The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy

2018

In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, immigrants called 'metics' (metoikoi) settled in Athens without a path to citizenship. Galvanized by these political realities, classical thinkers cast a critical eye on the nativism defining democracy's membership rules and explored the city's anxieties over intermingling and passing. Yet readers continue to treat immigration and citizenship as separate phenomena of little interest to theorists writing at the time. In The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy, Demetra Kasimis makes visible the long-overlooked centrality of immigration to the originary practices of democracy and political theory in Athens. She dismantles the interpretive and political assumptions that have led readers to turn away from the metic and reveals the key role this figure plays in such texts as Plato's Republic. The result is a series of original readings that boldly reframes urgent questions about how democracies order their non-citizen members.

Citizenship Studies, 2017

Cities have always offered multiple spatial settings for human acts that question existing order and create new forms of citizenship. Keeping in mind the Arendtian definition of citizenship as a superior 'right to have rights' , this paper explores the emergence of scenes of citizenship in contemporary Athens, with regard to the public appearance of immigrants as actors that seek (or not) more than the recognition of separate rights. Some key contradictions that are revealed, such as those that concern the boundaries between private and public life, solidarity and disempowerment, sense of belonging and motivation to exclude, illustrate that acts of citizenship depend on the qualities of the urban scenes in which they unfold and that these qualities are in turn shaped by different articulations of power. Introduction: Is there only one people? In 2010 non-EU immigrants in Greece were granted for the first time the right to vote and to stand as candidates in local elections. In a country where the vast majority of immigrants and their descendants, even after years of residence or having been born in the country, continue to live under an ambiguous legal status, this seemed to be a path-breaking step towards political recognition, despite the fact that the opportunity to participate was actually restricted to those few that were able to prove at least five years of legal residence, while holding valid long-residence permits or having been recognized as refugees. Three years later, migrants' elective rights were judged incompatible with the Constitution by the Supreme Administrative Court (Council of State) and had to be abolished. The rationale for the Court's decision was illustrative of the dominant understanding of citizenship in Greece. After declaring that the people is the superior instrument of the state, the Court (Council of State 2013, §12), ruled that according to the Constitution: 'there exist no […] various peoples, each with a different composition. There exists only one people composed of Greek citizens alone, namely by all those who have acquired the Greek citizenship'. The significance of this formulation lies in the establishment of an absolute mutuality between the people and the state. Not only is the people the constitutive element of the state,

2018

After the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 B.C. the question of who should be included in the citizen-body was fervently contested. Two of the speeches composed by Lysias for delivery at this period have been interpreted by Bakewell (1999) as constituting a covert proposal of adding an alternative to citizenship by birth: legal naturalization. This paper argues that Bakewell’s interpretation misunderstands the argument of the speech Against Philon which is only concerned with eligibility to serve in the Council, and not with citizenship. Furthermore, the paper questions the validity of what Bakewell (1999) considers as Athenian stereotypes of metics (resident aliens), and concludes that these are more stereotypes held by modern scholars, generated by misunderstandings of the actual composition of the metic community, rather than ancient Athenian views. As the paper is addressed not only to Classicists, but also to scholars of other disciplines who might be interested in the...

Jsse Journal of Social Science Education, 2003

Contents 1 Theoretical framework and method of analysis 2 Civic Education and textbook 2.1 Conceptions of democracy in the textbook 2.2 Students' conceptualization of democracy 2.3 Conceptions of citizenship in the textbook 2.4 Students' conceptualizations on the characteristics of the ideal citizen 2.5 The role of the state and the government in the textbook 2.6 Students' attitudes regarding the role of the state. 2.7 Issues regarding immigrants in the textbook 2.8 Students' attitudes towards immigrants' rights 3 Concluding remarks Appendix Notes References

Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 2024

The increased arrival of immigrant/refugee populations often leads to public debates. These debates about immigrant/refugee policies are often raised in parliament. Inside parliament, speakers use specific arguments to persuade their audience, aiming to construct specific national identities, and to promote the national homogenizing discourse. To accomplish this, the politicians often exploit narratives and more specifically, national narratives, reframing aspects of history in order to shape the national conscience. The aim of this research is to analyze how two political leaders of opposite Greek parties, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Yanis Varoufakis, use narratives on the Greek immigration/ refugee movement to the USA in the 1920s to argue about the contemporary Greek policy toward immigrant/refugee issues. To analyze their narratives, we utilize the model of positioning suggested by Bamberg (1997), drawing a distinction between three levels: the narrative world, where we focus on how the characters are positioned in relation to one another within the reported events; the narrative interaction, where we examine how the narrator positions him/herself in relation to the audience through specific argumentative strategies (Reisigl and Wodak 2001); and the broader socio-ideological framework, which concerns the positioning of the narrator toward the Discourses, namely, toward the ideologically defined ways of representing reality. According to our findings, at the level of the narrative world the two politicians construct differently the USA immigrant/refugee policy. These constructions result to different arguments at the level of the narrative interaction, where Mitsotakis promotes as a norm the exclusion of the Others, while Varoufakis promotes their assimilation. Given that both the exclusion and the assimilation of the Others comprise homogenizing practices, we realize that, at the level of

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2019

This thesis investigates the metics, or resident aliens, in democratic Athens and how they affected ideas of identity, with a particular focus on the fourth century BC. It looks at definitions of the metics and how the restrictions and obligations which marked their status operated; how these affected their lives and their image, in their own eyes and those of the Athenians; how the Athenians erected and maintained a boundary of status and identity between themselves and the metics, in theory and in practice; and how individuals who crossed this boundary could present themselves and be characterised, especially in the public context of the lawcourts. The argument is that the metics served as a contradiction of and challenge to Athenian ideas about who they were and what made them different from others. This challenge was met with responses which demonstrate the flexibility of identity in Athens, and its capacity for variety, reinvention and contradiction.

1994

In the contemporary United States the image and experience of Athenian democracy has been appropriated to justify a profoundly conservative political and educational agenda. Such is the conviction expressed in this provocative book, which is certain to arouse widespread comment and discussion. What does it mean to be a citizen in a democracy? Indeed, how do we educate for democracy?