Greek-Turkish Relations Since 1955

Tozun Bahcheli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367160739
• eBook ISBN: 9780429712258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bahcheli analyzes the dispute over Cyprus from its emergence in the 1950s to the coup against President Makarios which brought Greece and Turkey to war in 1974. He considers the Cyprus issue within the narrow context of Greek-Turkish relations, and the broad context of international relations

1 Burying the Hatchet: and Greek-Turkish Détente to 1950

DOI:10.4324/9780429040726-2

The troubled relations of Greece and Turkey in recent decades are the legacy of their historical conflicts dating from Byzantine and Ottoman times. Some writers trace the historical rivalry of Greeks and Turks as far back as 1071 when Selçuk Sultan Alparslan defeated Byzantine Emperor Diogenes' soldiers in the battle of Malazgirt, thus starting the Turkish conquest of Asia Minor. However, it was the Ottoman Turks' capture of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453, which ushered in four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule over Greeks, that is more commonly cited as an historical turning point

The Making of Modern Greece

While the Turkish victory made Greeks the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire, they enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy in the prerogatives and obligations of the millet system. This system was a form of communal self-government which helped the Ottoman rulers to govern and to retain the loyalty of their subjects in a multi-ethnic, non-national state.

In this context, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Istanbul was granted special privileges and served both as the spiritual and temporal ruler of the empire's Greek Orthodox subjects. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Patriarch exercised his authority over 13,000,000 Christians, who comprised one-quarter of all the Ottoman Empire's subjects.¹ In his duties, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church was assisted by many educated and wealthy Greeks who, in many instances, also attained positions of high office in the Ottoman bureaucracy as ambassadors and administrators. Some among this administrative aristocracy, known as the Phanariots, rose to the highest ranks of Ottoman government to become Dragoman (chief interpreter) or Vezir (chief minister). According to Kitsikis, a Greek historian of the Ottoman Empire, the millet system of self-rule elevated Greeks to the status of "partners" of the Ottoman Empire.²

After the French Revolution, however, the religious and cultural autonomy exercised by the individual millets created the basis of separatist ethnonationalism. Though the Greeks enjoyed cultural and civil autonomy comparable to other ethnic communities in the empire, this did little to assuage their sense of subjugation and alienation, especially after the advent of nationalism in Ottoman lands. Indeed, these very distinctions of status promoted sensibilities of separateness and victimization. The Greeks became the first of the Ottoman Empire's European peoples to achieve national independence.

With considerable external help, the Greeks succeeded in establishing an independent state in 1830 after an eight-year struggle. However, the settlement that defined the boundaries of the new state left most Greeks still living under Ottoman rule. Consequently, from the earliest days of independence, Greek nationalists dreamt of the eventual liberation of the Greeks who remained under the Ottomans. But Greek interests were not confined to rescuing their kith and kin. Far more exciting was the prospect of recreating the Byzantine Empire under Greek sovereignty. These two ambitions constituted the Megali Idea (Great Idea). In his perceptive analysis, Michael L. Smith described Greece's national aspiration in these terms:

The Great Idea... in the mid-nineteenth century came to contain at least three different strands. Strictly interpreted, it was the romantic dream of revival of the Byzantine-Greek Empire centred on Constantinople. Less strictly it was the aspiration for Greek cultural and economic dominance within the Ottoman Empire, leading to its gradual subversion from within by a natural process which need not entail a violent clash between the rival Greek and Turkish nations. Thirdly, the Idea could be interpreted in terms of the modem nation state, as the progressive redemption of the Greek irredenta by their incorporation in the Greek kingdom, which entailed a head-on clash with the Ottoman Empire. Though all these conceptions survived into the twentieth century, it was the third which prevailed.³

In spite of the Ottoman Empire's declining fortunes during the nineteenth century, a process that had started more than a century earlier, the resources and armies of the small Greek state were hardly a match for those of the Ottoman government. This is why, despite periodic agitation by Greek nationalists in Thessaly and Crete aimed at severing Ottoman rule, Greece did not make war against the Turks for several decades. Notwithstanding their desire to expand, the realities of power during the nineteenth century obliged the leaders of Greece to accept piecemeal additions to the territories under their control. However, the ambitions of the Great Powers to diminish Ottoman power, and the agitation of neighbouring Balkan nationalities for independence, created other possibilities.

The first addition of territory to the Greek state occurred not by taking up arms against the Turks but by persuading Britain to cede the Ionian islands in 1864. The next addition of territory occurred in 1881 when Greece was rewarded for her neutrality during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The Great Powers gave her much of fertile Thessaly and the district of Arta in Epirus.

Of the remaining "unredeemed" territories with Greek majorities, Crete was almost regularly in turmoil, with the majority of its population aspiring to join Greece. The Greek government helped die Cretans with arms and volunteers, and in 1897 sought to force the Sultan's hand by declaring war. This first major war by the Greek state against the Ottomans ended in total victory for the Sultan's forces. But the Great Powers intervened to spare Greece any loss of territory; indeed, Greece became a beneficiary so far as Crete was concerned because the Powers forced the Ottoman government to give the island an autonomous status, with Prince George of the Greek royal family as its governor.

