Introduction

Greece, a Small Power in the European Union's periphery and NATO's southern flank, has played a central role in the geopolitics that have shaped and are shaping the state system, regional security, and ethnic and sectarian communities of the Balkan, the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean regions. This chapter explores the constitution of the State and Greek society by ideas and social facts that produced competing ontologies of Hellenism and Hellenicity: ideas about national origins, manifest destiny, cultural hierarchy, exceptionalism, privilege, and difference; social facts expressed as formal or informal norms, processes, and practices, affirm or disrupt the exercise of power and social and territorial control. In the Greek State's 200-year-long history, the pervasiveness of different ideas and social practices produced, at times, a totalizing effect upon the polity, religion, and perceptions of security – in Marcel Mauss's sense of un fait social total.