Faced with claims for recognising religious diversity, liberal European democracies have shifted in the last 10 years towards a more restrictive view of integration. This paper seeks to make a contribution to this line of research on how European countries deal with migration-related ethnic and religious diversity today by investigating the case of a southern country, notably Greece. Greece is an interesting case to study: it has by now 20 years of experience as a host country, but still its migrant integration policies are under-developed. In addition Greece it is currently experiencing an acute economic crisis while irregular migration towards the country is on the rise. These developments have contributed to bringing migration on to centre stage in political discourse with a concomitant rise of racist and xenophobic discourses against migrants. This paper takes, as a case study, the public Muslim prayer that took place in several squares of Athens on 18 November 2010 as a peaceful protest against the fact that Athens still does not have a formal mosque. We use this event as an opportunity for interviewing social and political actors directly or indirectly involved in it on their views regarding migration, religious diversity and their accommodation in the Greek public space. We analyse their discourse on whether and under what conditions religious diversity, Islam in particular, should be tolerated or accepted in Greek society. We propose here the notion of 'nationalist intolerance' to make sense of Greek discourses and propose a dynamic understanding of tolerance and intolerance as concepts that do not emanate from abstract norms but are rather negotiated in specific contexts. Ethnicities 13(6) 709-728

Institutehttp://epublishing.ekt.gr | e-Publisher: EKT | Downloaded at 04/07/2020 16:43:17 | Narrating the story of a failed national transition 50 promemorandum discourse that has been propagated by the political establishment and mainstream media since the outset of the crisis and that interprets the current crisis as a crisis of Greek identity: Greece failed to reform where necessary due to the domination of the traditional political culture (over a "modern" one) that is to blame for the failed transition since 1974 to postwar European modernity. The second part of this article situates this dominant narrative within the broader context of scholarly literature and academic discourses that have attempted, in different periods and in diverse ways, to conceptualise and prescribe the transition to modernity followed not only by Greece, but by other societies the world over. By unfolding the creation of this "failed transition" story while examining it in relation to broader narratives and discourses, this brief study forms a vantage point from which to observe how history is experienced by societies in crisis and, thus, witness "history in the making".

This article explores the role of gender in the social movements of the Greek crisis. Building on extensive fieldwork, we observe a gradual shift from claim‐based, street mobilizations to locally embedded solidarity initiatives that addressed social reproduction needs in relation to food, health, education, and housing. We illustrate how this foregrounded social reproductive practices; challenged traditional divisions of labor and the temporalities and spatialities of movement organizing; and brought forward the value of building intersectional coalitions and of embracing affect and radical care. Despite the lack of explicitly articulated feminist values and principles, we argue that many social movements of the crisis therefore have cultivated situated and implicit modes of feminist solidarity that warrant further attention. Accordingly, we discuss the implications for feminist organizing and radical social movements more broadly.

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