Greece had to wait for several more years before exercising sovereignty over Crete. However, the prospects for the Megali Idea were enhanced with the rise to power of Eleftherios Venizelos, a gifted politician from Crete. After assuming power in 1910, Venizelos set out in earnest to realize the vision of creating a Greater Greece. He forged an alliance with neighbouring Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro as a prelude to joint military action against the Ottoman Turks in 1912. The timing of the war coincided with the weakening of the Turks during the 1911-1912 war with Italy over Libya, and the Albanian revolt The defeat of the Turkish forces in what has been called the first Balkan War paved the way for Greece to extend her control over substantial territories, namely southern Macedonia (which contained the coveted port city of Salonika), southern Epirus, and virtually all of the Aegean islands.

According to Stephens, Turkish resentment against Greek territorial gains

was [the] strongest over Greece's formal annexation of Crete and occupation of the Aegean islands, especially Chios and Mitylene. These two large islands lie only a few miles off the coast of Western Anatolia and cover the approaches to the port of Smyrna (Izmir). The Turks feared they might be used as a base to attack Asia Minor as indeed happened six years later.⁴

For the Turks, the humiliation felt over the territorial losses to the Greeks was compounded by the problem of waves of Muslim-Turkish refugees from the captured territories who poured into Istanbul and the surrounding area. It is worth noting that the dislocation and forced movement of entire communities of Turks and Greeks started well before the better-known larger exodus that occurred during and after the Greek invasion of Anatolia and the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1922). According to figures of the Ottoman Ministry of Refugees, as cited by Arnold Toynbee, 297,918 Muslims became refugees as a result of the loss of Turkish territories during the Balkan Wars⁵; of these refugees, 122,655 came from the territories captured by Greece. This upheaval prompted the Turkish authorities to persecute and expel several Greek communities in western Anatolia.⁶ According to Stephens "some 30,000 Greeks were deported or driven from their homes on the coasts of Thrace and Anatolia. The Turkish authorities claimed that their jobs and homes were needed for the Moslem refugees who were pouring from Macedonia."⁷

Even before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and the accompanying refugee issues, the forces of change in the Ottoman Empire brought about by the Young Turk Revolution accentuated Greek-Turkish differences and increased animosities. "The Young Turk revolution by its introduction of parliament and constitution awoke feelings and hopes among the Christians — visions of becoming 'co-governors' of the Empire, in Ion Dragoumis's phrase — which were soon dangerously frustrated by the Young Turks' policy of 'Ottomanization' of the minorities."⁸

As the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire waned at the dawn of the First World War, Greece appeared resurgent and the fulfillment of the Megali Idea looked to be within its grasp. Anatolian Greeks identified with the grand aspiration of their brethren in Greece to control western Anatolia. Consequently, they were viewed as a disloyal element by the Turks who believed that they would act as a "fifth column" for Greece—as indeed they did during the Greek invasion of 1919-1922.

It is worth noting that Greeks were the majority in all the territories that Greece incorporated during the period of its expansion from the beginning of Greek independence to the conclusion of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). But in the Anatolian territories and Istanbul which the Greek nationalists coveted, the Greeks were a minority. According to the Ottoman census of 1911-1912 as presented by Justin McCarthy, there were 1,254,333 Greeks in Anatolia as compared with over 14,000,000 Muslims, the great majority of whom were Turks.⁹ Even in areas of their greatest concentration in Anatolia, Greeks were heavily outnumbered by Turks and others. According to the Ottoman census figures for 1895 provided by Stanford Shaw, for example, there were 161,867 Greeks in Istanbul which represented 18 percent of die population; according to the same source, there were 229,598 Greeks in Aydin province (15.5 percent) and 288,968 in Edirne (29.3 percent).¹⁰

These demographic realities were downplayed by the Greek leaders who were seized by the mission of reviving Hellenism in Asia Minor. It is worth recalling that its victories during the Balkan Wars had enabled Greece to double its territory to 550,000 square miles, and to increase its population from 2,600,000 to 4,363,000. Referring to the Greek gains, Kenneth Young stated that "all of these were to stimulate future appetites, just as the comparatively easy regaining of Macedonia and Epirus encouraged elated expectations of a return to western Anatolia and Constantinople itself."¹¹

Venizelos, the architect of the Balkan victories, "was gripped by a false but seductive determinist theory of the rising power of Greece and the declining power of Turkey, a process which must end with the total dissolution of the Ottoman state."¹² He hoped to dislodge the Turks from western Anatolia and Istanbul by striking them at a time of weakness, as he had done in 1912, and was confident that he could secure the help of the European powers in realizing his mission. Greece's opportunity arrived in 1914, when the Young Turk Government committed the Ottoman Empire to war on Germany's side. With the exception of a few victories such as at Gallipoli where the Turks were led by their future leader Mustafa Kemal (later named Atatürk), Turkish armies were forced to re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of Maps Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Introduction
• 1. Burying the Hatchet: The Lausanne Settlement and Greek-Turkish Détente to 1950
• 2. Political Dynamics in Divided Cyprus and Greek-Turkish Involvement Before Independence
• 3. Reacting to Cyprus Developments: Short-lived Communal Partnership, Civil Strife, and Further Mainland Involvement
• 4. 1974 and After: New Realities for Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey
• 5. The Aegean Dispute and Additional Strains in Greek-Turkish Relations
• 6. Irritants over the Treatment of Minorities
• 7. Prospects
• Appendixes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index