Studies on Modern Greek Society and Politics (review)

George Kourvetaris, Studies on Modern Greek Society and Politics. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press. 1999. Pp. xii + 424, plus 43 tables, figures, and illlustrations.

This book is a collection of sixteen essays, of which the overwhelming majority consist of previously published articles. The articles span a period of over thirty years and focus primarily on military-political relations. This focus is not surprising because the author is founder and editor of the Journal of Political and Military Sociology. However, the topics addressed in the book's chapters go beyond military sociology and include the role of political elites and party organizations, electoral voting preferences, political clientelism, Greek attitudes toward the EU, and Greece's international relations, including the Greek-Turkish dispute. Hence, the essays touch on most of the important social and political issues that have preoccupied post-1945 Greece.

In his prologue, the author states that one of the key factors that motivated him to revise and publish the articles in book format is "the realization that, after an article has been published, it is forgotten or ignored by the scholarly community" (v). His hope is that by collecting the essays into a single volume the work can be salvaged and serve future generations of scholars. It is therefore appropriate to assess the volume from this point of view. Certainly, although the author has attempted to revise the individual chapters, they still bear the mark of their date of publication. This is most explicit in the bibliographical sections of the individual chapters, as well as in the social scientific paradigms used for the interpretation of empirical data.

The fact that some of these essays were published a number of years ago also affects the author's analyses in certain chapters. For example, in his discussion of civil-military relations in the nineteenth century, the author makes only limited use of the paradigm developed in John Koliopoulos's brilliant book, Brigands With a Cause (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). While Kourvetaris views civil-military relations in terms of the military's steps toward professionalization, Koliopoulos develops a paradigm that captures the symbiotic relationship between banditry and military developments. In contrast to the historical dimension of civil-military relations, it is the contemporary dimension of these relations that is the author's strong suit.

In this regard, it is necessary to keep in mind that, although contemporary Greece is now deeply involved in the process of European integration, the country's turbulent post-1945 history indicates that Greece's road to democracy was a rocky one. The preoccupation with the role, social profile, and cloud hanging over the officer corps was particularly understandable for a whole generation of researchers who were confronted with the post-1945 authoritarian Greek regime as well as the military dictatorship (1967-1974). In fact, six of the sixteen chapters in the volume deal with different aspects of the Greek military. They analyze civil-military relations in modern Greece from the Greek War of Independence to the 1976-74 Junta. A second major theme running through the essays is Greek attitudes toward the post-1974 democracy, and more specifically, the "vices" of Greek democracy, ranging from clientelism to populism, class preferences toward political parties, and so forth. At least six chapters address different aspects of the process of democratization in post-1974 Greece.

An important feature of most chapters in Kourvetaris's book is the use of social science methodology in studying and analyzing social relationships. The use of concrete data for studying modern Greek society is a phenomenon without deep roots in modern Greece. Sociology was only belatedly institutionalized in Greece and, to this day, the tradition of sociological research remains relatively underdeveloped. Hence, the use of social science methodology to shed light on modern Greek society and politics is particularly valuable. The author should be commended for undertaking projects involving quantitative and qualitative analyses of data. It is...