Agreements and friedship between Greece and Turkey in 1930: contesting nationalist discourses and press reactions

Abstract

The signing, among others, of a “friendship agreement” between Greece and Turkey in 1930 has been coined by official nationalist discourses as the initiation of a brand new “friendship-era” between the two nations. This rupture though was undermined by the fact that the signing followed only few years after the end of the Greek-Turkish war in 1922, and the ethnic tensions that the ten-year-long fighting had brought as its unavoidable repercussion. This thesis, after a brief analysis of the international matrix in which the Greek-Turkish rapprochement was concluded, proceeds to a two-fold analysis: On the one hand it reconstructs the nationalist discourses -mirrored in parliament debates and public speeches, as well as the regime-loyal press, that is, the Venizelist Ελεύθερον Βμ{460} (Free Tribune), and the Turkish Cumhuriyet (Republic)- with which both the Venizelist and the Kemalist government justified in public the followed policy and attempted to render the other party as a “trustable” and “new” partner, disentangling it thereby from past connotations, while presenting themselves as fully supported by both countries’ “public opinion.” On the opposite pole, it seeks to shed light on the differences evolving between these official nationalist discourses and oppositional/popular ones. With that aim it analyzes the two countries’ press spectrum of 1930 and sheds light on the different nationalist imaginaries that were uttered around the signing of the agreements in June and October 1930, by popular versions of the official nationalist discourse, like the Turkish newspaper Vakit (Time), by oppositional parties, as the anti-Venizelists in Greece, or such marginalized groups like the refugees/exchangees and the communists. The method thereby used is a critical reading and a reconstruction of the texts of the parliament discussions and a variety of newspapers, with the aim to create a narrative unraveling the different political implications, the power relations and the contradictions these contain.