CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE GREEK FAR RIGHT

Culture and the far right may seem odd companions at first. Traditional approaches to fascism and the extreme right as well as the common perception of these political spaces by non-academics posit them as antithetical. As the major Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio would claim in the 1980s, “where there was Fascism there was no culture”.

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Yet, even if we want to define it as an “anti-culture” or “sub-culture”, the far right in all its manifestations did and does produce its own culture while establishing complex relations with existing culture. Whether through its role in the patronage of arts and letters, as well as in memorialization and public performances when in power, or in its capacity to create cultural networks and disseminate ideas about culture when out of power, it has constantly nurtured strong links with the cultural realm.   

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Stylizing themselves as arbiters, wardens, and promoters of national culture, or as the vanguard in a battle against the corrosive cultural forces unleashed by internationalism, modernity, and other ethnic or religious communities, the adherents of the far right have always sought to operate largely within the domain of culture. Attacks on “cultural Bolshevism” in the interwar years or “cultural Marxism” in modern times, and moral panics about the impending “destruction of Western/European/Greek culture” through the influx of refugees and migrants in the present, or about the communist threat in the past, are merely two sets of examples that illustrate the importance that (discourses on) culture have for fascism and its political cognates.

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This workshop aims to provide variegated perspectives on the multifaceted interconnections of culture and the Greek far right from the 1930s to the present. Starting from the Metaxas dictatorship and ending with the Golden Dawn, individual talks will deal with specific periods or political actors and focus on particular aspects of this interconnectivity. This offers workshop attendees a chronological overview of the phenomenon while enabling the speakers to bring together their research specialties over a roundtable discussion on the cultural politics of the Greek far right.

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