Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the mechanisms of differential inclusion and exclusion and the changing representations of citizenship, nationhood and belonging triggered by the Greek crisis and the neoliberal state of exception, taking as examples the Soviet Greek "returnees" and the Muslim Minority of Thrace.

Paper long abstract:

Nation is commonly represented as a deep horizontal comradeship and citizenship is normatively understood as a status of equal membership. And yet, we are fully aware of blunt or sharp ethnic hierarchies within the same nations and we have come to realize that citizenship proves to be graduated in quite many ways.

The Muslim Minority of Western Thrace and Soviet Greeks were formerly classified as second class citizens and enemies within in their respective countries of origin. Today they find themselves coping with distinctive forms of institutional or social discrimination and prejudice. Greek co-ethnics "returnees" from the Soviet Union, arriving and settling in Greece after 1990, enjoy full citizenship rights based on the jus sanguinis principle and the ethnic conception of nationhood but their greekness is called into question from large sections of the local population. As for the members of the Muslim minority of Thrace - ethnic Turks in their large part - these derive their citizenship from the jus soli principle and in application of the 1923 Lausanne treaty. Nevertheless, they have endured, especially till 1990, pronounced segregation and serious infringement of their civil and political rights.

The Greek debt crisis of 2010 and the subsequent neoliberal austerity measures, along with the proliferation of Golden Down's fascist agenda have triggered new mechanisms of differential inclusion and exclusion and changing representations of membership, belonging and identification. What happens - in a state of exception - with those politically and discursively (dis)placed outside the core nation?