Homeland-Diaspora Relations in Flux

The ‘Unbearable’ Legacy of Greekness: Destabilising Greek and Migrant Youth Categories

While the decade long on-going Greek austerity driven crises continue to ravage the remnants of the country’s social fabric, debates concerning the resilience of ‘national consciousness’ emerge repeatedly in many ways. As a discursive trope and symbolic signifier of ‘Greekness’, constructions of ‘ethnos’ have had paramount salience in who ‘belongs’ to the nation and who doesn’t; who deserves sympathy in a context of dispossession and deprivation, as well as why those ‘undeserving’ of such have contributed to the country’s economic demise. At the same time, Greece is barely coping with one of the most significant global challenges as regards displacement of refugees while experiencing a severe scientific migration and austerity induced emigration. Within these parameters, second generation migrant youth who were born, raised and educated in Greece, similarly to Greek youth, are also struggling to develop independent livelihoods under adverse socio-economic and political conditions. The prospect of outward migration for both Greek and migrant youth appears to be a likely, if not viable/desirable, option which sets a new mobilities agenda with local and transnational implications. In such austere times, additional liminal spaces emerge when we consider the impact of the crisis on both Greek and migrant youth as well as the subsequent potential diasporas from these groups. This paper discusses various dimensions of destabilising rigid categories of new diasporas emanating from the current Greek crisis and explores both conceptual liminalities and experiential realities of such experiences for Greek and migrant youth.

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