The name is absent

88

security concerns of the 1990s was replaced by rhetoric of ‘connection’. This effectively
oriented individuals to think of themselves, and indeed the world around them, as
integrated within wide-reaching economic, social, and discursive rhizomatic networks.
Here we had the beginning of a transformation in political subjectivity which, as the
following will demonstrate, came to promote a new mode of localization driven and
informed by an interconnected civic consciousness⁸⁷.

The significance of this phenomenon is multiple, but for the purposes of this work
I will focus on two important considerations. First, individuals began to consider issues
related to transnationally-driven local change within idiosyncratic national∕civic identity
negotiations. The impuissance of the state apparatus coupled with the decline of the
country’s formal moral order resulting from poor governance and growing popular
disillusionment, led the public to look towards private, local social experiences in their
attempts to navigate unknown and unexpected contexts arising from new transnational
interconnections and flows⁸⁸. This resulted in the creation of a discursive space where
formal ideological frameworks for understanding public life were supplemented with
increasingly authoritative transnational discursive flows pertinent to various local socio-
political and economic issues. What followed was the relocation of an imagined Greek-
ness from the authority of state-sanctioned formal publics and “first-principles” national
unity based on “cultural identity”, language, and the common history they promoted, to
the level of micro-scale daily life where being Greek was being defined relative to the
local effects of various national and transnational flows.

⁸⁷ Note, here we see the breakdown of the national (Anderson 1983) and transnational (Basch et al. 1994;
Hannerz 1996) dichotomy; an analytical perspective which has shaped anthropological investigations of
such community-building phenomena as the internet. It is arguable that this dichotomy has also stymied
examinations OfEuropeanization in its various forms.

⁸⁸ See Herzfeld (2005) on cultural intimacy.

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