We Want Our Country Back: Land, Sea, and National History in the Far-Right Greek Imaginary

The platform of the Greek Far-Right party, Golden Dawn, refers extensively to policies intended to protect national borders from foreign incursions. Territorial disputes with neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, are used as a rallying cry. The nineteenth-century irredentist policy to recreate the borders of the Byzantine Empire has received a second life in the party’s rhetoric. Incursions are perpetrated not only by foreign countries and foreign nationals – the state and private corporations have also laid claims to land that rightly belongs to the Greek nation. Golden Dawners frequently deploy historical arguments to support these positions. This paper examines the ways the Greek Far-Right has revived and recast nationalist historical narratives to support these and other policies pertaining to land use, land rights, borders, and immigration.