Hellenic Studies Annual Lecture

How do we look back at the 50 year since the transition to democracy in July 1974? What kind of democratic practice has Greece established ever since? What is the political heritage of those intense moments of near collapse under the ongoing conflict in Cyprus and the Turkish invasion? And what did it mean for the country's image and self-perception that the Left won the political and cultural hegemony, as is often claimed, for several decades as a result of the lingering trauma triggered by the dictatorship and its aftermath? What is certain is that while the Greek transition managed to at once democratize the country, put an end to the long post-civil war period, and pave the way to Greece’s accession to the European Union, it also set the rules of the political game in the country for the years to come.

 

This talk will start from this premise to look at how the memory of this real or supposed smooth change was challenged during the years of the Great Recession. While critics blamed the so-called ‘culture of Metapolitefsi’ and its underground currents for all present-day ills in that moment of intense crisis, others saw in 1974 unfinished business. Promises of a "New Metapolitefsi" on both right and left further proliferated, an invocation that made an appeal for a radical reboot that never really took place.

 

Kostis Kornetis is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). He has taught at Brown, New York University, and the University of Sheffield, and was CONEX-Marie Curie Experienced Fellow at Carlos III, Madrid, and Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the ‘long 1960s’ in Greece (Berghahn Books, 2013) and co-editor of Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the “Long 1960s” (Bloomsbury, 2016), Rethinking Democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and The 1969 Greek Case at the Council of Europe. A Game Changer for Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2024). His next monograph A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization. The Age of Transitions is forthcoming with OUP.

 

 

Sponsored by the Hellenic Heritage Foundation (HHF), the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario (HCAAO), the Hellenic Studies Initiative at the Munk School, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek Studies at York University, and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.