Greece - Cold War

"Courtesy of "www.lib.msu. edu/sowards/balkan/lect22.htm"

The Grigoropoulos, Lieutenant L-161 aka USS LSM 45 served the Greek Nation (1958-1993) during the Cold War .

Beginning with the history of Greece, we find a revival of traditional political patterns after the war. Many post-1945 events might well have taken place with or without the backdrop of the global Western clash with Communism.

American leaders hoped and expected that Greek history in the Cold War years would follow a simple script like this: parliamentary democracy at home, economic development based on Marshall Plan aid, solidarity with NATO partners in foreign policy. Such an approach focussed too much on the distant enemy in Moscow and concerned itself too little with local and persistent Greek concerns. By ignoring old patterns of Greek political behavior, such a stance allowed them to become important even though such trends threatened to interfere with the preferred scenario.

Until 1949, it was easy for Greece's non-Communist political leaders to work together in the domestic political arena. Until the defeat of the Communist insurgents in the Greek Civil War of 1947-49, the King and the army shared a common enemy: the same Leftist elements against whom they had been fighting since their wartime confrontations with EAM-ELAS, or even earlier. Greek anti-Communist politics in the 1940s were easily reconciled with American interests in the region.

However, after the Communist threat waned, so too did unity of purpose. In domestic politics, longstanding tensions between republicans in the army and the royal family reemerged. This is a theme not explained easily by an analysis based in a simple bi-polar view of Cold War Balkan affairs. In foreign affairs, Greece had its most serious conflicts after 1949 not with its Communist neighbors, but with its nominal NATO ally, Turkey. Again, this was a trend easily explained by reference to history, but hard to reconcile with Cold War assumptions.

The united front with Turkey was one of the first casualties of the reemergence of pre-Cold War themes. To understand Greece's relations with Turkey, we have to spend a few moments looking at the island of Cyprus. Cyprus is not part of the Balkans, but its history has often followed parallel paths. The island was part of the Byzantine Empire, then fell under the control of the Franks, the Venetians and finally the Ottoman Turks. In 1878 it was annexed by Great Britain. In the 1950s, the island had a Greek population of 430,000, who made up the last concentrated body of Greeks living outside of Greece. The island also had a Turkish population of 95,000.

In 1954, Greece proposed the union ("enosis") of the island with the Greek state but the British refused to allow it. A guerilla group called EOKA (the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) then began a campaign of civil disobedience and political violence on the island in an effort to drive out the British. EOKA was led by George Grivas, a Cypriot-born former Greek army general identified with the anti-Communist forces in Greece during and after World War II. In 1955 a bomb exploded at the Turkish consulate in Salonika. This sparked anti-Greek riots in Istanbul and Izmir, and Turkey called for partitioning the island to safeguard the rights of the Turkish minority there. Instead ,Britain granted the island its independence in 1959.

An independent Cyprus was acceptable to Archbishop Makarios III, an Orthodox cleric who was the leader of the Greek community, but not to Grivas or to nationalists in Athens. In 1963, a crisis broke out over the proportion of Greeks and Turks in the Cypriot parliament, in the police and in the bureaucracy, and led to inter-ethnic violence. A United Nations peace-keeping force was inserted to forestall a Turkish invasion. Both Greece and Turkey resorted to military threats, but neither side was willing to engage in an actual war.

In the 1960s, tensions over Cyprus dove-tailed with Greek domestic political problems. Post-war politics had become a complicated three-way affair, in which George Papandreou's Center Union party balanced between the pro-Communist United Democratic Left and Konstantin Karamanlis' right-wing National Radical Union. When Papandreou and the center regime failed to pursue "enosis" with Cyprus, a group of middle-level Army officers (known as "the Colonels") seized power in a coup in April 1967. When the king attempted a counter-coup in December he was driven into exile by the junta.

The military regime of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos claimed to be inspired by anti-Communism, but three mainstays of traditional Greek politics were clearly more important: irredentism and the Megale Idea (this time aimed at Cyprus); anti-royalist sentiments among rising elements of society (in which we see the legacy of Venizelism); and intervention by the military in civilian politics (a theme since the 1909 coup).

The dictatorship of the colonels lasted until 1973 when the OPEC oil embargo led to an economic crisis. Papadopoulos responded to unrest among students and in the navy by proclaiming a republic, but was soon displaced himself by other officers. At the same time, the junta tried to shift the focus of popular discontent away from its own domestic situation by inciting international frictions over Cyprus. In July 1974, the Athens regime, EOKA and Greek officers acting inside the Cypriot military engineered a coup against Makarios, who was now President of Cyprus. The coup backfired: instead of enosis, the crisis led to a Turkish invasion of the island. Throughout the previous twenty years, the two sides had been too evenly matched for either to take such a risk, but at this time the Turks gauged Greek weakness and division accurately.

The Turkish invasion completely discredited the Athens military regime. The army repudiated the junta and civilian rule was restored. This did not lead to a restoration of the status quo on Cyprus, however. Following a de facto partition, the Turkish zone along the north coast constituted itself as a separate state. The "Turkish Federated State of Cyprus" (with 37% of the island's area and 18% of the population) remains a source of friction between Greece and Turkey.

The Greek political landscape after 1974 continued to move along paths unconnected to bi-polar Cold War patterns. Greek voters refused to return to political models based on the 1940s. A plebiscite rejected a restoration of the monarchy. In place of the old three-sided political party landscape, elections after 1974 revolved around the rise to power of PASOK, the "Panhellenic Socialist Movement" led by Andreas Papandreou (son of the long-time Liberal and Venizelist figure Georgios Papandreou).

Based in elements that had resisted the junta, PASOK combined socialist rhetoric and populist economic promises with an anti-Turkish nationalism. Because the United States failed to support Greece during the Cyprus affair, PASOK was anti-American as well. In the 1981 elections, PASOK became the largest Greek party and Papandreou became Prime Minister, a post he held until 1989. While PASOK did not follow through on threats to leave NATO, Greece did stop participating in NATO planning and there were frequent border clashes with Turkish forces. Papandreou also broke with the Western bloc by supporting General Wojciech Jaruzelski's military government in Poland (which repressed the Solidarity union in the early '80s) and in general sought international neutrality.

These examples show why it is hard to explain Greek politics in the Cold War era in terms of the Soviet-American confrontation. Traditional issues -- irredenta, the role of the monarchy, economic development -- remained important. At the same time, Greece's independent course is the best evidence of Greece's secure position among the nations of the "Free World."