Delimiting Europe: Greek State Formation as Border Making.

• Author: Hoffmann, Clemens

Defending Europe's Frontier? The Making of the European Space

We must progress as much as possible in the direction of Constantinople and India. ... We must hasten the downfall of Persia, push on to the Persian Gulf, if possible reestablish the ancient commercialities with the Levant through Syria, and force our way into the Indies, which are the storehouses of the world. Once there, we can dispense with English gold. The Testament of Peter the Great, Article 9 By 2022, Europe's borders in the Mediterranean have turned into a veritable fortress. The so-called 'refugee deal' with Turkey signals this as much as the European Union's (EU) own 'Frontex' border force working in tandem with the Greek coast guard to 'push back' the undesired 'Wretched of the Earth' attempting the dangerous crossing across the Aegean and Evros River. (1) This human tragedy evolves under the eyes of a European public that is increasingly divided between liberal and left-wing cosmopolitans welcoming refugees and those who, in the classic depiction of Oswald Spengler, fear the 'Decline of the West'. (2) External and internal borders and boundaries generate this physical, but also ideological European space with Greece (and Cyprus) seen as civilisational frontiers. The making of the relational spaces of the 'Occident/Orient' and 'East/West' distinctions goes far beyond discourse though. Defining these borders in concrete, geophysical locations implies a daily violent struggle for life and death for many people from the Global South. It also implies the making of the border between two contemporary nation-states, Turkey and Greece. And while a lot has been said about the relationship of those 'Frenemies' (3) within NATO and the context of the EU accession process, (4) their relational trajectories are frequently taken for granted. The naturalisation of these two states (one 200 years old, the other 100), and with them the still contested border between them, overlooks how the continuous process of nation- and border-making is the historical rule, rather than the exception. (5) It also overlooks how the making of modern Europe, and even the making of modern international relations, is tied to the War of Greek Independence. So, while the historical significance of this war is drowned out by 1648 and other 'foundational myths' (6) of modern International Relations (IR), its history is frequently taken off the shelve of a rather superficial Greek nationalist (and the European Philhellenes') historiography. This understands this secessionist independence struggle as ideologically aligned with the French and American Revolutions. Enlightenment hits the Balkans in the form of a reborn Athenian Republic, embodying the values of democracy and freedom, thus, demarcating European 'high' civilisation to the East. Emphasising its significance, but very much reiterating the Enlightenment narrative, an eminent Balkan historian even argues that Greece gave rise to the entire global system of nation-states. (7)

This article seeks to rectify this story of making Europe and the place of Greece within it. It will do so by taking the 'Spatial Turn' in IR seriously and revisiting the origins of the making of the modern European space and its borders. Mobilising an international historical sociology of state formation, it will re-interpret the social process of making Greece. This will show, first, that then as now, the alliance, celebration and formation of a European consciousness took place in the Aegean Sea and in relation to a clearly defined geopolitical referent: The Ottoman Empire and Turkey. It will reveal, second, that then as now, the process of defining this space was violent and marred with mass casualties. The re-historicisation of border-making will show, third, that a delicate balance of local social forces, from local bandits to a transnational trading class, was unsettled by a variety of social developments in reaction to Ottoman weakness, rather than merely the spread of European revolutionary ideals. Most central to this social process was, however, the large-scale intervention by European powers, which eventually secured Greek independence. The article will argue that Greece was born out of a compromise between otherwise highly divided conservative dynasties, rather than the symbol of an emerging liberal order. And it will show, finally, that the newly created Kingdom of Greece, neither became a re-born Athenian Republic, nor the frontier against the 'Ottoman steppe' the European Philhellenes had imagined. This will finally demonstrate that nation and border formation remain ongoing social, more than finite legal processes. This suggests that IR should pay greater attention to the non-linearity and historical specificity of border (un) making as one of its core constitutive categories.

