Perceptions and Uses of the Land: Agrarian Rhetoric and Agricultural Policy in Greece under Metaxas’ Regime (1936-1941)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/perspectivas.3208Keywords:
Agrarianism, Land, Nationalism, GreeceAbstract
This paper aims to explore the ways in which the concepts of ’Nature’ and ’Land’ were incorporated and mobilized in the rhetoric of the dictatorial regime established in Greece by Ioannis Metaxas on August 4, 1936. Firstly, it examines the links between the construction of a national landscape and the emergence of a novel nationalist ideology in interwar Greece. Then, it looks into different ways in which politicized ideas of nature informed agronomic researches and practices and were translated in Metaxas’ political thought and policies. These ideological connotations of Land and Nature inscribe themselves in the philosophical and economic doctrine of the ’peasantist nationalism’. Based mostly on radical agrarianism and neo-romanticism, this discourse gained momentum in the early 1930s and permeated autarchic economic and agrarian policies, especially after the collapse of parliamentary rule. Along those lines, Metaxas’ dictatorship and its perceptions of the environment arguably align with features and trajectories of the authoritarian regimes that flourished all around Europe in the interwar period.
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