Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery

As part of Westview Press’s “Nations of the Modern World” case study series on European countries, Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery aims to provide a cogent and comprehensive primer by which discerning students may come to understand the complexities of Greece’s evolving role in the post-Cold War international system. In fact, however, authors Keith Legg and John Roberts have produced a book that, when evaluated according to accepted standards of scholarly rigor, is severely handicapped and, when considered in terms of pedagogical utility, is lamentable.

The relatively straightforward thesis appears on the opening pages of the introduction: geography and culture have been and will remain the principal determinants in the history of Greece’s political, economic, and social development, particularly within the context of a European Union (EU) characterized by increasing vertical and horizontal forms of integration. The authors introduce the concept of borderland as a mechanism for elucidating the cultural and geographic dimensions of Greece’s peripheral locus in Europe. Specifically, Greece’s cultural and geographic peripheralization are interpreted as the root cause of a host of unanticipated, dysfunctional consequences that have marred the country’s modernization trajectory.

The rich potential of the central thesis deserves acknowledgment. Had the authors used careful comparative method and sophisticated analysis, they might have introduced Greece into any number of provocative theoretical and empirical problematics concerned with the formation of a Greater Europe in the post-bipolar world—for example, the distinctions between nation-building and nation-destroying (Connor 1994), the intellectual and diplomatic mapping of Balkan identities (Todorova 1997), the origins of economic dualism and regionalism in modern Europe (Leonardi and Nanetti 1994; Piore & Sabel 1984), the complexities of sovereignty transfers from national to supranational institutions (Lyons and Mastanduno 1995; Gottlieb 1993), the causal relationship between marketization and democratization (Marks and Diamond 1992; Przeworski 1991), and the differential advantages of collective defense versus collective security arrangements in transatlantic relations (Papacosma and Heiss 1995; Lodge 1993).

The promise of the book is completely unrealized. The remainder of the introduction sets out both the underlying tone and logic of Modern Greece in the form of a simplistic combination of, on the one hand, Putnam’s painstaking research on civil society’s importance for the divergent democratic practices and regional economic disparities in modern Italy (Putnam 1993) and, on the other hand, Huntington’s sweeping generalizations about the immutability of cultural obstacles that render certain civilizations permanently incompatible with modernity (Huntington 1996). The authors’ principal claim is that “Greece’s economic and political institutions are unlikely to adapt successfully to the demands of full participation” (2) in the EU. The country’s “political institutions seem incapable of making the reforms that might make Greece competitive with the economies of the more advanced members of the Community” (2).

To substantiate their claim, Legg and Roberts argue that after most other contemporary European states “had settled the question of national definition, both culturally and territorially, Greece has found it to be politically volatile well into the twentieth century” (5); that “Greek leaders and the population as a whole have generally . . . [shown] no reluctance in seeking outside assistance and little sense of responsibility once assistance is secured” (7); and that “the military interlude of the late 1960s and early 1970s cast doubt on the contemporary classification of Greece as ‘European’” (3).

The previous three quotations are emblematic of the book’s entire argumentation. Specifically, Legg’s and Roberts’s claim about Greece’s permanent geographic and cultural aberration from the EU norm is based on their interpretation of the country’s nation-building and state-formation experiences. Drawing extremely liberally and reductionistically from the argumentation of standard reference sources on modern Greek politics and history (Diamandouros 1972; Petropulos 1968; Mavrogordatos 1983), Legg and Roberts rigidly recast those analyses in order to summarize the complementary foreign and domestic policies of the Greek state as a singleminded, expansionist, centralizing agenda whose raison d’être was the...