The Normalisation of Cyprus' Partition among Greek Cypriots: Political Economy and Political Culture in a Divided Society by Gregoris Ioannou (review)

Tucked in the waters of the southeastern Mediterranean just across from the Levant and Egypt and just over 450 kilometers from the Turkish coast, Cyprus was a base and later a home for the Crusaders and, eventually, until its independence, formed part of the British colonial empire. The island has been simultaneously an object of desire and a conundrum for the Greek and Turkish nationalisms which, since their emergence, have laid claim not only to the island but to the hearts and minds of a large part of its population. Cut off from the Ottoman mainland and wrested from an embattled Ottoman Empire in 1878, Cyprus acquired a culture distinct from those of both of its putative motherlands. The British colonial administration retained the Ottoman administration's use of the millet system to divide the islanders into Muslim and non-Muslim communities, but it progressively strengthened the ethnic distinction between those two groups through its encouragement of communal education, through proportional representation of the two groups in administrative institutions, and through the mobilization of rival nationalisms in order to undermine opposition to British rule.

Independence in 1960 was a moment filled with ambiguity and circumscribed by conditionality. An independent Cyprus was the lesser evil to the prospect of partition (taksim), preferred by Turkish nationalists, for many Greek-Cypriots, or the Greek nationalist vision of unification (enosis) for most Turkish-Cypriots. An imperfect compromise between the antagonistic nationalisms, the small island-state that emerged from colonialism was seen by many nationalists as an aberration and an affront or, at best, as a temporary evil. As such, the young Cypriot Republic was soon to be marked by the wounds inflicted by rival identity projects. The paramilitary group EOKA-B sought the island's annexation by Greece—which they referred to as "unification" (enosis)—and committed violence not only against Turkish-Cypriots but also against Greek-Cypriot "dissidents." The paramilitary Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT) was equally violent in promoting the Turkish-nationalist agenda of partition (taksim) and reining in Turkish-Cypriot dissidents. The dividing wall between rival nationalisms became a geographic reality in 1974: the Greek-orchestrated coup d'état, intended as a prelude to enosis with Greece, and the subsequent Turkish invasion consolidated and intensified the demographic separation of Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots and instituted the de facto division of the island between the Turkish-controlled north and the Greek-Cypriot-controlled and internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus in the south.

The Normalization of Cyprus' Partition Among Greek Cypriots by Gregoris Ioannou constitutes an effort to explore the dynamics that have given shape to the Cyprus problem since then. This is a dense volume that considers the specter of partition through the dual lens of historical and political sociology. Ioannou systematically maps the aspects of the Cypriot sociopolitical landscape that pertain to the genealogy of the idea and practice of partition, giving particular attention to the politics of the Greek-Cypriot community. This focus on Greek-Cypriots is one of the book's strengths: partition has historically been associated with the Turkish-Cypriot side, and this was especially true during the period when Rauf Denktaş was the leading figure in Turkish-Cypriot politics, since Denktaş worked tirelessly to achieve the geographical and cultural separation of the island's two communities and welcomed Turkey's suffocating embrace of the island's north.

Successive Greek-Cypriot administrations have accused the Turkish-Cypriot side of obstructionism and lack of genuine will to work toward reunification. Ioannou challenges this narrative. Chapters 2 through 6, despite their apparently straightforward historical narration, provide a theoretically-informed identification of institutions, actors, and interests in the south of the island that favored the status quo while blaming Denktaş's separatist intransigence for the ongoing division. Through a brief examination of the British colonial period, during which a diffuse sense of...