Greece since 1945

Politics, Economy and Society

David H. Close

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582356672
• eBook ISBN: 9781317880004
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The book draws extensively on research on modern Greece in recent decades, and on the many perceptive commentaries on recent events in the Greek press. It adopts both an analytical and chronological approach and shows how Greece has both converged with western Europe and remained distinctively Balkan. David Close writes clearly and forcefully, and presents a lively picture of the Greek political system, economic development, social changes and foreign relations.  Aimed at readers coming to the subject for the first time, this is a readable and informative introduction to contemporary Greece.

Chapter One
Introduction

The development of the new nation, 1821–1940

People and territory

The modern Greek state came into being in 1821-33, when part of the Greek people won independence from the Ottoman empire in their ‘national revolution’. This was an early stage in the emancipation of the Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule, and Greeks were the first of them to win internationally recognised sovereignty. Like the other Balkan states which thus emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greece derived legitimacy from a sense of identity which was based on deep-rooted ethnic characteristics and then cultivated by intellectuals and patriotic insurgents from the late eighteenth century onwards, before being inculcated by a national government in its subjects. Among the characteristics of the Balkan nations, religion was especially influential, a fact which led, except in Muslim-dominated areas, to close association between church and nation.

In the Greek case the historical foundations of ethnic identity were particularly compelling in their appeal, consisting of descent – attested by linguistic as well as geographical continuity – from classical Greek civilisation and the subsequent Byzantine empire, which had expired after over a millennium of existence with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. An institutional link with the Byzantine empire was the Greek Orthodox Church, which could claim a direct line of continuity including language with the earliest Christian communities. From the late seventeenth century, Greek families – many of them wealthy and cultivated – played a major role in the administration and commerce of the Ottoman empire.¹ The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who was in effect chosen by some of those families, was acknowledged as spiritual leader by the empire’s millions of Orthodox Christian subjects, who formed the majority of the Balkan peoples. Greeks therefore had reason to see their cultural heritage as exceptionally valuable.

It is only recently that most Greeks came to inhabit national territory, as a result both of its expansion and also of immigration. Later in the nineteenth century, the new state acquired the Ionian Islands and Thessaly. In the Balkan wars of 1912-13, it wrested Epirus, Macedonia, Crete and many eastern Aegean islands from the Ottoman empire, so expanding its territory by 70 per cent, and increasing its population from 2,800,000 to 4,800,000. The First World War added western Thrace, acquired from Bulgaria. Under the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, Greek boundaries took almost their present form, enclosing large new territories and populations which then had to be assimilated. The only territory to be added thereafter consisted of Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands, acquired from Italy in 1947, and inhabited by 121,000 people.

During the spasms of ethnic reorganisation which occurred during the twentieth century, most of the Greek diaspora that existed in the nineteenth century immigrated to the new state. The years 1913-23 saw 1,300,000-1,400,000 Greeks arrive from what is now Turkey, most of them expelled by the armies of Kemal Atatiirk in the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’ of 1922. Another 100,000 arrived in these years from Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. Thus in 1940 the national population of 7,345,000 was nearly ten times that of 1833. Thereafter the national population was increased by the further contraction of the old diaspora, with the arrival in the 1950s and 1960s of tens of thousands of Greeks from Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Egypt; since the late 1980s of 163,000 more from the former Soviet Union and tens of thousands from Albania.

The new frontiers were for a long time vulnerable to challenge, and were indeed changed by Bulgaria and Italy, as satellites of Nazi Germany, during the joint military occupation by the three countries in 1941-44. Bulgaria reclaimed western Thrace, and Italy annexed part of Epirus to its protectorate of Albania. These territories returned to Greece with liberation in 1944. Thereafter the slav-Macedonian speakers of Macedonia tried to secede to the Macedonian Republic of the new federation of Yugoslavia. During civil conflict in 1944-49, about 86,000 or more speakers of Albanian, slav Macedonian and Vlach (a Romanian dialect) fled abroad or were killed, because they were accused of supporting the occupation forces or the communists. In addition, during the enemy occupation in 1942-44, 67,000 Jews (making up 87 per cent of their prewar numbers) were deported to their deaths. Thus by 1950, and until the 1990s, the country was ethnically homogeneous by Balkan standards, with about 95 per cent of the population being both Greek-speaking from preference and Greek Orthodox in religion, and under 2 per cent diverging in both language and religion.²

