23
Te border provided a platform against which the co-constitution of
nationalism, militarism and masculinity became solidifed. Central to
this process was that beyond the border lay the Greek Cypriot (GC)
imagination of the ‘occupation’. Borders serve a material utility against
which such a construction can be projected against. Yet, borders them-
selves are also merely constructed out of the nationalist imagination
(Anderson 1983). Anderson talks about ethnic groups as an ‘imagined
community’ to point to the construction of the national community as
a uniform body, based not on real encounters between members, but
rather a shared idea of the collective. People might have had little or no
encounters with the border, yet they broadly share an understanding of
what the border meant and symbolized.
Whilst the border was established as a result of events of 1974, the
threefold intertwining of nationalism, militarism and masculinity
began to be formed with the creation of the National Organization
of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) in 1955. Being comprised exclusivley
by GCs, EOKA’s ultimate goal was the liberation of Cyprus from the
British yoke and the unifcation of Cyprus with Greece. Tis struggle
was also manifested against the gradual ethnic separation the Greek and
Turkish Cypriot communities. Whilst in 1964 a United Nations (UN)
2
Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity
After the Construction of the Border
© Te Author(s) 2019
S. A. Efthymiou, Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-Confict Cyprus,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14702-0_2