"It's Time:" Europeanization in the Hands of Young Urbanites in Greece

“It’s Time!”  Europeanization in the Hands of Young Urbanites in Greece

Against the backdrop of the 2009 fiscal collapse and the corollary instability and uncertainty that has plagued Greeks since, the country’s youth—as volunteers, cultural innovators, and agents of reform help determine their country’s future.  Leading the effort are Thessaloniki’s young residents who, inspired by their city’s title as the “2014 Youth Capital of Europe,” organize local and global movements to revitalize their city through political, social, and symbolic action.  With the slogan “It’s time,” they move their city in crisis through “development and transition towards its social revival.” Based on year-long ethnographic research in Thessaloniki (2011-2012 and summer 2014), this work demonstrates that while eurocrats continue to Europeanize Greece from above, the young members of Thessaloniki’s “creative middle class” are launching strategies to Europeanize Greece from below.  Two years earlier my research participants self-identified as “the lost generation” and their country’s “burned children.”  Today, through self-ascribed roles as ‘global citizens of Greece,’ they define volunteerism as “political agency,” and revitalize their national and local heritage as primordial identity and legacy.  Among their goals are attention to their ecological and cultural landscape, strengthening cultural dimensions of international and domestic tourism, and building pro-work alliances with young Europeans in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.  Consistent with the revelatory power that crises yield, this ethnography shows that young Greeks’ transitional forms of being and belonging contributes to a theory of crisis as a source and site for social renewal through cultural agency.