Pontic Greeks Today: Migrants or Refugees?

Abstract

This paper offers a conceptual framework in terms of which the current Pontic Greek experience of displacement from the Soviet Union can be interpreted in a historically informed way, by addressing two sets of issues: methodological and substantive. With respect to the former, I argue that ‘refugeeness’ is a modern phenomenon associated with the formation of nation states, entailing thus a necessary correlation between ‘nationalism’ and ‘refugees’. This accounts for the mobility pattern of the Pontic Greeks from the Ottoman Empire to the Caucasus through the 19th century as an instance of migration rather than refugeeness. In turn, I seek to establish the historical and conceptual links between ‘nationalism’ and the cultivation of ‘national identity’ as part of the modern Greek state's irredentist policy which supports all current claims to ‘repatriation’ and the Greek homeland. Yet, this bears no necessary historical relation to ’ethnic identity claims‘ which show themselves to be contingently construed and relationally specified. Substantively, in view of these peoples’ repeated uprootings, any attempt to define their movements in terms of volition is insufficient to capture the complexity of their experience which often acquires dramatic proportions, as in the recent case of the Greeks from Central Asia, which includes phenomena of social amnesia and historical gaps in the group's collective consciousness. Both features turn them into refugees.

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