Greece's Struggle to Escape the Past: A View from Inside

No country in southeastern Europe has dominated the front pages of the news this year more than Greece, and these days the world reads Greek news on the business pages. As Greece struggles to find a clear path from its financial crisis, its main interlocutors are the European Union, its European partners, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This is a far cry from the days not long ago when the United States was the dominant player on the Greek political landscape. Whereas many of Greece’s domestic difficulties today are bogged down in enduring quagmires from the past, much in fact has changed in the country’s foreign relations, particularly with the United States.

After World War II, Greece was a dominant regional player, sitting for years at the European table as a member of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and since 1981 the European Union. It avoided the economically and politically disastrous years under communism that shrouded many of its neighbors, and as the Cold War ended, Greece was the wealthiest and most democratic country in southeastern Europe. Still, Greece was frequently a difficult case for US administrations. Often it stridently promoted a foreign policy agenda full of national issues that could fill its squares and streets with raucous and violent protestors, and which was regularly misunderstood by Europeans and North Americans.

While Greece has a glorious Classical past and thousands of years of history, the country’s recent decades are the key to understanding one of Europe’s most multinuanced members. Modernizing its political system and economy over the post – World War II era has not come easy. Unlike the rest of Western Europe, Greece did not traverse the great watersheds of Western history. Under Turkish domination, it missed much of the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, Reformation, and Enlightenment. After the war, Greece packed five hundred years of Western development into five decades. Government after government attempted to break traditions of paternalistic politics and economic corruption, while offering Greeks the functioning political-economic infrastructure that other Western Europeans enjoyed. Many strong currents shaped postwar Greece: the Greek Civil war of the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the junta, the Cyprus invasion, the return of democracy, and so on. But beneath that complex surface was still another layer of events associated with this battle to develop into a modern European state. In this essay we discuss the Greek struggle that so far has been more successful on the foreign policy front than the domestic.

Greece and the United States

While one could start the review of modern Greece earlier, 1981, the year Andreas Papandreou came into office, was a watershed for Greece and is a suitable starting place. Many of today’s issues find their origins in the 1980s, including the current economic crisis. Andreas Papandreou tried to transform Greek society into a progressive welfare state, but he failed in the prerequisites of modernizing the economy and establishing a sustainable market system. His mobilization of the masses and particularly labor groupings might have fit the 1960s and 1970s, but many of the policies for which his followers fought and protested were already being discredited elsewhere in Europe and the United States by the 1980s. Greece, moreover, received a great deal of EU money after it entered the union in 1981, with nobody closely monitoring how it was spent. In hindsight, EU development funds greatly disguised the weaknesses of the Greek political economy.

On the foreign policy front, Andreas Papandreou left a legacy that strongly influenced Greek policies and foreign attitudes toward Greece for years after. The United States still deals with the remnants of his leftist romantic perspective toward many of its former enemies. Over the years of his first prime ministership, US-Greek relations traveled a rocky road, close but problematic. Now, however, thirty years later, one sees how the road has worn smooth. Many of the difficulties in US-Greek relations of those earlier times have transitioned into today’s important but less adversarial issues. To give...