southeastern europe

My interview was mentioned in the Facebook fan group of Antonis Samaras – the architect of Greece ’s Macedonian quagmire and aspiring leader of Nea Dimokratia. The author of the comment, Mr Evangelos Papathanassiou has not bothered to check which book has excited Macedonian opinion and therefore provides a surreal narrative about the "Greek" academic at King's College (sic) who wrote a book about the persecution of the Macedonians by Greece that culminates in accusing my opinions as left-nihilist and moves on to associate them with the views of the Greek prime minister George Papandreou just because our book was featured in the book pages of his website. Mr Papathanassiou seems to be of the impression that whenever a book is presented in a website, it is endorsed. The idea of a book being a starting point of an intellectual search and adventure seems to be alien to him. I found his use of adjective s personally offensive and his logic simplistic and dangerously populi...

After having spent ten days in the USA and a six-hour stopover in London -both quite remote from the intricacies of Greek politics- I arrived in Thessaloniki just after midnight today to speak in a Roundtable on Nationalism in Greece and Turkey hosted by the Thessaloniki International Book Fair. The taxi ride from Macedonia Airport (previously known as Mikra Airport to people of my generation) provided a reminder that Greece -just as every other EU country- was preparing for this year's European parliament elections but also an abrupt warning that nationalism was a potent force in the shaping of the debate surrounding the election. Giant posters inviting the voters to support one of the two largest parties were hard to miss as they dominated nearly every visible space in the few kilometers that separate the city from the air terminal. Among them, also hard to miss, were posters of a third suitor of the electorate's preference: the Panhellenic Macedonian Front (Πανελλήνιο Μακ...