Weighty matter
M. LLEWELLYN SMITH
Politics in Modern Greece Keith R. Legg (Standford up/our 95s)
The nature of modern Greek politics has frequently been misunderstood by those who have been deceived by the Greeks' imitations of western models and institutions into imagining the Greek political game to be roughly the same as the Western European. The events of the last three years in Greece have done something to correct this miscon- ception, against which Keith Legg's book comes as a timely but ponderous warning.
The author, a political scientist from the University of Florida, is concerned not only with Greek politics but also, less illuminat- ingly, with parallels between the Greek and other systems, and with the concepts and methods of political science as applied to transitional societies such as the Greek. The definitional and 'methodological' section of the book is prickly with 'consociational sys- tems', 'sub-cultural cleavage' (!), 'endo- and exo-prismatic systems' and other bonbons from the exotic vocabulary of political science. But once the reader has ploughed through, or skipped, the theoretical exegesis, the rest of the book is relatively easy for a non-specialist to follow.
The book is not one of those political and historical backgrounds to the military coup of 1967 which are now beginning to appear, but a rarer case—a difficult and spare anatomy of the political system in Greece; in the author's words, 'a case study of socialisation and recruitment' in a semi- developed society. Legg's analysis shows that the Greek political system, despite its outward and visible forms, is geared not towards the satisfaction of group interests by compromise and bargaining, but towards the satisfaction of individual interests by means of the extensive client-patron net- works which operate within the major poli- tical parties and most other important Greek institutions. The only party which falls out- side this generalisation is EDA, the party of the extreme left, which operates on the lines of a mass 'ideological' party in West- ern Europe. The corruption, 'personalisa- tion' and relative inefficiency of government in Greece, which the Colonels decried but have not eradicated (since the army, once involved in politics, is subject to the same institutional flaws as the political parties), are all products of the penetration of Greek institutions by clientage networks.
There is nothing startlingly new in this thesis, which relies heavily on recent anthro- pological research in Greece by Campbell,
Friedl and others. But Legg makes sensible use of the evidence and has produced a
comprehensive account of what makes the Greek political machine tick over, or (as in April 1967) seize up. A main doubt is whether, in developing his anthropological model of Greek society as an intricate net- work of relationships based on favours and obligations, he has not excluded too rigidly every element of ideological commitment from the make-up of the two major poli- tical parties. For although the two great bourgeois parties do operate, in the main, in the way Legg describes, they do also represent divergent sets of political attitudes which have had a persistent life since the time of Venizelos and the elder King Con- stantine.
The book has its touches of humour, notably in the appendix on 'Research Methods', where Legg quotes the question- naire he submitted to a sample of fifty-five deputies from the 1964 parliament, and describes their reactions to it. 'By and large,' writes Legg, 'the deputies did not under- stand the purpose of the interviews . . . They enjoyed talking about themselves, but they would have been apprehensive about any questions calling for policy opinion . . . Few deputies believed that their responses would be secret. In fact, several were upset that we didn't want their names.' The analy- sis of the replies of these anonymous depu- ties—splendidly intractable material for the political scientist—makes one of the more interesting passages in this worthy but heavy- handed book.
Previous page
