Greek Americans and the Diaspora

Abstract

Greece as a nation-state is to a large extent a creation of the Hellenic diaspora. Though internal problems within the Ottoman Empire and external intervention by the great powers, particularly Russia, made the situation ripe for rebellion between the 1770s and 1820s, the intellectuals and merchants of the diaspora actually translated the dissatisfaction among peasants into a nationalist project. Members of the Greek intellectual and mercantile elite, scattered throughout many European cities, launched one of the first projects of modernization outside western Europe (see Jusdanis). Having understood from their experience in the West, first, that the nation-state, and not the empire, was becoming the dominant mode of social and political organization and, second, that their interests lay in neither the Ottoman nor the Russian Empire but in the capitalist states of western Europe, many intellectuals and merchants sought to free the Greek territories from Ottoman control and to create a new administrative unit, independent yet attached to the West. Their chief aim was the invention of a national culture, an imaginary field of shared sentiments, beliefs, and symbols, to replace the ethno-religious identities of the Ottoman Empire. With this collective national consciousness the Greek-speaking Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire came gradually to regard themselves primarily as fellow citizens of a nation-state rather than as coreligionists of the Orthodox millet. Though they remained Orthodox Christians, their religious belief constituted not their entire identity but one dimension of their national consciousness. In the differentiated order of modernity, religion simply served one function—meeting the spiritual needs of the citizens.

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