Terrain and Memory in the Balkans: "Geographic Nationalism" in Greece and Bulgaria (1927-1946) (ePub)

The critical social problems encountered by Greece in the interwar period (1922-1940), like the urbanization of farmers, the crisis of bourgeois hegemony, the consequences of the civil establishment refugees and the global economic crisis, "over-professionalism" and "parasitism" in Greek cities, have been pieced together with new mental phenomena - such as geopolitics, the geo-economic, the neomalthousianismos, radical agrotism and "agricultural nationalism". The social concern of the interwar period impregnated by agronomists, an emerging new elite of specialists and intellectuals, which undertook the scientific organization of the rural economy and achieving sufficiency in grains, and considered the curbing of rural depopulation their social "mission". The overpolitical discourse developed by agronomists (for reasons of legitimacy and social advancement) initially received a nationalist tinge. The memory of the national war (1912-1922) and the new romantic conception of the territory combined with the radical agrotistic ideas for the formation of the concept of an "agricultural nation". Geopolitical and "agricultural nationalism" used by postwar intellectual Greeks for the theoretical foundation of a new "Great Idea", which borrowed characteristics of New Imperialism. The short-lived Greek imperialism (1943-1946) examined here compared with the interwar Bulgarian revisionism, which was based on similar ideological components (geographic determinism, geo-economics and the construction of an "agricultural nation").