The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece
432
The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece
432eBook
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Overview
Halkias’s analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics/gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. Halkias conducted in-depth interviews with one hundred and twenty women who had had two or more abortions and observed more than four hundred gynecological exams at a state family-planning center. She reveals how intimate decisions and the public preoccupation with the low birth rate connect to nationalist ideas of race, religion, freedom, resistance, and the fraught encounter between modernity and tradition. The Empty Cradle of Democracy is a startling examination of how assumptions underlying liberal democracy are betrayed while the nation permeates the body and understandings of gender and sexuality complicate the nation-building projects of late modernity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822386049 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Alexandra Halkias is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Panteion University in Athens, Greece.
Read an Excerpt
THE EMPTY CRADLE OF DEMOCRACY
SEX, ABORTION, AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN GREECEBy Alexandra Halkias
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3323-4
Chapter One
SETTING THE STAGE: ATHENS, GREECE, FANTASY, AND HISTORY
Certainly, "the Greek light" that so many have written of, as has the Nobel prize-winning poet Seferis in the excerpt opening this part of the book, is a prominent part of the Greek landscape. Whether there are perceivable physical differences to the light in this part of the Mediterranean is hard to tell. What matters is that Greeks and foreigners alike tend to share a belief in its uniqueness. The metaphoric sense of light is operative because the link is often explicitly made between the quality of the light here, an almost relentless brightness, and the clarity of thought of especially Ancient Greek thinkers. Moreover, as Seferi suggests, a narrative about good and evil also seems to be intertwined with those relating to the Greek light.
Glossy images of whitewashed little houses perched on a barren slope of one or another island with the sparkling sea below and the clear blue sky above tend to be connected to a romanticized idea of a starkly simple and wholesome mode of life. The image may appear as seductive as it does because it issuperimposed on an imaginary snapshot of "the Ancient Greek world." This double exposure, gilded by fragments of more recent historical narratives about Greece and Greeks, may be what is read as evidence of a distinctly Greek spirit. Incisive thinking, uncompromising conviction in high ideals, including a superior aesthetic such as that exhibited in the ancient ruins scattered across the country, relentless freedom and independence, and an inferred readiness to take absolute and passionate action in heroic ways are vital parts of the contemporary Greek myth. This, I think, is what "the Greek light" is made of. This representation of Greece, even if muted locally by the hectic rhythm of life, the high stakes of bipartisan micropolitics, petty clientelism, and other stressful aspects of Greek late modernity, no doubt constitutes an important part of the context of contemporary Athens, the site of my research (see figure 1).
There are other, less noble but equally important features. Athens today is a city whose busy central Constitution Square sports a thriving McDonald's, only the first of several now operating in the larger Athens area, that is surely host to almost as many as those who come to visit the Parthenon, a mere mile away from Syntagma, also the home to the Greek Parliament, i Vouli ton Ellinon. The adjacent old town areas of Monastiraki and Plaka are filled with tourist shops selling Greek memorabilia. This area gives way to the increasingly posh areas of Thisseio, Psirri, and Gazi, where the natural gas factory used to operate and workers' dwellings have been renovated to become some of the more fashionable restaurants and bars frequented by the Athenian elite. Little bars and tavernas can be found in abundance in most neighborhoods of Athens, assuming one is willing to negotiate with the unbelievable traffic found at almost all times of day and night! This city, representing less than 5 percent of Greece's territory, is where 34 percent of the approximately 11 million Greeks live.
In the upper-class neighborhood of Kolonaki, as well as the nearby northern suburbs of Psyhico and Filothei, Filipino cleaning women, considered the elite of the caste of Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Albanian cleaning women now employed regularly even by middle-class households, keep house for the aging and diminishing class of Athenian aristocracy as well as for the newly rich. These are also areas where one rarely sees in public any of the thousands of Albanians who entered the country legally or illegally during the 1990s. Further downtown, as well as along parts of the avenue along the coast, Greek prostitutes are joined by a growing number of male and female Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian, and other prostitutes, some of whom also double as "California Girls" dancing at some of the fancier strip joints.
Athens, specifically Exarhia, the area neighboring Kolonaki, is the base for what has been called Europe's most enduring anarchist movement. Even today, police vans often line its central street or park outside the headquarters of the party in office, the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), in an attempt to ward off "trouble." Fasaria. Klouves. Athens has also been the main site of action for a twenty-year-old revolutionary organization called the 17th of November (commemorating the day in 1973 when students took over the Athens Polytechnic in protest of the U.S.- supported Papadopoulos dictatorship) that the United States ranked as one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world. In a larger global context of entities such as the IRA and ETA, and of course now Al Qaeda, this is a puzzling title, because the 17th of November has engaged in highly focused strategic actions resulting in some damage to property and the death of twenty-three people, almost exclusively members of the Greek and foreign elite, since its operation began in 1975. Nonetheless, it has increasingly been the subject of heated discussion in the public sphere, and in June 2001 highly contentious legislation was passed to help "fight the terrorist threat." U.S. and British pressure played an important part in this new wave of effort to find and arrest members of this group, which culminated, in the summer of 2002, in the arrest of several alleged members.
