090086 VO The Greek Interwar (1922-1940): social transformations and political upheavals (2022S)

The Greek interwar started in 1922, after the Greek-Turkish War in Asia Minor that led to the final demise of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Turkish Republic. For Greece, the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” signalled the definitive failure of the irredentist “Megali Idea”. From this perspective, the 'short' Greek interwar was marked by a process of homogenisation of an ethnically and culturally diverse population after a whole decade of interstate and civil wars that had started with the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and ended with the treaty of Lausanne (1923) and the population exchange. The experience of forced mass population movements and resettlements during those years has been described as the culmination of a process of 'ethnic un-mixing' during the long transition from the Empires to the Nation-States. The marks and legacies of this process shaped the interwar period, particularly in the nation-states of South-Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe that emerged from the dissolution of the defeated continental empires.

Against the background of those massive demographic and social transformations, this course attempts to provide a general overview of the main themes in social and political history of the Greek interwar, in what concerns the overall process of state- and nation-building; social engineering, rehabilitation and integration of the refugees; minorities and limits of citizenship; mass politics, democracy and dictatorship; arts and popular culture; transformations of national ideology.