Constructing a governmental vision of happiness: Insights from Greece

Abstract

This paper analyzes how governments instrumentalize the concept of happiness for political ends. It argues that while happiness is primarily employed as an externally-oriented policy and discourse to attract tourists and desirable migrants, it is equally aimed at changing the expectations of the local population, including brain-drainers. We argue that in the case of Greece, happiness forms a governmental vision to brand the country anew after years of moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt surrounding the financial crisis. First, we outline how the Greek government construes happiness as a commodified experience that the Greek population ought to generate for tourists and desirable migrants (‘live like a local’), but importantly also for itself (‘live like a tourist’). Second, this happiness vision seeks to both encourage the Greek population (in that we want to be happy), but also to discipline it (in that we need to be happy). Thirdly, to justify this vision, its key promoters conceive of a future that requires sanitizing the country’s past and present, camouflage its unpleasant and contentious aspects, and re-narrate it in positive terms. Curiously, however, this is less about envisioning a better future after years of crisis, than about asking the Greek population to be satisfied with the status quo. This way, the happiness vision is an attempt to substitute the unfulfilled promises of the capitalist imaginary vis-à-vis opportunity, upward social mobility, and overabundance, where happiness arises not by overcoming the precarizing realities of inequality, but from having a positive attitude in navigating them.