Another especially prominent aspect of the contemporary Athenian public sphere are the 2004 Olympic Games that the city fought for and won under the mostly inspired leadership of Iana Aggelopoulou, the wife of a very wealthy industrialist, though of working-class background herself. Putting aside the scandals associated with the allocation of the related funds that have sent shock waves through Greek society on more than one occasion, preparations for the Games-necessary to create an infrastructure capable of supporting the expected massive influx of people to an already very congested Athens-are affecting many facets of life in Athens today. The new Eleutherios Venizelos airport, built in the remote area of Spata, opened in March 2001 and the new roads constructed to facilitate traffic to and from it are two of the proud achievements of the currently governing PASOK; both have received extensive media coverage.
Other significant features of the Athenian social landscape include the largest professional association of lawyers in all of Europe, the highest per capita concentration of doctors, at least twenty well-equipped high-tech Centers for Assisted Reproduction, innumerable art galleries and gyms, many theaters, barakia (little bars with music), a few of which cater to a gay clientele, and tavernas and kentra (places to drink and eat that also usually have music) as well as kafeteries and fast-foodadika. For several years now, Greece reportedly has had the highest per capita consumption of scotch and of cigarettes in Europe. Cafés are ever-present and crowded at most hours of the day; there people sit talking with one another, sipping a portokalada, an orange drink, or frappe, a foamy iced coffee drink that, along with the iced cappuccino, freddo, have almost replaced the traditional tourkiko or elliniko, the small cup of thick espresso-like coffee called Turkish or Greek depending on the degree of one's nationalism.
The fairly loud voices, honking cars, and overall ruckus heard in Athens are punctuated by the sound of phones ringing. The center of Athens today is a site inhabited by humans whose most prominent feature, male and female alike, might well be the contraptions they hold firmly in their hands and into which they talk very loudly and often. In a very short period of time, the mobile phone, to kinito, has become a vital appendage for many Greeks whose dense social networks now have another outlet for further zimosi ("kneading"), as social interaction with a purpose is called, or simply casual gossip (koutsobolio). The Greek market for mobiles is at 59 percent saturation; the average in other countries of Europe is 65 percent. In Athens, as well as elsewhere, the kinito has become in a very few years an important accessory with which, as many claim openly, there is a powerful relationship of dependence.
Fervently trying to connect some of the disparate points of the Athenian landscape is an erratic public transportation system and thousands of taxis. The massive construction undertaken to build a tunnel for a new underground train (to metro), which kept encountering ancient ruins, finally yielded results. It is another of the proud and well-publicized accomplishments of PASOK and is making its mark on Athenian traffic, often as much by creating yet more congestion at the stations where commuters' cars park erratically as by somewhat diminishing the flow on some of the main arteries of the city. Indeed, the traffic is often the reason cited for the need of the omnipresent mobile phones. Surrounding all this, and enveloping it, is the pervasive smog (to nefos), which is routinely at levels comparable to that of Los Angeles.
Historical Background of the City
Athens was not always like this. In this section I track significant events in the city's historical development, leaving the details of the various histories of Greece itself in the background for the moment. Greece was formally declared an independent state, having successfully won a fierce and bloody struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire, with the Protocol of London on 3 February 1830. In 1822, one year into the revolution, Athens was a city of eight thousand (Leondidou 1989, 48). When, in 1834, Athens was declared the capital of the Greek Kingdom, it was basically a city in ruins with twelve thousand inhabitants. Barely three thousand houses remained intact (Markezinis 1966, 126). The adjacent port of Piraeus, famous in antiquity and now again thriving, was a wild coast with a few moorings. Although interesting versions of Athens existed in ancient times, the Roman or Middle Ages, and the immediately preceding period of the Ottoman Empire, in many ways, the history of contemporary Athens as a city begins in 1830. After its declaration as the capital of Greece, a highly centralized state apparatus developed and replaced the decentralized modes of administration that existed during Ottoman rule. The government, the king, and social classes that serve the state were installed. Athens became a city with power and control over the nation, without itself having any directly productive economic activity.
This began to change in 1870 to marked effect by 1880. The Greeks living in their own communities outside of Greece, mostly in Western and Eastern Europe and in northern Africa, who had kept their businesses outside of Greece, began to settle in Greece and to invest. As they settled in Athens, the city began to operate as a mercantile center and the new bourgeoisie became a dominant economic force. A capitalist mode of production developed during the 1880s and Athens proper began to grow. Thus, whereas there were 87,117 inhabitants of the Athens-Piraeus area in 1879, by 1889 there were 144,589. From that time on the population exploded.
