Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Chinese and Japanese could be cited as examples of ethnic continuity, since, despite massive cultural changes over… - Anthony D. Smith

Another school opposed this dream with its summons to military adventure in Anatolia, and took its blueprint from a Western reading of classical antiquity. While conceding the demographic break with the ancient Greek world, the westernized intelligentsia claimed a continuing spiritual affinity between modem Western, secular ideals and those of classical Athens. Locating the modern Greeks through their cultural heritage of classical antiquity along an cast—west axis that stretched from Paris and London to Athens and Constantinople, the ‘Hellenic’ map differed profoundly from the ‘Byzantine’ one; for the Latter had a north—south axis from Moscow to Constantinople and Egypt, which aligned a re-nascent Byzantine Greece with Orthodox Russia as the protector of Eastern Christianity. There was a similar contrast in ethnic moralities. While the Byzantine conception of Greek revival envisaged a renewal of the Orthodox Christian virtues and ecclesiastical controls, the secular Hellenic vision advocated a ‘return’ to the qualities of rational enquiry, self-control and reflective choice which seemed to sum up the ethical message of ancient Greece.

Yet even here all these peoples have remained rooted in their sacred homelands for centuries. Though oppressed and colonized by outsiders, they have never been expelled en masse, and so the theme of restoration to the homeland has played little part in the conceptions of these peoples. There are, however, two peoples, apart from the Jews, for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been central: the Greeks and the Armenians, and together with the Jews, they constitute the archetypal Diaspora peoples, or what John Armstrong has called ‘mobilized diasporas° Unlike diasporas composed of recent mi migrant workers—Indians, Chinese and others in Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean— mobilized diasporas are of considerable antiquity, are generally polyglot and multi-skilled trading communities and have ancient, portable religious traditions. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians claimed an ancient homeland and kingdom, looked back nostalgically to a golden age or ages of great kings, saints, sages and poets, yearned to return to ancient capitals with sacred sites and buildings, took with them wherever they went their ancient scriptures, sacred scripts and separate liturgies, founded in every city congregations with churches, clergy and religious schools, traded across the Middle East and Europe using the networks of enclaves of their co-religionists to compete with other ethnic trading networks, and used their wealth, education and economic skills to offset their political powerlessness)

For the modernist, in contrast, the past is largely irrelevant. The nation is a modern phenomenon, the product of nationalist ideologies, which themselves are the expression of modern, industrial society. The nationalist is free to use ethnic heritages, but nation-building can proceed without the aid of an ethnic past. Hence, nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.