84
instead, the thousands of near destitute individuals coming into the country formed
informal protective collectivities as described in chapter two, which provided the
employment, housing, and social assistance individuals needed. Subsequently, this new
survivor population began a slow morphogenic transformation of Greece’s urban centers,
dramatically altered the labor market (see Christopoulou & Kosma 2009:12)82, and
facilitated the development of illegal and grey-market economic spheres.
As the city and the economy changed around them, many Athenians came to
understand their security and political being not only in the terms provided by
nationalist∕sovereignist discourse and imported global phenomena, but relative to a
changing topography - that is a social, economic, and political landscape in addition to a
physical landscape - swayed undeniably by forces outside official controls. Here, Greek
citizenship underwent a second major existential shift in which the structures of
governance and the socio-cultural and historical determinants of local life were seen to be
vulnerable to errant Cosmopolitanization83. This change was registered within media
discourse and in private conversations. The national concern over foreign perceptions of
Greek progress and modernity, which could up to that point be considered a Greek
rhetorical idiom indexing the popular post-1974 national∕civic identity renegotiation,
became supplemented by popular concern over destabilized locality articulated in terms
of social, economic, and even “cultural” security. This locally-defined security discourse
proliferated contributing to what was becoming a growing gap between the
82 It can be argued that the transformation of the labor market began in the late 1970s with early inflows of
Albanian workers. While this is undoubtedly true, since the late 1990s undocumented migrants have
further transformed agriculture, but also manufacturing, construction, and other areas of labor requiring
relatively low or no specialized skills.
83 On Cosmopolitanization, and especially “risk-cosmopolitanization” see Beck (2006); see also and
Ossman (2007a).