Stirring the Greek Nation

Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945–1967

Ioannis Stefanidis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754660590
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351897884
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This work examines the background to Greek nationalist politics and its effects on public opinion towards international events and territorial claims, from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of constitutional rule in 1967. It explains how intermittent public mobilisation on various foreign policy issues created a political culture that combined elements of nationalism, religion, race and stereotypes about the national Self and the Other. The book challenges widely-held assumptions that Greek irredentism was all but dead and buried in the aftermath of the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922, and that anti-Americanism was the product of US support for the Colonels' regime of 1967-74 and its condoning of the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus. It begins with an examination of the revival of irredentism in connection with Greek national claims after 1945 and the two campaigns for the union of Cyprus with Greece during the 1950s and 1960s. The second part of the study reveals anti-Americanism to be largely the result of failed post-war Greek territorial ambitions - particularly the frustration of the Enosis claim - rather than the actual intervention of the United States in Greek affairs. Drawing on a huge variety of sources including the Greek press, records of the Greek Parliament, the US and British National Archives, as well the archives of numerous individuals, this book provides a fascinating account of Greek political culture and national self image at a crucial time in the country's political development.

Chapter 1

Greek Foreign Policy: The Domestic Nexus

Greek Political Culture after World War II

An imperilled nation

Following a decade of war, occupation, civil strife and, as will be seen, frustrated irredentist aspirations, the Greeks were left to face the grim reality of a war-ravaged homeland. It was a time when super-power antagonism and the Herculean tasks of reconstruction raised doubts regarding the ability of the nation-state to ensure the security and livelihood of its citizens single-handedly. At that point, the Greek public was treated to generous amounts of a rather defensive nationalist discourse that stressed threats old and new as well as Greece’s civilizing mission and a return to the roots, a certain version of the Orthodox tradition in particular.

Greece’s problems with her northern neighbours during the immediate post-war period, including the latter’s assistance to the communist bid for power as well as the vicissitudes of the Northern Epirus and the Macedonian questions, added to the inter-war legacy of insecurity. Filippos Dragoumis (1890–1980), former deputy minister for Foreign Affairs, was not alone in perceiving the Slavic threat in terms of an inexorable geopolitical reality. ‘Slavic imperialism’, he told a gathering of pre-war prime ministers and foreign ministers in August 1945, had always sought to gain access to the Mediterranean ‘through the Aegean Sea and over the dead body of Greece’.¹ Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1948, the Central Committee for Hellenic Rights, an irredentist organization, claimed that ‘having settled our ancestral lands, foreign peoples, newcomers, whom our Fatherland has benefited in various ways’, were now scheming to detach more national soil.² Professor Dimitrios Chondros (1882–1962), a physicist and member of various irredentist groups, combined the sense of threat with a more forward looking strategy. His generation, he wrote in an irredentist journal, was raised ‘in the climate of the bitter struggles of our Race, when Hellenism, particularly in Macedonia, was fighting the life-and-death struggle against the Slavic cataclysm which threatened to engulf us’. The Greeks, he concluded, should fight until their ancestral lands were free again, notwithstanding the fact that in some parts ‘the crimes of the Slavs and the criminal tolerance of the powers have nearly eliminated the rightful owners’.³

The so-called ‘threat from the north’ remained the central axiom of Greek national security policies for nearly three decades after the end of the Civil War. Suitably adjusted to the context of the Cold War, it could serve the quest for collective security, economic and military assistance and, ultimately, integration into the West.⁴ As Minister for Foreign Affairs Evangelos Averoff (1910–1990) told a group of American officers in 1958, the country was still engaged in ‘its age-old effort to hold back the Slav [sic] tide’. Therefore, he concluded, it needed all the support it could get from its Western allies.⁵ Prime Minister Karamanlis pronounced the outcome of the Civil War ‘one of the great landmarks of history’, since it had been the privileged fate of the Greeks always to defend both their own existence and ‘the highest ideals of all mankind’.⁶ Speaking from the opposition ranks in parliament, Averoff contended that Greek foreign policy stemmed from the ‘immutable geopolitical factor’ of her position at one of the most critical crossroads in human history. ‘There had never been an ill wind’, he waxed lyrical, that has not blown to the direction of Greece.⁷ Another Greek authority on defence and diplomacy averred that Greece badly needed allies given her extensive and vulnerable land borders and ‘the continuous geopolitical pressure of Slavism to the South’.⁸ Even liberal intellectuals, such as Theotokas, saw Greece threatened by a Slavic idée fixe that was constantly compelling her northern neighbours to seek an outlet to the warm Aegean waters and dislodge Hellenism from its outlying territories in Macedonia and Thrace.⁹

Some consolation could be drawn from the much-vaunted assumption that, following the population transfers of the first half of the twentieth century, Greece had virtually become an ethnically homogeneous state. However, the enemy from within threatened to offset the benefits of homogeneity. The victors of the Civil War systematically conflated the external with the internal threat: that is, the old Slavic peril with the more recent one of Communism.¹⁰ In December 1947, when the Communists set up a ‘provisional government’, their party (KKE) and its affiliated organizations were officially proscribed and communist activity was penalized. Henceforth, the Slavic-communist threat would not simply serve to contain leftist influence at home. In a Hobbesian sense, it was evoked as a complementary source of legitimacy for the victors of the Civil War. External and internal security were intertwined, Karamanlis repeatedly claimed during his premiership, for ‘international Communism’ sought to subdue democracies from within. In the case of Greece, the threat was even greater, since Communism constituted a ‘racial danger to the extent that it becomes the agent of the well-known expansionist designs against Hellenism’.¹¹

Even after the outbreak of the Cyprus question and the signs of détente in East– West relations, the ‘threat from the north’ and its domestic corollary, anti-Communism, remained the staple of official discourse. As such, it uneasily coexisted with the awkward dilemmas which the pursuit of irredentist objectives raised with regard to Greece’s relations with her Western partners. Yet the remaining alternatives, that is, neutrality in a hostile environment or adherence to the Slav-dominated communist bloc, were ruled out as suicidal.

