Using national history to construct the boundaries of citizenship: An analysis of Greek citizens’ discourse about immigrants’ rights.

Abstract

In this paper we advance a qualitative approach to study the interconnection between representations of history and representations of citizenship. We argue that representations of the national past are important resources on which different constructions of citizenship are based. Our empirical context is the heated debate that emerged as a result of the announcement of new citizenship legislation in Greece. We used the online comments posted in the forum of the Ministry of Internal affairs following the announcement of the legislation to study how national history was represented by Greek citizens and how these representations functioned to form different arguments regarding migrants' citizenship rights. Our analysis identified four themes in representations of national history: continuity of the nation, idealization of the past, moral obligation towards the past, and homogeneity or heterogeneity of the nation. We show that these ideas largely sustain an exclusive, essentialist, ethnic conception of the nation as a distinct, homogenous and continuous entity of people sharing a common genetic heritage. More inclusive arguments were based on seemingly pluralistic ideas that implicitly entailed banal nationalist assumptions or assimilatory ideas towards migrant inclusion. We conclude that commentators' historical representations inhibit critical understanding of the past and consequently of a more open and plural understanding of the future. Future research should focus on examining how formal and informal education may promote such representations and on the political implications of these for intergroup relations in multicultural contexts.

Dilemmas of sexual citizenship: A critical social psychological analysis of Civil Union law representations in Greek Cypriot newspapers

“…The problem for the nation is a moral one in this account: the legislation is constructed as a concession to the directives of a morally corrupt Europe, and adopting it is seen as disgracing and disrespectful towards the nation’s brave ancestors who fought for worthy national struggles. Appeals to history are powerful semantic tools legitimizing inclusion or exclusion to citizenship rights to migrants (Kadianaki, Andreouli, & Carretero, 2018), but herein they legitimize exclusion of non-heterosexual “citizens” from citizenship rights. In effect, historical figures are used to suggest that the nation should remain heterosexual, as it has always been, and thus prove morally superior to the European paradigm.…”

“Sad day for the UK”: The linking of debates about settling refugee children in the UK with Brexit on an anti‐immigrant news website

“…Citizenship has been shown to be another important contested area in talk about migration, especially in regard to EU migration (Kadianaki et al, 2018;. In the data analysed here citizenship is rarely topicalised, but it is of relevance, particularly through the suggestions that the refugees don't belong in the UK (furthering the "us and them" distinction) and more broadly in the claims that supporting these refuges would be an unreasonable expense for the UK in the form of taxes, which implies that the refugees would not contribute anything to the host nation.…”

“…In particular, this has led to research focusing on the notion of citizenship. Kadianaki, Andreouli, and Carretero (2018) show how historical representations of the nation (in their case Greece) are used to present immigrants as lacking appropriate citizenship to belong in the nation. Also in Greece, Kadianaki and Andreouli (2017) show how essentialised constructions of citizenship containing an ethnic component can be used to present immigrants as failing to belong.…”

Conflict Transformation and History Teaching: Social Psychological Theory and Its Contributions

“…The result of such pressures for the actual teaching practice is that teachers trying to balance a romantic and enlightened way of history teaching end up making use of communicative styles that Moscovici described as "propagation", a communicative style which is a middle road between propaganda and diffusion (Moscovici 1961(Moscovici /2008. Indeed the denial of citizenship rights to a significant number of inhabitants of the Baltic states of Russian origin should not come as a surprise given the link between essentialist representations of the past, ethnic identity and exclusionary notions of citizenship (Kadianaki and Andreouli 2015;Kadianaki et al 2016).…”