Konstantinos Tsitselikis: Aspects of legal communitarianism - Between millet and citizenship

Legal and political percepts pertaining to ethnic belonging in Greece are closely linked to the ideological understanding of Greekness, a legacy of the Ottoman Greek-Orthodox millet  system. 

Complementary to this image of the national self, minority protection law on Muslims and Jews was and still is partially formed through millet-like paradigms. Greece’s territorial expansion made all inhabitants of the annexed provinces Greek citizens en masse: in addition to those that were deemed eligible to belong to the Greek nation, Jewish and Muslim communities also acquired Greek citizenship. For these communities the self-autonomy of the Ottoman millet structure in education and religious matters was transformed into minority protection, through special individual and collective rights (community schools, Moufti’s jurisdiction, Muslim foundations, military conscription).

Overlapping belongings, first to the state, through civic citizenship, and then to the nation, through religion or language, created inclusion and exclusion schemes that determined two communities with antithetical inner and outer frontiers: this of the Greek citizens vs aliens and that of the ethnic Greeks vs non-ethnic Greeks though the dividing  legal categories of omogenis (of Greek descent) and allogenis (of non-Greek descent). Citizenship law regarding Muslims Greek citizens reflected this ambivalent situation in which a part of Greek citizens were seen as a distinct, millet-like, community with deficient  access to full civic citizenship.