‘Ethnikophrosyni’

In this context, the state championed an updated version of the pre-war ideological orthodoxy, ethnikophrosyni (national way of thinking or loyalty to the nation).¹² It had already emerged as a platform for rallying the heterogeneous opposition to the communist-led political and social bloc of the National Liberation Front (EAM) during the enemy occupation and its bitter aftermath. A fairly loose concept, ethnikophrosyni preached attachment to ‘national ideals’, including the post-war irredentist claims, and permanent vigilance against the internal enemy, Communism. The sense of mortal danger that the political and social elites experienced during the Civil War apparently led many moderate politicians as well as their right-wing rivals to endorse it.¹³

This mix of ideas offered little in terms of a social message, other than the need for cross-class solidarity. In January 1945, only days after the quelling of the Communist revolt in Athens by British troops, Professor Chondros articulated the new ideological divide. Addressing a faculty meeting at Athens University, Chondros, who had been taken hostage by the communist militia during the fighting and escaped, spoke of a clash between two radically opposed ideologies. According to the first, presumably ‘patriotic’ ideology, ‘the concept of Nation and Fatherland [was] fundamental to the evolution and progress of human societies’, while the goals of social and international justice could be achieved peacefully, through ‘liberal institutions’ and respect for the individual. The other, ‘overtly or covertly’ unpatriotic ideology recognized ‘only social classes’ in a state of endless struggle against each other and inspired organized minorities to impose the ‘worst kind of slavery’ upon friend and foe alike. Chondros denounced the Communists and their ‘fellow-travellers’ as ‘anti-national miasmata’, a standard term in the rhetoric of ethnikophrosyni. The academics adopted a resolution acknowledging ‘social reform’ as a worthy task provided that it conformed with ‘the ancestral Hellenic and Christian solidarity and the Hellenic democratic ideals’.¹⁴

Ethnikophrosyni and its flip side, anti-Communism, did not merely reflect the domestic legacy of the inter-war and Civil War years. They borrowed from the experience of other countries, the United States in particular, where the ‘red scare’ undermined several tenets of liberal democracy.¹⁵ Ethnikophrosyni was institutionalized in the security apparatus established during the Civil War. It served as a measure of loyalty to national integrity and the ‘prevailing social order’, which helped to divide the Greek citizens into ethnikophrones and ‘miasmata’. As a yardstick of political participation, ethnikophrosyni was instrumental in consigning the Left beyond the pale of mainstream politics until the imposition of military rule in 1967.¹⁶ It also helped to prolong the political and ideological rift of the Civil War until after 1974.¹⁷

The state and its institutions systematically disseminated the new national discourse. ‘Slavic Communism’, affirmed a textbook for the Sixth Grade of elementary education, had been sown by ‘agents of the ancestral enemies of the Race’ in order to break up national unity.¹⁸ On the tenth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Prime Minister Karamanlis described the conflict as part of a continuous struggle for ‘racial and national existence’. Associating it with all the perils that Greece had faced since independence, he denounced Communism as ‘the greatest impediment to the progress of the nation as a whole and the most ruthless enemy of each and every class, the farmers and the workers in particular’.¹⁹ Every opportunity was taken to warn the good unsuspecting Greek that, unless one remained constantly vigilant, he or she could be contaminated and rendered ‘an enemy of the Fatherland’. As much was stated in the royal message to the Nation on New Year’s Eve in 1966, which condemned Communism as ‘a miasma born outside Greece, inspired and motivated from abroad’.²⁰

Some proponents of ethnikophrosyni seemed to believe that the cure for the ‘red virus’ lay in self-awareness which they offered to improve. Those who had been led astray by communist blandishments could be induced to rediscover their nationalist core, because, as King Paul (1900–1964) confidently asserted, ‘the average Greek communist’ was actually more of a nationalist.²¹ The publisher of the best-selling Ilios encyclopaedia partly attributed the growth of anti-national creeds, such as Communism, to ‘the lack of a more profound national consciousness among certain lower strata’. This deficit, exacerbated by ‘the intellectual and moral anarchy’ of the age, could be redressed if all Greeks were properly indoctrinated.²² Similar views were to an extent behind the Makronissos experiment. For more than six years, thousands of politically suspect conscripts were subjected to a ‘national re-education’ program in conditions of strict confinement on a barren island off the coast of Attica. According to Konstantinos Tsatsos (1899–1987), a professor of philosophy with a successful career in politics, the Makr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Greek Foreign Policy: The Domestic Nexus
• 2 The Post-War Irredentist Revival
• 3 The First Cyprus Campaign
• 4 The Political Culture of Enosis
• 5 The Second Cyprus Campaign
• 6 The Cyprus Question and the Origins of Anti-Americanism
• 7 The Growth of Anti-Americanism
• 8 Discontent and the Impact of the Second Cyprus Crisis
• 9 (National) Pride and Prejudice
• 10 Surveys
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Index