The National Identity of Inter-war Greek Engineers: Elitism, Rationalization, Technocracy, and Reactionary Modernism

This article deals with the national identity of Greek engineers in the inter-war era. It attempts to highlight both the ’objective’ dimensions (demography, education, sectors of activity, organization of profession) and the corresponding ’subjective’ components of this identity. The paper shows that inter-war Greek engineers were a socio-professional group with strong elitist characteristics that claimed a leading social role in the country’s modernization and westernization race. This was expressed in a variety of ideological schemes, from the rationalization ideal to technocracy and, ultimately, to a Greek version of reactionary modernism.