Koliopoulos and Veremis, two well-known historians, have attempted to fill an important
gap in the current literature by providing an introduction to modern Greece. The
result, however, is an unsatisfying volume that tells the reader more about the
problems of scholarship in modern Greece than the challenges of Greece itself.
The paucity of serious literature on Greece has long been a concern for those
interested South-Eastern Europe. One cause is the lack of importance attached
to a country that for the last 20 years or so has successfully marginalized itself
in international politics. Another factor is the low standards prevalent in the
field of modern Greek studies, which are partially a result of political interference.
The offering by Koliopoulos and Veremis, caught as it is between scholarship and
propaganda, fits squarely into this weak literary framework. The aim of the book
is apologetic, to protect Greece from insinuations that it is not part of the
West by showing that the country has become thoroughly Western. The authors labor
to rebut perceived slights against Greece and the Orthodox countries of South-Eastern
Europe from scholars such as Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and the late
anthropologist and theorist of nationalism Ernest Gellner. The authors respond
to what they believe to be negative stereotypes with similar stereotypes of their
own, claiming that Orthodox Christianity deprecates individualism – a nonsense
for 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 their
own undoubted record of scholarship. Yet instead of writing a narrative history,
they have chosen to organize their material into a series of thematic chapters
and capsules. The result is immensely uneven. The military, whose interventions
from 1843 to 1974 have played a critical role in Greek politics, receives a feeble
four pages. Yet over 30 pages are devoted to the early debates over the nature
of the Greek state – solid material that is largely of interest to devotees
of the Greek war of independence in the 19th century.
The Great Idea, the irredentist aspiration to unite all Greek-inhabited territory
in one state, is covered in a few lines. The importance of the Great Idea cannot
be understated, even if it was never a formal policy and was never consistently
applied. Some of the greatest disasters of modern Greek history, the defeat by
Turkey in Asia Minor in 1922, when Greek forces tried and failed to carve out
a greater Greece following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the partition
of Cyprus in 1974, were direct results of the nationalist impulse of the Great
Idea.
The injudicious choices the authors make between summarizing and going into detail
have curious results. They sometimes assume a considerable level of knowledge
of Greece. They refer to the “Chams,” for instance, without explaining
that they were Muslims who spoke a dialect of Albanian and were expelled en masse
in 1945. At other times, they opt for almost comic platitudes. The peasantry,
they write, “left few traces of their existence” – surely a
defining 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 state
that 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 and
the authors’ acknowledgment of the bloated state sector.
There is a tendency to choose ethnic pride over analysis. There is no proper analysis
of Greek policy toward the former Yugoslavia, which went from financing Milosevic
to helping to bring him down and encouraging his delivery to the War Crimes Tribunal
in 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 union
with Greece in a Church-organized referendum In 1950, when in fact there was no
vote, just a mass petition. The capsule on the euro was actually written by the
Greek Foreign Ministry, hardly a center of independent scholarship. The section
on Greek Jews, recycled from a Greek Foreign Ministry volume, reßects the patronizing
and ignorant official stance toward this much-maligned minority.
The authors conclude that modern Greece has been a qualified success. Sadly, the
same cannot be said of their book.
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