The next significant change came after the military uprising against the king in the Athens area of Goudi, in 1909. The process of industrialization, which intensified during World War I, gradually transformed the Athens-Athens, Piraeus area from a small-scale base for bourgeois and petit bourgeois classes to the productive center of Greece (Leondidou 1989, 96). This transformation intensified after 1922, when the refugees from the Asia Minor disaster arrived in Greece. As per the agreement made by Greece and Turkey (more on this in the section on the history of Greece), there was an "exchange of populations" wherein a total of 1.3 million refugees arrived in Greece in "exchange" for 500,000 Turks who left Greece for Turkey (151). Of this number of returning Greek refugees, it is estimated that in 1928 about 250,000 had settled in the larger Athens area (table 16, 159). Thus, between 1920 and 1928 the population doubled, from 453,000 to 802,000 (156; table 15, 158). During the nineteenth century, Athens never had more than 4 to 6 percent of the country's population, but after the arrival of the refugees this figure climbed to 13 percent.
After the refugees' arrival, a wave of internal immigration to Athens, along with continuing industrialization and urbanization, all played a role in transforming postwar Athens into "the crossroads of Greece." A survey of Athens in 1960 counted 690,000 "local" Athenians and 867,000 who had been born in other parts of the country or elsewhere. By 1981, despite a slowdown in internal immigration during the 1970s, 31 percent of the country's population resided in the larger area of Athens. Today, that larger area (including Piraeus and suburbs) is home to 3,761,810 Greeks.
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND THE ECONOMY
The social structure of Athens has gone through several changes. During the nineteenth century, the Greek bourgeoisie was located outside of Greece, in Europe and northern Africa, where Greeks had settled to take advantage of economic opportunity, and in Asia Minor, where they continued a long history of Greek presence. At this time, there were two phases to the socioeconomic development of Athens. In the first, lasting roughly until the early 1870s, the population consisted primarily of urban-dwelling bourgeois, public servants, and petit bourgeois. Primary economic activity was minimal (i.e., by 1876, there are reports of a mere eleven factories in Athens and twenty-seven in Piraeus).
The second phase of development occurred in the 1870s: the Greeks abroad begin to return, establishing Athens as the base for their financial enterprises. In the Balkans of this time, there were significant investments in large-scale transportation projects. Indeed, in Greece the 1880s have been called "the decade of the railways." The wealthier Greeks who returned from abroad also began to invest in banks, mining, shipping, and commerce. Industrialization gradually changed the economic profile, specifically of Piraeus from a services-centered city to a more directly productive one. At the end of the nineteenth century there were roughly six thousand workers in the larger Athens-Piraeus area.
Greece recovered in the first decade of the twentieth century. After the Goudi uprising in 1909, many productive units were created. In 1910 there were reports of 243 factories in the Athens-Piraeus area, of which 12 were large. The area was radically transformed by industrialization, which intensified during World War I. The diaspora bourgeoisie, made up of wealthier Greeks who had come to settle, was joined by a newly developing "domestic" bourgeoisie, and the mercantile class continued to thrive. At the same time, a workers' movement developed, as workers multiplied and lived in poverty and socialist ideas began to circulate. The second Panhellenic Workers Conference in Athens in 1918, partly an effect of the October Revolution, resulted in the foundation of the General Federation of Workers of Greece (Leondidou 1989, 113). The same year saw the founding of the Socialist Workers' Party of Greece, later to become the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). The influx of the Asia Minor refugees in 1922 further enhanced Athens's economic development, as many of them became a source of cheap labor. More women also joined the active workforce, mostly in the area of tapestry and rug making (Leondidou, 198). The area of Nea Ionia became a weaving center; the areas of Kaisariani and Virona developed several small industries; the Piraeus areas of Kokkinia and Drapetsona became large workers' towns (174, 178).
However, the Athens economy did not fully absorb the new populations. Rather, as the population grew between the two World Wars, so did the problems associated with rapid urbanization. Unemployment was endemic and especially pronounced during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-40). The working class lived in poverty, poor living conditions became even worse during the 1940s, unemployment increased.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgents xiIntroduction 1
Part 1. The Agoras of Agon
1. Setting the Stage: Athens, Greece, Fantasy, and History 19
2. Stage Left: Greek Women 35
3. Center Stage: What is Greece? 53
4. Stage Right: The Demografiko 77
Part 2. In Context, in Contests
5. In the Operating Room: On Cows, Greece, and the Smoking Fetus 89
6. Give Birth for Greece! Abortion and Nation in the Greek Press 113
Part 3. Sexing the Nation
7. Navigating the Night 135
8. The Impossible Dream: The Couple as Mother 207
9. Abortion, Pain, and Agency 235
10. Reprosexuality and the Modern Citizen Face the Specter of Turkey 291
11. A Critical Cartography of the Demografiko’s Greece 319
Epilogue: Theory and Policy 345
Notes 349
References 381