Face to face with the System

PERSONAL COLUMN MICHAEL LLEWELLYN SMITH

I have been trying to remember how many separate things I had to do last winter in order to dispatch two large trunks of books and household goods from Athens, where I had been living for some time, to London— certainly far more than appear in the following pallid resume of those hours of sweat, toil and impassioned negotiation. It went something like this: 1. Drive with trunks in borrowed Morris Minor to freight depot of Larissa Station. Queue up in office. Told to go to customs house for clearance.

2. Drive to customs house. Clangorous dis- order, straw and packing-cases. Ask where to apply for clearance. First man knows nothing about it, but knows of second man who should know. Second man, upstairs, knows the lot. Points out that contents of trunks must be inspected for clearance inside customs house. I answer trunks too heavy to carry upstairs. He asks how heavy—weights must be entered on forms. I say don't know until trunks cleared by customs and can be weighed on station weighing machines; then stagger him by pro- ducing list of contents of trunks in triplicate from inside pocket. We agree use must be made of these valuable documents. Append them to clearance forms. By this time relation- ship established. Man knows my name, work, reason for travelling, marital status, views on Greece-Portugal football match.

3. Deadlock on inspection of goods solved by reference to higher authority, whom I even- tually locate in glass-walled box in corner of warehouse, wearing military uniform, drink- ing coffee. After discussion he sends sub- ordinate to accompany me to station and inspect trunks there at the weighing-in.

4. Trunks and man to station. Trunks un- loaded, weighed. Man rifles through contents, finds neither drugs nor pornography, ignores note3 and press-cuttings on Greek politics. I produce length of rope from car, rope trunks.

5. Drive to customs house, leaving trunks at station. Military authority accepts trunks now cleared. Return to first floor for docu- mentary evidence of this.

6. Crisis. No aitesis. (The aitesis, literally a petition, is an essential tool in the bureaucratic machinery. In this case, when I protested that I had already received customs clearance, the man asked how could I have received it when I had not applied for it?) 7. Draft aitesis requesting customs clearance. Man at desk sticks five drachma stamp on it, man at another desk cancels stamp, higher authority in another room initials it, my military authority scans it, says I didn't ask for this, take it away.

8. Find someone who will accept the damn thing. Collect necessary documents from up- stairs. Trunks now cleared. The rest is child's play. Return to station, fill out forms and labels for dispatch of trunks, pay for carriage, tip porter, drive home, long drink.

Total time—three hours.

It is through this sort of experience that the foreigner comes nearest to appreciating the commonest cliché of Greek popular philo- sophy, that 'Life is a struggle': for the peasant, against the soil and the elements; for every- one, against hostile or at best indifferent organs of the state and bureaucrats. Any resident of a few months' standing could match it with stories of visits to the parcels office or the aliens bureau or the car registration office. But for the foreigner these are occasional. sometimes even exhilarating, forays into alien territory; for the Greek the struggle for sub- sistence, prestige, protection from the often arbitrary interference of the state, is more nearly continuous.

Other characteristic phrases are the re- proachful 'We're all human beings' (implying that someone else is acting like a rat), and the pompous-didactic 'We Greeks . . ."We Greeks gave Europe its civilisation.' The pro- fessor who said this represented what may be called the 'Cradle 'of Democracy' view of Greece; the visit to the customs suggests an- other view which was hinted at by a friend of mine when he called Omonia Square in Athens `the navel of the Balkans.'

Almost every dignitary, journalist and Nip who has visited Greece since the coup has, however, felt obliged to resurrect the cradle. It makes a good peroration: 'It is tragic that the country which gave democracy to Europe, which invented the word democracy, which is the very cradle of democracy, should be the country where now democracy has been put to sleep.' It is tragic, but not for the reasons stated. The implication of the phrase 'Cradle of Democracy,' that the Greeks are more ardently democratic and intolerant of authori- tarianism than anyone else, is less than con- vincing. There is no historical reason why they should be: Periclean Athens was, as it were, another country inhabited by a largely different race. And the Greeks' well-known indivi- dualism expresses itself more in the protection of individual and family interests, and in a general mistrust of the state, than in the active and co-operative defence of the democratic principle. I propose a moratorium On the phrase. Let us leave it to the Greeks, who use it, heaven knows, enough—Greeks of all parties, including the colonels.

According to the other view (the navel), Greece should be seen as a small, compara- tively young Balkan state, characterised by the `Balkan' failings of corruption, inefficiency, fragmentation and fission of political group- ings. This is Eric Ambler country. It is a recognisable picture, but the charge of cor- ruption has been pushed too hard since the coup by journalists acting on the principle that there is always another side to any question, and that even if the colonels' regime is bad, the previous regime was fatally corrupt. Apart from the injustice this view does to a number of upright public servants, who much resent it, it introduces an alien morality into an area where it does not belong. The implication be- hind much foreign criticism of the 'standard of public life' before the coup is that the Greeks were lamentably failing to attain to the methods and standards of Westminster and Whitehall, which if only they knew better they would imitate. In fact the Greeks knew too well to attempt any such thing.

The confusion arises from our pejorative word 'corruption,' which is made to cover a wide range of activities some of which are to the Greeks morally neutral or even admired. In the 'struggle' of life, especially in his un- avoidable encounters with the state machine, the Greek needs influence or 'means' to hack through the thickets of regulations which, if he lacks them, some official is likely to interpret in the harshest possible sense. The possession and successful manipulation of such 'means' is generally respected. What we call corrup- tion is the oil which lubricates the bureau- cratic machine; if, by magic, it could be abolished overnight, no doubt the machine would seize up. The situation in England is not comparable. Patronage networks here operate only within narrow areas of the nation's life and business. In Greece nearly everybody belongs to a chain of networks, of great complexity, whose links are favours ex- changed, ties of blood, political or social sup- port given in return for 'protection.'

The foreigner in Greece usually does well in the struggle. I suspect that for the large colony of artists, students, writers and teachers of 'English as a foreign language' the sense of achievement derived from successful grappling with the bureaucratic machine often outweighs the frustration involved in the process. The foreigners have every advantage on their side. The struggle is not for them, after all, one of life and death. They are dealing with a people who are generally tolerant of other nations, except perhaps those which border on Greece. And, because they arc foreigners, they do not represent a threat to the interests and liveli- hood of the Greeks. They are, in fact, outside the system; the bureaucrat does not feel the need to put them in their place, because he does not know what their place is. Hence, perhaps, it took me only three hours to dispatch two trunks from Athens to London.

It is these advantages, and the sunshine, rather than any sentimental memory of an Anglo-Greek special relationship (a relation- ship which consisted for the most part in the English pushing the Greeks around), which account for the comparative ease of life in Athens for the English. That relationship counts for something still; the alliance during the last war is not forgotten, nor are Byron. Lloyd George and other philhellenes. But the chief practical benefit of the entente for the English in Athens is probably the insistence of a large section of the Greek bourgoisie that their children should be taught English by Englishmen with English and not American accents; the latter are widely and snobbishly regarded as not only ugly but wrong. We have travelled a long way since that memorable occasion in 1862 when the Greeks actually voted by plebiscite in favour of offering the throne of Greece to an Englishman, Albert, second son of Queen Victoria. Garibaldi took only three votes to Albert's 230.000. In view of the subsequent fortunes of the Greek monarchy. the prince's advisers were no doubt wise to turn the offer down.