SDU Faculty of Arts and Sciences Journal of Social Sciences Special Issue on Balkans Unwelcome Citizens: Muslim Turks of Greece and Orthodox Greeks of Turkey

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of Muslim Turkish minority in Greece and the Greek Orthodox minority in Turkey in the course of nation-state making from 1924 until today. Greece and Turkey are two neighbouring nation-states created upon the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, harboring two ethnic minorities reminiscent of the past Ottoman period-the Muslim Turks of Greece and the Greek Orthodox of Turkey-stood for both as an impediment in their nation-state making project. For his reason and especially until the final decade, both minorities were regarded as potential threats to the national unity and security of these states. Hence they have become victims of bilateral issues of conflict between Greece and Turkey. Brubaker’s theoretical framework of ethnic relations model, the ‘triadic nexus’; which links the minority communities themselves, the states in which they live, and their external homelands, is adopted in this paper in order to offer an in-depth analysis of Greek and Turkish minority policies and their implications for both minorities until the final decade. For the period post 1995 until today, though, Sata’s ‘quadratic nexus’, which incorporates the fourth factor of ‘international organizations’, in this case particularly the European Union, is used to elucidate the positive change in both states’ minority policies