The Eastern Question: The Last Phase: A Study in Greek-Turkish Diplomacy (review)

Harry J. Psomiades: The Eastern Question: The Last Phase: A Study in Greek-Turkish Diplomacy. New York: Pella Publishing, 2000. 139 pages. ISBN 0-918618-79-7. $15.

This concise and penetrating book, originally published in 1968, has been out of print for some years. It remains widely used, however, by scholars dealing with Greek- Turkish relations in the 1920s and, more broadly, with the settlement of the "Eastern Question" following World War I. Both are subjects of obvious relevance to the analysis of contemporary Balkan affairs. Its reissuance in paperback as the latest item in the Queens College Modern Greek Research Series is a welcome event in Mediterranean studies.

The book retains its original format, which focuses on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the events leading to it, but it has a new introduction by Van Coufoudakis, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Coufoudakis, who is well versed in the region's diplomatic history, rightly observes how clearly and succinctly Psomiades has laid out the impact of the watershed treaty on subsequent relations between Greece and Turkey. His introduction also updates and broadens the work with an overview of Greek-Turkish relations since World War II. Comparing and contrasting the post-Lausanne and post-1999 Greek-Turkish détentes, Coufoudakis reflects on the main issues that are likely to dominate the two countries' relations in the years to come. Picking up on Psomiades' observation that the interwar rapprochement was a détente between governments, not peoples, Coufoudakis emphasizes the enormity of the challenges that still impede Greek-Turkish coexistence.

The book is divided into ten short thematic chapters. The first explains the significant influence played on modern Greek-Turkish relations by three pre-existing conditions: imperial tradition (Byzantine Christian and Ottoman Islamic), religious affiliation, and emergent nationalism (both Greek and Turkish). Psomiades points out, for instance, that the experiences of empire gave modern Greece and Turkey their concepts of fluid borders and the foundations for their competing claims to much of the same territory, not to mention the same capital, Constantinople. He also points out that in return for tribute payments, Islam protected Orthodox Christians as a people of revealed scripture, which allowed Greeks to maintain their religious institutions under Islam and to enjoy a measure of self-governance. This pattern of toleration preserved Greek ethnicity through four centuries of Ottoman dominion and conferred intracommunal political authority on Orthodox clerics, conditions that eventually bolstered the rise of Greek nationalism.

The next three chapters deal in succession with the roles that the revival of Greek nationalism, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of Turkish nationalism played in shaping subsequent events. Psomiades points out that Greece's revolt from Ottoman control and the resulting 1830 settlement did not liberate the Greek people but merely established a tiny, feeble Greek kingdom. Animated, however, by initial success and inspired by Western notions of nationalism, Greeks pressed to expand the new kingdom beyond its settled borders to encompass the greater part of the Greek nation, which lay in such places as Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Crete, Thrace, the Aegean islands, and Asia Minor, all of which were still within Ottoman territory. This Great Idea (Megali Idea), the liberation and unification of all Hellenes, dominated Greek foreign policy for nearly one hundred years.

Psomiades then describes how, following World War I, Turkish resistance to the Great Idea formed around a superb nationalist leader, Mustafa Kemal, initially with Soviet support and later aided by various concessions from France and Italy. In August 1922, Kemal's troops defeated Greece's war-weary, overextended army in Anatolia and drove the Greeks back to Smyrna, where in September 1922 the Great Idea was annihilated in a horrific seaside holocaust. The resounding Turkish victories induced consideration of a completely new settlement of the Eastern Question, which was resolved at Lausanne...