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European Affairs
Book Reviews
A Weak Apology for Modern Greece
Greece: The Modern Sequel From 1831 to the Present
By John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis
Reviewed by Andrew Apostolou
Koliopoulos and Veremis, two well-known historians, have attempted to fill an importantgap in the current literature by providing an introduction to modern Greece. Theresult, however, is an unsatisfying volume that tells the reader more about theproblems of scholarship in modern Greece than the challenges of Greece itself.
The paucity of serious literature on Greece has long been a concern for thoseinterested South-Eastern Europe. One cause is the lack of importance attachedto a country that for the last 20 years or so has successfully marginalized itselfin international politics. Another factor is the low standards prevalent in thefield of modern Greek studies, which are partially a result of political interference.
The offering by Koliopoulos and Veremis, caught as it is between scholarship andpropaganda, fits squarely into this weak literary framework. The aim of the bookis apologetic, to protect Greece from insinuations that it is not part of theWest by showing that the country has become thoroughly Western. The authors laborto rebut perceived slights against Greece and the Orthodox countries of South-EasternEurope from scholars such as Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and the lateanthropologist and theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner. The authors respondto what they believe to be negative stereotypes with similar stereotypes of theirown, claiming that Orthodox Christianity deprecates individualism – a nonsensefor any religion in which individual actions and beliefs provide the key to salvation.
To put the best possible face on modern Greece, the authors try to rely on theirown undoubted record of scholarship. Yet instead of writing a narrative history,they have chosen to organize their material into a series of thematic chaptersand capsules. The result is immensely uneven. The military, whose interventionsfrom 1843 to 1974 have played a critical role in Greek politics, receives a feeblefour pages. Yet over 30 pages are devoted to the early debates over the natureof the Greek state – solid material that is largely of interest to devoteesof the Greek war of independence in the 19th century.
The Great Idea, the irredentist aspiration to unite all Greek-inhabited territoryin one state, is covered in a few lines. The importance of the Great Idea cannotbe understated, even if it was never a formal policy and was never consistentlyapplied. Some of the greatest disasters of modern Greek history, the defeat byTurkey in Asia Minor in 1922, when Greek forces tried and failed to carve outa greater Greece following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the partitionof Cyprus in 1974, were direct results of the nationalist impulse of the GreatIdea.
The injudicious choices the authors make between summarizing and going into detailhave curious results. They sometimes assume a considerable level of knowledgeof Greece. They refer to the “Chams,” for instance, without explainingthat they were Muslims who spoke a dialect of Albanian and were expelled en massein 1945. At other times, they opt for almost comic platitudes. The peasantry,they write, “left few traces of their existence” – surely adefining feature of peasants everywhere. Equally, the reader learns that people“have been moving in and out of Greece since the beginning of recorded time”– hardly a meaningful insight into migration. The authors bizarrely statethat the most stable aspects of Greek society are the family and market forces,a claim that is at odds with the upheavals and divisions of Greek history andthe authors’ acknowledgment of the bloated state sector.
There is a tendency to choose ethnic pride over analysis. There is no proper analysisof Greek policy toward the former Yugoslavia, which went from financing Milosevicto helping to bring him down and encouraging his delivery to the War Crimes Tribunalin The Hague. Too often nationalist assumptions are repeated without question– for example, the book says that Macedonian irredentism against Greece“is impossible to refute.”
The authors repeat the claim that 96 percent of Greek Cypriots voted for unionwith Greece in a Church-organized referendum In 1950, when in fact there was novote, just a mass petition. The capsule on the euro was actually written by theGreek Foreign Ministry, hardly a center of independent scholarship. The sectionon Greek Jews, recycled from a Greek Foreign Ministry volume, reflects the patronizingand ignorant official stance toward this much-maligned minority.
The authors conclude that modern Greece has been a qualified success. Sadly, thesame cannot be said of their book.