On Greece
A Short History of Modern Greece.
by C. M. Woodhouse.
Praeger. 318 pp. $6.50.
The Web of Modern Greek Politics.
by Jane Clark Carey and Andrew Galbraith Carey.
Columbia. 240 pp. $6.95.
Most major developments in Greece in the last two decades have been significantly influenced by American policy. It is therefore unfortunate for the United States, and sometimes disastrous for Greece, that the American public remains largely uninformed on events in that country. For many years, no American newspaper has had a fulltime correspondent stationed in Greece. In times of crisis large numbers of correspondents do, to be sure, arrive in Athens. But they seldom stay long enough even to make the necessary initial contacts; by the time they are ready to function effectively, they are directed to a new crisis area hundreds or thousands of miles away. (Nevertheless some correspondents, such as Richard Eder of the New York Times, have surmounted these difficulties and contributed substantially to American knowledge of Greece. But after they leave, Greek events revert to their normal shadowy estate for the American public.)
The information gap resulting from inadequate daily coverage could, to some extent, be filled by books; and there was reason to hope that the two volumes under review might add to the very small number of good books on Greek affairs currently available. Colonel Christopher M. Woodhouse headed the British Military Mission in Greece during the war, and was correspondent there for the London Times in the immediate postwar period. He is also the author of three books on Greece: Apple of Discord, a valuable if necessarily partisan account of events in that period; One Omen, a book of short stories dealing with the same events and in some ways casting even more light on them; and a rather good history of the Greek War of Independence. And he is a former head of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. The Careys, although less intimately connected with Greek affairs, nevertheless have substantial qualifications. Mrs. Carey has been a consultant to the U.S. State Department and is a director of the Foreign Policy Association; she is also a director of Anatolia College in Salonika, while Mr. Carey is a trustee of the American Farm School.
Neither book, however, lives up to the hopes it raises—or, indeed, to its title. Woodhouse uses a third of his space on a dash through the history of the Byzantine Empire in which facts and often dubious interpretations presented as facts tumble out helter-skelter in an almost indistinguishable mass. A few pages would have sufficed to indicate the significance of Byzantium for contemporary Greece, chiefly the so-called “Great Idea” of bringing under Greek rule all the territories once held by the Byzantine Empire. The “Great Idea” poisoned Greece's relations with her neighbors and diverted her attention from pressing internal needs throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries. It also brought with it a legacy of problems including a tradition of excessive governmental centralization and a relation between church and state that has been deleterious to both.
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The space thus saved in this “short history” could have been profitably used in expanding the treatment of the 19th and 20th century background of contemporary Greece. (The entire period from the installation of the present dynasty in 1863 to the outbreak of World War I receives only twenty-three pages; that from the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936 to the end of the civil war in 1948 is treated in twenty-nine.) Sketchy as it is, however, Woodhouse's treatment of this period is among the more useful parts of the book. Thus, after noting the success of Charilaos Trikoupis in forcing King George I to accept the principle that he had to name as Prime Minister the leader with the greatest parliamentary following, Woodhouse remarks: “So simple a principle seems hardly to need stating, but almost every dispute between the crown and the politicians in the last hundred years has originated from an attempt to disregard it.”
Woodhouse also comments, though inadequately, on the conflict between the artificial official language, the katherevousa, and the people's language or demotiki. Although he describes the efforts to gain acceptance for the demotiki as “a revolution against this intellectual tyranny,” he does not discuss the actual political struggle over the use of demotiki in education in the last few decades. It is worth mentioning that one of George Papandreou's major political assets is his outstanding role as a champion of the demotiki; the present military junta, in contrast, has taken up the cudgels—sometimes literally—in behalf of the most intransigent adherence to the katherevousa, even insisting on it as the language of instruction in all except the lowest grades.
Woodhouse's assessment of Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece's most important 20th-century statesman, is on the whole well-balanced. While praising Venizelos's diplomatic skill, he also points out his limitations, assigning Venizelos his just share of blame for the disastrous war with Turkey in 1920-22. Woodhouse correctly notes as well that “Venizelos was unequipped by training or past experience to handle the domestic problems of Greece in the decade after the Treaty of Lausanne.” One may add that very few Greek political figures have ever been well-equipped to handle these matters; one of the great strengths of Andreas Papandreou, whom Woodhouse slides over as a “left-wing” influence on his father, lay precisely in the fact that he did give promise of being able to cope with domestic problems.
Indeed, Woodhouse himself almost completely neglects Greece's domestic problems; he fails to deal adequately with the development of the Greek labor movement, or even with the Greek Socialist and Communist movements prior to World War II. The “Communist danger” in Greece thus emerges full-fledged in this study—like Athena from the head of Zeus—during the resistance to the Nazi occupation. The truth is that while the Communists did indeed greatly expand their influence during that period, they already had a very substantial base on which to build.
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In treating events during and immediately after World War II, Woodhouse has the advantage—and sometimes perhaps the disadvantage—of having been a participant. He does not, however, always mention his own role; thus he fails to note that he was secretary-general of the Anglo-American observer team which gave its blessing to the 1946 elections. This is important, because his account—like the report of the Anglo-American team—is essentially a whitewash of the circumstances surrounding those elections. There is no mention of the rightist terror in the countryside, and to a lesser extent in the cities, which caused not only the Communists but much of the Center to boycott the elections. Woodhouse's general treatment of this period loses much from compression; because of important omissions the impression it leaves is a far less accurate one than that given in Apple of Discord.
