Abstract
The purpose of this study is threefold: (a) to present an analysis of a moment of what scholars framed as ‘particularist political struggles’, developed in the socio-political context of a given liberal–democratic country. The particularist political struggle examined concerns the negation of the compulsory – to all male citizens-military service of Greece; (b) to highlight local political struggles in their complexity, which are largely unknown and buried by hegemonic, transnational, ‘culturalist’ narratives that caricaturized the particular country and its people; (c) to discuss the possibilities and the difficulties for the emergence of political subjectivities in societies where apolitical, individualistic social identities prevail. The focus on the particular instance of socio-political struggle emphasizes the importance of spatio-temporal context. The analysis deploys the concept of bio-politics, in both Foucault's and Ranciere's terms: in the form of punitive and disciplinary strategies imposed by institutional apparatuses, and in the form of the emergence of an emancipatory subjectivity. The article concludes that fidelity to values and to subjective contexts, counter-hegemonic articulation and solidarity networks are key for the creation of political events, political struggles and counter-hegemonic subjectivities today, as ever.
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Notes
1 Extract from ‘The proclamation of the 21th April 1967’ and from ‘statement to the Greek people’ (by Dictator Colonel G. Papadopoulos 1975), retrieved from http://clubs.pathfinder.gr/papadopoulos/704068 on 19 September 2009.
2 Communism was constructed as a major threat to the sovereign space of modern Greece, by conservative social forces that related to ‘various conspiracies in the country's political life during the 1920s and 1930s’ (Mazower, 2000, p. 166); ‘communism’ was further demonized and generalized as a form of a ‘moral panic’ during the civil war years and in the next two decades following that war, in line to the hegemonic discourse of the Western part of the Cold War on a ‘global communist threat’.
3 ‘National salvation’ is also the moral imperative used by elected and non-elected Greek governments between 2009 and 2012 in order to legitimize emergency politics relating to the compromising of Greek citizens’ human, social and political rights, the compromising of the Sovereignty of the Greek State, the indebting of future generations in the country and the imposition of a series of austerity measurements, despite the massive and active opposition to such politics by the majority of the Greek people.
4 Law 1763/88, art 8, par. 7. In a period of general mobilization, or of war, the Minister of National Defence has unlimited right on matters pertaining conscription.
5 One of the most common practices that individuals still do to avoid the military service and, most importantly, the consequences of a political negation of it is the exemption of the conscript as psychologically unfit, obtaining a ‘I5’ status.
6 Extract cited from http://www.stratologia.gr/ypodeigmata_entypwn/ΠΛHPOΦOPIAKO%20ENTYΠO%2026.DOC on 20 September 2009
7 Statements from MP Stelios Papathemelis (PASOK-social democrats) and the late Archbishop Christodoulos cited from the article by Nikos Alivizatos, ‘The objectors, the modernists, and the critiques of the populists’, http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=2&artid=88995&ct=6&dt=15/06/1997 on 21 September 2009.
8 The objector's reference to the English also indicates the ties of this discourse to the country's historical left: in 1944, during the first act of the Greece civil war, military confrontation occurred between left-wing resistance to the Axis occupation and nationalist–loyalist opponents, in support of the Greek government in exile, supported by the intervention of the British army to support its geopolitical interests of Britain in Greece over the post-war polity of the country, which went as far as to deploy Nazi-collaborationist groups for the defeat of the resistance movement and its aims for the post-war Greece (Mazower, 2000).
9 It has been noted that the nation plays with the relation of the universal and the particular by prioritizing its particularity as universality (Billig, 1995, p. 73).
Logics are concrete explanatory divisions of social research, developed by Glynos and Howarth (2007) as a discourse theoretical research model. As research categories, logics aim to disclose dominant patterns of knowledge that signify, objectify and govern the social. Glynos and Howarth select three important categories of logics in the research of social processes and practices: the social, the political and the fantasmatic logic. The fantasmatic logic derives from the psychoanalytical agenda of post-structuralism; it adds to the density of power where particular patterns of knowledge. The fantasmatic aspect denotes the adhesive dimension that social agents attain from social practices and the ways under which such practices are constructed to make such an appeal.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr David Witman, Professor Athanasios Marvakis and Stavros Psaros for their help in this study.
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Appendix
Appendix
The interview with the conscientious objector lasted for approximately 1 hour and was conducted in Thessaloniki, in July 2002: The interview was a semi-structured one and was centred on the key topics/questions below:
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What were the reasons for refusing to serve the military?
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How did you materialize your refusal?
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Why did you decide to politicize your refusal to the military service? What do you think of people not serving through formal exceptions from the service for medical and psychological reasons, true or not?
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What kind of consequences did you have to face for your refusal, formal and informal ones?
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Did you have any support? By who?
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What do you think of recent (2002) changes in the Greek military, like the introduction of a vocational army?
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What do you think of the alternative service to the military one? What about absolutist objectors?
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What do you think were the achievements and gains out of your action?
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What were the main consequences of the objection to you?
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Mylonas, Y. The emergence of political subjectivity in ‘a-political’ terrains: conscientious objection to the military service in pre-crisis Greece. Subjectivity 6, 320–348 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.1