IR and the Social Production of Borders

After the end of the Cold War, the discussion on borders moved away from the 'hard' physical fortification of two opposing blocs to a more critical understanding. This new approach investigated processes of their historical (un)making and how new, 'softer' borders were maintained discursively, rather than by walls and guns. Globalisation was, after all, seen as synonymous with transcending national boundaries, though some chose to erect new 'civilizational' borders in their place. 'Otherisation' now took place in language, or socioeconomically between the Global North and the Global South, within an otherwise universal globalised space. Part and parcel of these new critical approaches was the tradition of Historical Sociology of International Relations (HSIR), which focused on the historical making of territory and space, emphasising geopolitical competition, or the emergence of capitalism as the core 'drivers' of modernity. (8) While improving the realist 'static' understanding of sovereignty, one major omission of this literature was the question of political identities. The process of 'nationmaking', while tied to state-making 'as organised crime', (9) was left unstudied and simply seen as a function of those new 'survival units' once they came into being. In fact, the origins of ethno-linguistically homogeneous identities and 'imagined communities' (10) were mostly left understudied by IR more generally. But as these critical approaches emphasise, the making of states and identities alike is a historically dynamic process, rather than a 'natural', timeless, or universal order. And the same is true for borders.

Notwithstanding this seeming banality, the process of linear border making remained similarly underspecified and mostly just assumed. (11) However, if borders, broadly conceived, alongside nations and territory, are part of IR's core categories, and few doubt that they are, they are just as important to historicise. Here, borders are not just thought of as either discourse or fixed physical demarcations. Rather, the article mobilises the tradition of HSIR to understand them as historically specific, situated social processes, which are constantly made and unmade. And the process of Europe's southeastern delimitation remains an ongoing and dynamic process. Social, physical, violent, discursive, local, national, regional, and global all at once.

And while Greece remains a focal point of this process, it isn't necessarily the sole place where "bordering Europe" takes place. Like other such places, notably Ukraine, Greece continuously shifts from being located at the core of Europe's civilisational heritage, to being an oriental outlier. The various forms of re-orientalising Greece throughout Europe's debt crisis shows its dynamic positioning. (12) Despite the 'Age of Globalisation' predicting their total transcendence, physical borders never quite disappeared. In many ways, they're making a comeback from Belarus to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.

By 2022 the heydays of globalisation are truly over and we're facing a variety of new forms of divisions. Fences, walls, tear gas, rubber bullets and, above all, the stormy waters of the Mediterranean themselves now separate a realm where the rule of law applies, and rights are granted (13) vis-a-vis the necropolitical realm of refugee migration. (14) Post-colonial theory illustrates not only how this border regime fits into global hierarchies and inequalities, as reflected and reproduced in language and global political practice, but also how these racialised practices of differentiation manifest themselves in the European Union's policies towards refugees in the Mediterranean in particular. (15) These border practices separate not only the 'Occident' from the 'Orient', but also the global north and its protected wealth from its non-Western (former) colonial subjects in the global south. This border regime has now become a central function of the EU's foreign policy, epitomised, above all in the EU-Turkey and EU-Libya refugee deals (interestingly both bordering Greece). (16)

Celebrating 200 years of Greek emancipation from its 'Oriental yoke' and from its much-denied Ottoman heritage cannot be seen in isolation from this project. Greek state formation played (and plays) a central role for European self-idealisation. Re-imagining Greece, the cradle of European civilisation and democracy was, paradoxically led by a Europe in full reactionary mode. The idealised 'Dream Nation' (17), eventually headed by a Bavarian prince, while confronting an absolutist and colonial Ottoman power, became part of the violent process of colonial and racial differentiation of Europe itself. Paradoxically, the reformist Ottoman Empire, then still run by many of its Christian and Jewish minority populations, (18) even joined Europe's racist inter-imperialist rivalries, formalising its rule of Africa and the Middle East. (19) Simultaneously, 'modern' Greece, having successfully seceded, became central to the process of Europe differentiating its inside from its outside. (20) The...