![]() In fact, from a Greek’s perspective, it is the equivalent of asking the French, German, Spanish or Dutch to respond, with a yes or no answer, to the silly question: “Is European civilisation better or worse than other civilisations?” In this sense, modern Greeks are neither more nor less culturally chauvinist than Europeans who celebrate European civilisation as if the horrors of European colonialism had never happened. Greece Europe, and vice versa, telling a pollster that they do not believe their culture to be superior would be tantamount to questioning the superiority of European civilisation. For Greeks used to hearing folks like Giscard d’Estaing insist that. Not to be outdone in philhellenism, commenting in 1941 on the Greek resistance to the Italian and German invaders, Winston Churchill famously added: “Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.” Surely any people showered with such lavish praise by influential foreigners would be forgiven for taking a certain pride in their culture. On 28 May, 1979, the occasion of Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then president of France delivered a speech in Athens and declared: “Europe without Greece would not be Europe… We are all, in our language and thought processes, children of Greek civilisation…” Today, he concluded, “Europe is rediscovering Europe.” A century or so earlier, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. ![]() ![]() At the risk of confirming that stereotype, I shall blame it on… foreigners, with their immoderate praise of Greek culture and their superficial reading of their own silly surveys. We were even anointed the most culturally chauvinistic Europeans in a recent Pew survey. We Greeks have a reputation for being insufferable nationalists, most of whom genuinely believe that Greek culture is superior to that of other nations and peoples. ![]()
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