Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967 (review)

Ioannis Stefanidis belongs to a younger generation of Greek historians whose scholarly labors have, over the past decade or so, enormously enriched our understanding of Greece's turbulent politics in the years following the Second World War. His latest contribution is concerned with how and to what extent "national issues"—primarily the Cyprus question—stirred the Greek nation between 1945 and 1967. His book is a valuable study of the impact of nationalist sentiment on Greece's domestic politics—a value that, unfortunately, is limited by the very nature of the project he has undertaken.

Stefanidis ventures outside the realm of straightforward historical narrative into the murky waters of "political culture . . . understood as a constructed set of core values, beliefs and attitudes which, despite a degree of confusion, ambiguities and inconsistencies, are shared by a decisive majority of citizens" (p. 2). The "core element" of Greece's political culture, he claims, is nationalism, whose own ambiguities and inconsistencies, he realizes, were starkly evident in the competing nationalisms (the one anti-communist and anti-Slavic, the other anti-imperialist and anti-western) of the combatants in the country's fratricidal Civil War.

Sensitive to, but undaunted by such complexities, Stefanidis produces a discursive, intelligently organized historical analysis of the multifarious manifestations of Greece's nationalist political culture, with a focus on the question of enosis—the union of Cyprus with Greece—that sporadically dominated the political scene. To do so, he draws on the statements of church and nationalist organizations, politicians, and commentators, and, less successfully, on public opinion polls conducted by the U.S. Information Service (for which Greece, we learn, was second only to West Germany as a testing ground in the use of opinion research to inform U.S. foreign policy). The result is two parallel historical narratives. One is focused on his case that "national issues"—dominated by the Cyprus question—represented a "post-war irredentist revival" of the Venizelist Megali Idea ("Great Idea"—the annexation of part of Asia Minor by Greece) that had presumably perished in the flames of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922 (in this, I think he overstates his case; the nationalist passions stirred by the Cyprus question represented more than renascent irredentist impulses). The second historical narrative traces the origins of Greek anti-Americanism, not to U.S. support of the 1967-74 Colonels' regime and its dubious role in the 1974 Cyprus disaster, but earlier, to widespread frustration with American policies during the 1963-64 Cyprus crisis (here I think he offers a valuable corrective to conventional wisdom).

Yet Stefanidis's analysis is by no means a dispassionate exercise in political sociology. An edifying intention informs his project, which he conceived during "the upsurge of the controversy surrounding the future status of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" in the early 1990s. In April 1994, the Greek Ministry of Education decreed a school holiday so that students could attend a mass demonstration in the center of Thessaloniki. Having "spent two semesters explaining in class the modernity and constructed character of national identities," Stefanidis proposed using the opportunity for a classroom discussion. His idea was rebuffed by his most talented student, later a "hard-headed diplomat," who pleaded: "But, Sir, let us be nationalistic for just one day!" (p. xi). That incident, Stefanidis tells us, gave him the "original incentive" for writing his book. It is his answer to the classroom discussion that never took place, cancelled when his students chose to vent their nationalistic feelings at a protest rally rather than engage in a historically-informed reflective dialogue on the impulses that were driving them there.

Given this point of origin, the book unsurprisingly casts a negative light on the "mass display of nationalist militancy" that erupted in Greece at critical junctures when the fate of Cyprus was hanging in balance. "[B]y severely limiting acceptable political...