The Social Power Dynamics of Post-truth Politics: How the Greek Youth Perceives the 'Powerful' Foreigners and Constructs the Image of the European Partners

Abstract

The present study starts from the premise that, for human communities, it is difficult to penetrate each other, so that even the globally diffused communication infrastructure is not enough to create an effective common life. This grounds our assumptions about the way the Greek young interviewees, aged between 18 and 32, belonging to main political orientations (centre right, centre left, radical left, and extreme right), are perceiving themselves and their transnational sociopolitical environment, especially Europe and the powerful foreign institutions in the era of financial crisis. We first focus on the question of collective identity, on how the sense of we-ness (the self-perception of the Greek citizens as a human group) is represented in the consciousness and attitudes of the young interviewees of different ideological orientations. A theoretical starting point pertains to the assumption that the collective identity does involve imagining or representing things; but the imaginary it involves is an instituting social imaginary in the sense of an implicit cognitive infrastructure of the Greek society, which originates in the past and shapes the image Greeks have about the world, their values, their common reality. The main research objective is to make intelligible how the young interviewees perceive the diverse facets of their collective identity, how the Greek instituting social imaginary and the imaginary significations it produces (values, ideas, habits, and so on) are expressed in their individual imaginary, what it means for them as responsible citizens, how they frame religion and the ancient Greek past, whether they feel represented by the representatives they have supported, how they perceive the powerful foreign institutions, the European Union and their relationship to the Greek society.