But the weakest part of the book is that dealing with events since the end of the civil war. One can only conclude that Colonel Woodhouse has failed to keep in close touch with Greek affairs since the end of his personal connection with them. For example, he says that Marshal Alexander Papagos resigned as Commander-in-Chief in May 1951 “sickened with the irresponsible confusion of party politics in a national crisis.” In fact, Papagos resigned after an unsuccessful attempt at a military coup—which he did not himself support—by a group of his followers in the army.
The treatment of economic and political developments after 1952 is similarly sketchy and sometimes misleading. No mention, for instance, is made of the fact that in the decade following 1952 about a fifth of the Greek workers took jobs in Northern Europe. This development was the key to Greece's “economic miracle,” credit for which is so often assigned to the policies of the Papagos and Karamanlis governments. Woodhouse deserves credit, however, for recognizing that the “economic miracle” was not quite so miraculous. He writes: “The national economy still suffered from uncured weaknesses, chiefly the lack of indigenous facilities to exploit raw materials and the need to import a high proportion of the nation's food. Of the relatively backward industrial development, too high a proportion was still in the control of foreign capital.” He also notes the unfavorable effect on the balance of payments of the end of American economic aid and the resumption of payment on Greece's foreign debt in 1962; this added significantly to the economic problems which the Papandreou government had to face when it took office at the end of 1963.
Finally, equally important omissions and errors crop up in the discussion of the most recent developments in Greece: the events leading up to the removal of the Papandreou government in 1965 and the subsequent military coup of April 21, 1967. Thus Woodhouse refers to the entrance into the Papandreou government of Elias Tsirimokos, “once a leader in EAM and now in EDA”; again, he says that Stephanos Stephanopoulos formed a government after the king's dismissal of Papandreou “with the help of Elias Tsirimokos from EDA.” But Tsirimokos was never a member of EDA, the Communist-influenced leftist party, although like a number of other centrist politicians he had been elected on its ticket in 1958. He subsequently formed a separate parliamentary group, and was one of the founders of the Center Union in 1960.
Moreover, Woodhouse states that the king accepted Papandreou's dismissal of Defense Minister Garoufalias but was unwilling to appoint Papandreou in his place; in fact, the king refused to accept the dismissal. And he writes that Papandreou “offered his resignation in July,” whereas actually—and this is a point of constitutional importance—Papandreou only threatened to offer it, whereupon the king promptly “accepted” it. In describing the 1967 coup Woodhouse does not mention the previous preparations for a “general's coup” in which the king was involved, and the postponement of which gave the colonels their chance.
Although generally not friendly to the dictators, Woodhouse writes: “It must be counted to their credit that an American corporation, which had broken off negotiations on a plan for the economic development of Crete and the Western Peloponnese in 1966, renewed and completed them in 1967; and the success was due to the fact that under the new regime no bribes were found necessary.” Actually the contract, with Litton industries, had been dropped by the Stephanopoulos government in 1966 because it found that there was no chance of getting parliamentary approval for terms so unfavorable to Greece. The military junta, on the other hand, rushed to sign the agreement because it wanted to use it for public relations purposes; the junta hailed it—quite falsely—as a guarantee of $800,000,000 in American investments. So far, investments under the contract have totalled about $7,000,000—slightly more than the fees Greece has paid Litton. But the junta has perhaps not done so badly as the figures would indicate; Litton has used its vast resources to carry on an active public-relations campaign and to arrange political contacts for the Greek dictators.
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In spite of such inaccuracies, some of Woodhouse's conclusions have validity. Thus he is almost certainly correct in writing that “crowned democracy” has “unmistakably had its day.” And he raises serious questions as to the likelihood—or, from a Greek point of view—the desirability of a continued partnership with the West, suggesting that if the country could escape from its dependence on the United States, an orientation toward its Balkan neighbors might make more sense.
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In the web of modern greek politics the Careys have many intelligent things to say on the Greek economy and on Greek education, with both of which they have had some personal experience. But they are less successful when it comes to dealing with Greek politics. They make make more or less serious factual errors in regard to several elections, as well as a number of other matters of historical importance. To cite just a few examples: It was not King George II's “inaction” in regard to the Metaxas dictatorship that was held against him, but the fact that he had installed it. The Communist party did not “usually” hold the balance of power when elections were held under proportional representation; the only time this happened was in 1935. Attributing 36 seats to the Liberals instead of the 56 they actually received in the 1950 elections, the Careys arrive at the conclusion that the Democratic Front, which the Communists supported, “emerged with the balance of power.” This is simply not so; the three center parties had a substantial majority of parliament. Again, in dealing with the 1958 elections they get tripped up by the mysteries of arithmetic, writing that with “a 15 per cent increase in votes from the preceding election” the United Democratic Left “netted a gain in deputies amounting to 300 per cent.” In fact, the increase from the 1952 election (not the “preceding” one, in which the party did not run separately) was 15 per cent of the total vote, or over 150 per cent of its own previous record. The 300 per cent gain in seats as compared to 1956 resulted, not from the peculiarities of the electoral system, but from the fact that in order to induce the center parties to enter a coalition in 1956, the United Democratic Left accepted an allotment of seats much smaller than what its popular vote would have entitled it to. There are also numerous errors in the account of the history of the Greek Communist party.
It is unfortunate that this is not a better book, because it seems to be a very well-motivated one, and where the Careys are writing on matters with which they have firsthand experience it is a useful one. Perhaps some day the Careys will write a book on Greek education; it should be a good one. Greek politics, however, is not their field.
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I have concentrated in this review on pointing out errors and omissions—some major, some minor—in these two works because the reader with little or no knowledge of modern Greece might be easily misled by the titles and the authors' credentials into expecting them to be useful guides to the history and politics of modern Greece. They are not. Unless better books come along, we will undoubtedly have to wait for another crisis to find out what is happening in Greece.