Dependency, political and economic

Like other Balkan countries, Greece looked to great powers for political models and military backing. The movement for independence from the late eighteenth century was inspired by the western Enlightenment, and particularly by the western cult of classical civilisation. The entourage of the first monarch Otto (a Roman Catholic Bavarian selected by Britain, France and Russia in 1832) imposed on the country a mixture of German and Napoleonic concepts of government. After Otto was deposed by a revolt in 1862, his successor George was selected by the same powers from the Danish royal family, but he at least converted to Orthodoxy. When from 1910 the Prime Minister Elevtherios Venizelos – the Greek counterpart to Bismarck – sought to reform the navy, army and police, he entrusted the task to foreign missions – British, French and Italian respectively. In a later era of intensive modernisation – from 1990 onwards – governments as a matter of course consulted foreign specialists: for example the British about reforming state broadcasting, the civil service and social insurance, Americans about reforming the tax department, and both about reforming the police.

Greece was always dependent on foreign military backing, partly because an extraordinarily long coastline exposed the country to pressure from naval powers – the five largest cities in the mid-twentieth century being coastal – and partly because of a recurring need both for protection against territorial threats and support for territorial claims. In the late 1930s, the dictator Ioannis Metaxas drew closer for protection to Britain – which since the early nineteenth century had been the leading naval power in the Mediterranean – against threats by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Thus the national custom of seeking patrons was extended by governments beyond the frontiers.

The Balkan countries also became increasingly dependent, from the late nineteenth century, on the great powers for loans and investment. Their economic development was hindered by, among other things, lack of credit, poor internal communications, and competition with their own products by the developed countries’ manufactured exports, which since the eighteenth century had ruined or discouraged native industries. The public utilities that were constructed before the 1940s, like railways, power stations and reservoirs, were meagre by northern European standards, and were mainly built by foreign firms and financed by foreign credit. In Greece, the railway network, being built to suit the needs of foreign creditors, never reached Epirus in the north-west; and perhaps the majority of the population in the 1930s was still accessible only by rough tracks or infrequent boats.

Like much of Mediterranean Europe Greece is relatively poor in mineral resources, fisheries and arable land. Most of the surface area consists of rocky mountains and only 28 per cent of the area after 1947 can be cultivated; so that the area of arable land per head in the 1940s was 1.3 acres (compared with 5.4 in Britain); while the general quality of grazing land was poor. Part of the better arable and grazing land lay beside malarial marshes. Through lack of investment, productivity was low by northern European standards: for example, iron ploughs were used by only one-quarter of farmers in 1935, and production of wheat per acre was little over half the Italian level. For the sizeable proportion of the population living among mountains or on small islands, there was little hope of economic improvement save by migration to cities or abroad.³ Lacking the resources to pay for a top-heavy bureaucracy and army, the government became so indebted that from 1897 until the 1950s – and again in the 1990s – its finances were supervised by successive commissions representing foreign creditors.

But Greece benefited from location on major maritime routes. Largely for this reason, economic ties with other countries, and especially with the industrialised powers of northern Europe and the United States of America, were stronger and more varied than those of other Balkan nations. With the improvement of internal communications from the late nineteenth century, more and more villages were drawn into a national or international economy. One-quarter of the country’s food – and one-third of the staple item of diet, wheat – before 1940 were imported, and paid for in part by exports of a limited range of primary products (consisting largely of tobacco, raisins and currants), which were vulnerable to fluctuations in foreign demand.

Another link with western commerce was the Greek-owned merchant fleet, which in the 1930s was the world’s ninth largest. Like other maritime peoples, Greeks were especially ready to travel and emigrate. Consequently, a different source of foreign exchange – and of personal ties with western countries – consisted of remittances from emigrants, of whom there were 445,000 in the United States by the early 1930s, besides nearly 200,000 who had returned from there. By then there must have been thousands of villages thus linked by personal ties with America. Ties of various kinds were especially close with all the maritime democracies: Britain, America and France. On them the merchant fleet depended heavily for its viability and existence; while in the first two were placed much of the savings of the wealthy.

Economic dependency was reflected in a generally low level of material wellbeing, even by Balkan standards.⁴ The general level of health was also low, so that the proportion of the population suffering from malaria was always at least one-sixth, while average life expectancy at birth in 1928 was 46.3 – lower than in Britain in 1901. There prevailed a sense of backwardness in relation to the developed countries of the west. From the 1820s onwards, the most influential of the ruling elites strove to catch up with them, their specific aim being to establish effective government in place of the anarchic misrule of the Ottoman empire.⁵ In time the westernisers would predominate. In the later twentieth century, they were chiefly preoccupied with adapting all institutions and practices to the goal of producing wealth more efficiently so as to promote human welfare and national power – a process which we usually refer to as modernisation.

