Cultural Trauma and Divisive Political Identities

The article examines the relationship amongst cultural trauma, trust in public institutions, and political inclinations in Greece, and tests the hypothesis that cultural trauma could shape, in various degrees, the basal civil-political identity of the individual. Our quantitative research, based on a nation-wide random sample, suggests that civil-political identity is interrelated to, and possibly is preceded by deeply held worldviews informed by past traumatic events and corresponding narratives of good vs. evil. In this framework, various cultural traumas are not perceived by social actors as isolated events, but they are comprehended as episodes of an overarching grand traumatic narrative that “supports” the validity of the chosen political ideology as identity. This process generates, potentially, a multiplicity of grand traumatic narratives which clash for supremacy in the public sphere and sustain deep intergenerational divisive political and cultural identities. Our analysis indicates that in Greece there are three such grand narratives: the Nationalist, the Old Left, and the New Left, and, last a residual one, the anti-Junta narrative

Political science · Politics · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies