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a dramatic student uprising. On November 15th, over a thousand students and anarchists
occupied the Polytechnic University in Athens77 provoking a violent response from the
government on November 17th (Andrews 1980; Fatsi 1974), and precipitating the
removal of Papadopoulos by Colonel Dimitrios Ioannidis. Ioannidis, in turn, made a
number of catastrophic mistakes bringing Greece on the verge of war with Turkey
prompting the mutiny of his supporters and the decision to dismantle the dictatorship for
a return to democracy (Clogg 2002a).
The return to democracy brought with it a number of important changes to the
way individuals in Greece perceived themselves relative to each other and to the state.
Localization, which had been translated and lived in various iterations since Ottoman rule,
had ultimately relocated of the locus of citizenship and nation from the macro-social to
the intersubjective78 and spread among the population a general, underlying sense of
mistrust of the state79. This in turn provided the conditions for the next period of political
change and for the return of anarchism.
Modernization and Greek Socio-Political Change
The year 1974, when the country returned to democracy after the fall of the
military junta, and the late 1990s, a period of normative national global awareness and
political reflexivity, can be thought of as the defining moments of the current Greek
77 Incidentally, the Polytechnic University is only a few blocks away from Platia Exarchia.
78 Herzfeld demonstrates that nation and citizenship are negotiated and have normative authority at the
level of intimate, local, social spaces (1985).
79 Of note, this came up in an interview I had with a senior aid to the Ombudsman. According to this
consultant, deep rooted mistrust of the state undercuts the Greek Ombudsman’s effectiveness since citizens
don’t believe the office to be impartial.