Economy, society and political system

The main form of landholding in this largely agrarian economy was the small family farm. In the 1820s this already had a long and respected history, there being virtually no landed aristocracy, and limited incentives for businessmen to invest in agriculture. Meanwhile the rapid growth of population, with little economic development, led – as in the rest of the Balkans – to widespread land hunger. For these reasons, successive governments until the 1950s distributed in small allotments the extensive agricultural lands which they acquired from former Turkish owners, monasteries or Greek landowners. The chief phase in this process was stimulated by the mass influx of refugees from Asia Minor, and occurred in 1917-23. Thereafter four-fifths of farms in Greece were under ten acres, and most farms were owner-occupied. There was still much variation in the size of holdings, and village communities varied in social composition; but there were no extensive class divisions in the countryside.⁶ As in the rest of Mediterranean Europe, farmers lived in compact villages, typically clustered near a water source. In the 1930s, most landholders were heavily indebted and incapable of investing in improved productivity. But in the long run, the widespread distribution of land protected most of the population against total destitution. The great majority of the nation’s householders owned their dwellings; and much of the urban population still have land or close relatives in the country, where they return to celebrate Easter.

There was little industrial activity in the nineteenth century; and industrial development did not take off until the 1920s, even this being earlier than in the rest of the Balkans. In 1939, after more than doubling in value in the previous fifteen years, industrial production satisfied most of domestic demand, and with mining accounted for 18 per cent of GNP and 15 per cent of employment. The mercantile and shipowning element of the population had traditionally been large. Associated with it were comparatively numerous professional and administrative classes, trained in schools and universities. These institutions were for much of the nineteenth century paid for by mercantile communities abroad, which until the early twentieth century far outnumbered their counterparts within the country.⁷ Thus Greece differed from other Balkan countries in 1940 in that the farming population was smaller, at about 54 per cent of the population, while the city population was larger. The latter consisted overwhelmingly of people engaged in small-scale businesses and workshops, in state administration, commerce and retailing. Like the farming population, most of those engaged in construction, industry, commerce and transport worked in small family enterprises. By 1940 the metropolis, consisting of Athens and its adjacent port of Piraeus, formed the largest conurbation in the Balkans, with 1,124,000 inhabitants: 15 per cent of the national population, a large proportion of whom had immigrated recently from villages.⁸ Altogether, 24 per cent of the national population lived in cities with over 50,000 people. The two biggest cities – Athens-Piraeus and Salonika – formed enclaves of western tastes and consumption habits, contrasting with the more conservative villages and market towns where most people lived.

There existed then a cultural division between city and country, and another between natives and refugees. But in general Greek society was distinguished by its relative homogeneity. It was closely knit by religion, language and national myths, and by the prevalence in town and country of small family businesses. Moreover it lacked the aristocratic and anti-clerical traditions, and the hereditary class divisions, that were widespread in western Europe. An important reason for social cohesion was the fluidity of social lines, of which one example was the varied background of industrialists.⁹

Greece also diverged from other Balkan countries in its political system, characterised from early in its modern history by vigorous parliamentary politics combined with a highly centralised administration. Under Ottoman rule, Greek notables consisting of landowners, merchants, bishops and military chiefs, wielded local power and were represented in consultative assemblies. The movement for national independence was suffused with western liberal ideas, which were expressed in a series of revolutionary assemblies and a flourishing newspaper press. Community leaders, who were joined by some of the wealthy and educated Greeks from Constantinople known as Phanariots, therefore regarded parliament based on a broad suffrage as a natural part of the new state, and consequently forced the autocratic King Otto to accept one in 1843-44.¹⁰ Thenceforth the great majority of men had the vote,¹¹ and parliamen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Editorial Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Civil War and Reconstruction, 1945–1950
• 3. Dependent Development: the Economy, 1950–1973
• 4. Uneven Prosperity: Society, 1950–1973
• 5. The Post-Civil War Regime, 1950–1967
• 6. Military Dictatorship, 1967–1974
• 7. Foreign Relations, 1950–1974
• 8. Democratic Transformation, 1974–1989
• 9. Restructuring the Economy, 1974–2000
• 10. Old Values and New Tensions: Society, 1974–2000
• 11. Converging with Western Europe: Politics, 1989–2000
• 12. Foreign Relations, 1974–2000
• 13. Whither Now?
• Guide to Further Reading
• Appendix 1. Changes of government and head of state
• Appendix 2. Results of parliamentary elections
• Index