by John Brady Kiesling, Guest Contributor
Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967, by Dr. Ioannis D. Stefanidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 300 pages, €87)
In early February 2008, I attended a lecture in Greek at the Athens Technical Chamber on the “Eleftherna Mechanism,” a piece of ancient technology recently discovered in Crete. For an hour, the lecturer wielded PowerPoint slides and CAT scans to keep us on the edge of our seats. Ultimately, the object of his research proved to be a rusty padlock on a chain – a padlock from AD 364 to be sure, and quite handsome in its way. After hearty applause, a well-dressed man stood up to hail this important scientific contribution “not just to Greece but to all mankind.” The next asked timidly whether this was indeed a Greek padlock and not a Roman one.
Early in Stirring the Greek Nation, Professor Ioannis Stefanidis quotes Maurice Barré writing in 1906 about his visit to Greece, “I have never seen anyone other than four-year old children … admire themselves with such naiveté and, I must add, sincerity, as this nation does” (p. 12). But Barré, a French nationalist himself, ought to have known better. National narcissism is universal. Greeks differ from French or Americans only in their craving for regular public reassurance that they deserve the Periclean pinnacle to which they cling.
Stefanidis identifies darker implications to this craving. Attempts to play an imperial game beyond its resources led Greece to military defeat in 1897 and to catastrophe in 1922. Unchastened, many Greeks felt little gratitude when the Paris peace conference of 1947 handed over the Dodecanese islands. Greeks’ moral and cultural superiority over their neighbors, combined with their sufferings in World War II, entitled Greece to much more: all of Cyprus, plus territory in Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslav Macedonia, European Turkey, and perhaps even Libya.
The United States, however, failed to recognize Greece’s entitlement. With the Cold War looming on the horizon, the U.S. government wanted to avoid the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty. There would be no further rectification of Greek borders. That was a disappointment. But the U.S. government added insult to injury, treating Greece and Turkey, publicly as well as privately, as equally valued allies or (once the two quarreled over Cyprus in 1955) as equally blameworthy children. For proud Greek nationalists, this even-handedness was betrayal.
Stirring the Greek Nation reminds us that Greek anti-Americanism became intense and distinctive as early as the mid-1950s. Stefanidis’s insight lies in seeing its roots in Greek domestic political competition. Voters rewarded Greek politicians for the ferocity of their Cyprus rhetoric. In 1964, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou promised enosis to the cheering crowds, the union of Cyprus with Greece. He claimed enosis would make Cyprus “the springboard of Hellenism,” destined “to continue the march of Alexander the Great to the East by peaceful means” (p. 150).
Unlike President Bush in 2003, the Greek government was in no position to spread mayhem among actual Middle-Easterners with such megalomania. Instead politicians blamed the United States for standing between Greeks and their Megali Idea (“Great Idea”). In 1959, General Grivas’s rightist followers gathered up all the hula hoops they could find and destroyed them in the streets to protest the lack of U.S. support for enosis.
The Cyprus issue was a godsend to the Greek left as well. Leftist politicians could not afford to alienate moderate voters by reminding them of America’s real crime – intervening in 1947 to help their conservative rivals thwart a Stalinist paradise in Greece. But fighting for “decolonization” of Cyprus, a cause blessed by Moscow, helped the left overcome the stigma of having allegedly conspired with the “eternal Slav enemies of Greece” during the civil war. From 1954 on, leftist students routinely smashed the windows of the U.S. libraries in Athens and Thessaloniki as punishment for U.S. reluctance to oust the British from Cyprus.
Anti-Americanism was and remains an affordable price for U.S. administrations to pay for staving off a catastrophic Greek-Turkish war. But already in 1950, the Office of Research of the U.S. Information Agency was concerned enough about America’s tarnished image to sponsor the first scientific public opinion polling in Greece. Stefanidis has mined USIA’s once-confidential data to support his analysis of when and why Greek public opinion turned so sharply and unpleasantly against the ally that had rescued it.
This survey data is by no means entirely negative. Greeks were more neutralist than other Europeans in 1957, but they favored U.S. films, music, higher education, and even politicians over local versions. Their key concern, in the 1960s as now, was the struggling economy. Only a handful of ordinary Greeks, sometimes only one percent, saw Cyprus as their chief concern. In March 1964 the United States was the “best friend” of Greece, beating the USSR 28% to 15%. Six months later, the Soviet Union was winning 22% to 16%. By the middle of 1965 the United States was the best friend again by a crushing margin, 49% to 8%. In each case, headlines from Cyprus played a decisive role in shaping volatile public perceptions.
Stefanidis warns us that these polls should be treated carefully. They were flawed by low literacy levels and high levels of “don’t knows” and “no opinions.” With retribution still a serious risk for Greek leftists until the socialist election victory in 1981, at least a third of the population did not care to express its true opinions to strangers with a clipboard. Thus, the bare summary results of the 45 data tables printed by Stefanidis in chapter 10 would be more convincing if backed by more analysis. Still, he is almost certainly right in the conclusions he draws for the pre-Junta period.
Greeks are more self-confident in 2008. Politicians can more plausibly blame the EU for any inability to deliver on ill-chosen promises. When they pander to voters with grandiose language about Greece’s civilizing role in the Balkans, this is a much less dangerous fantasy than its predecessors. And because the flip side of a heightened sense of national destiny is a heightened sense of national responsibility, such patriotism is a sentiment we cannot afford to mock.
With this new book, Stefanidis has made an important contribution to the study of anti-Americanism in Greece. His fine ear for quotations sweetens the pill of the high price tag (€87). Reissued in Greek in a more affordable format, slightly reorganized to reduce repetitive material, Stirring the Greek Nation will be a revolutionary contribution to young Greeks’ understanding of America’s role as a tool, often an unwitting one, in their manipulation by their own politicians.
U.S. diplomats should also study Stirring the Greek Nation carefully. Greece and the world have changed, but the opinion polls have not. Greeks remain the most anti-U.S. population in Europe.
Some of their reasons are rational. For example, Stefanidis illustrates how the presence of the U.S. military bases in Greece became massively more controversial with ordinary Greeks in 1954 because of American insistence on immunity from Greek criminal jurisdiction for U.S. service members. Each bar brawl outside a U.S. base became an opportunity for the opposition to attack the Greek government for its servility to Washington. Fifty years later, blanket legal immunity for U.S. forces remains an expensive mirage, one the Pentagon continues to pursue with counterproductive ferocity. Armed with a better grasp of history, American diplomats can argue more persuasively back in Washington for policies that undercut the ability of ordinary Greeks to cherish a corroded and obsolete anti-Americanism with the same naïve admiration they bestowed on the “Eleftherna Mechanism.”
John Brady Kiesling is a former U.S. diplomat and author of Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac Books, 2006).
A slightly shorter version of this review first appeared in the Athens News of February 29, 2008, and is reposted with the gracious permission of the Athens News.