Continuity in Greek politics
Nigel Clive
A CONCISE HISTORY OF GREECE by Richard Clogg CUP, f22.95, £7.95, pp. 248 Professor Clogg has succeeded in presenting a new version of the period covering Greece's emergence from Ottoman rule until the present day. Drawing on the latest research, his concise history can be appreciated by both general and academic readers. It also has the advantage of many well-selected illustra- tions that enliven the text.
Greeks were and still are a people of the diaspora with a remarkable facility for absorbing themselves into their local back- ground. While Greek mercantile communi- ties were firmly established in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and southern Russia, at the end of the 18th century Ottoman Greeks held many key positions and notables in the Peloponnese were sometimes indistinguishable from their nominal Turkish overlords. This meant that after the war of independence, the new rulers of Greece, under the protection of Britain, France and Russia, had to con- struct a nation as well as a state that con- tained less than a third of the Greek Population of the Ottoman Empire. Hence Kolettis' vision of the 'Great Idea' to unite within the bounds of a single state, with its capital in Constantinople, all the areas of Greek settlement in the Near East. In the early 1830s, Athens was a dusty village where it was natural for tensions to arise from the grafting of Western parliamentary institutions on to a deeply traditional society.
Patron-client relationships evolved dur- ing the reign of George I from 1863 to 1913 and have continued in different forms until the present. It was during the last two decades of the 19th century that the essence of a two-party system was operat- ing, with Trikoupis and his arch rival Deliyannis alternating in power. Trikoupis' New Party was more in line with the west- ern tradition, believing that the state should be strengthened politically and economically before it engaged in irriden- tist adventures. In any event, the 'Great Idea' had always been dependent on the goodwill of the Great Powers. It was, how- ever, Venizelos who forged a new sense of national unity and whose leadership through the Balkan wars resulted in adding 70 per cent to the land area of 'New Greece', which by 1913 had emerged as a significant Mediterranean power. If his breach with King Constantine caused the `National Schism', he had the sense to back the winners of the first world war. But in its aftermath came the Greek 'catastrophe' in Asia Minor in 1922 when the 'Great Idea' was consumed in the ashes of Smyrna. When Venizelos became Prime Minister again in 1928, his greatest achievements were reconciliation with Turkey in 1930 and the Balkan Pact of 1934, but these soon faded away after the failed military coup in his favour in 1935, which forced him into exile in France.
Clogg describes the 'backward-looking and paternalistic dictatorship' of General Metaxas from 1936 until his death in 1941, after courageously rejecting the Italian ulti- matum in October 1940. Likewise, he gives a balanced account of the Communist and anti-Communist resistance movements under the German occupation, whose fate was sealed by the percentages agreement in Moscow in October 1944 between Churchill and Stalin, who bartered British predominance in Greece for Russian hege- mony in Romania and Bulgaria. This was a further instance of events in Greece being determined by the Great Powers. It also explains Stalin's passive attitude when British troops in December 1944 thwarted the attempt by the Communist resistance movement EAM/ELAS to seize power in Athens.
In the civil war starting in 1946, America stepped in when Britain stepped out (for economic reasons) of responsibility for saving Greece from falling behind the Iron Curtain. Much of American aid that in western Europe was being devoted to economic development was channelled into military objectives, which were only achieved with the defeat of the Commu- nists' so-called 'Democratic Army' in 1949. Thereafter, Clogg explains Karamanlis' rise to fame between 1955 and 1963, the events leading up to the disaster of the Colonels' regime from 1967 to 1974, followed by Karamanlis' triumphant return and the abolition once more of the monarchy, the emergence of Papandreou's socialist PASOK in 1977 as the official opposition, the `annus mirabilis' of 1981 when Greece joined the European Community and elect- ed its first socialist government, whose socialisation closely resembled patronage and whose changes were more in style than in substance, and finally the three elections resulting in the slim majority for Mitszo- talds"New Democracy' since April 1990. Although Greeks still talk of 'travelling to Europe', after 1981 Greece's European credentials have been established once and for all.
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