After the entry of Greece into the European Community in 1981, the
Greek government and individual Greek citizens became eligible for a
wide range of European funding programs. These programs are intended
to bring infrastructure development in the various lesser-developed
regions of Europe, including the entirety of Greece, to the level of
the most-developed nations in the European Union. One specific
funding program, and the focus of this paper, is the “cohesion”
funding program, which is directed towards providing grants which help
localities and national governments build large-scale infrastructure
improvements. The island of Crete in particular has received a large
portion of these funds, and since the mid-1980s, there have been
multiple large infrastructure projects, such as a trans-insular
highway, the modernization of the major ports, a rural electrification
program, and the introduction of mechanical irrigation across the
island, all of which have helped transform Crete from one of the
poorest regions of Greece into one of the wealthiest (on a per-capita
income basis). This paper will analyze how these projects are
designed, implemented, and received. More specifically, this paper
will consider the example of the agricultural irrigation network – how
the project was conceived, who received the contracts to build the
network, who received access to this new irrigation network, and how
the project has affected the lives of the people of Crete. At issue
in this examination is the author’s overall hypothesis that EU funding
projects, since they are sources of economic development historically
associated with the national government, are helping deconstruct the
sense of nationalism (often referred to as neo-Hellenism), which was
carefully constructed by the national government during the 20th Century, that most residents of Crete have shared to the present day.
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