The Greek Junta and the International System

A Case Study of Southern European Dictatorships, 1967-74

Antonis Klapsis, Constantine Arvanitopoulos, Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, Effie G. H. Pedaliu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429797767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines the international dimensions of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974 and uses it as a case study to evaluate the major shifts occurring in the international system during a period of rapid change.

The policies of the major nation-states in both East and West were determined by realistic Cold War considerations. At the same time, the Greek junta, a profoundly anti-modernist force, failed to cope with an evolving international agenda and the movement towards international cooperation. Denouncing it became a rallying point both for international organizations and for human rights activists, and it enabled the EEC to underscore the notion that democracy was an integral characteristic of the European identity.

This volume is an original in-depth study of an under-researched subject and the multiple interactions of a complex era. It is divided into three sections: Part I deals with the interaction of the Colonels with state actors; Part II deals with the responses of international organizations and the rising transnational human rights agenda for which the Greek junta became a totemic rallying point; and Part III compares and contrasts the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe, and analyses the different models of transition and region-building, and how they intersected with attempts to foster a European identity. The Greek dictatorship may have been a parochial military regime, but its rise and fall interacted with signifi cant international trends and can therefore serve as a salient case study for promoting a better understanding of international and European trends during the 1960s and 1970s.

This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War studies, international history, foreign policy, transatlantic relations and International Relations, in general.

1 Introduction

Antonis Klapsis, Constantine Arvanitopoulos, Evanthis Hatzivassiliou and Effie G. H. Pedaliu

This volume focuses on the international dimensions of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-74, and uses it as a case study to evaluate the major shifts that were occurring in the international system during a period of rapid change. This is a novel approach of a subject hotly debated from that era until the present day.

The 1967-74 Greek junta was not a decisive moment in the Cold War or in European history, but it certainly caused a shock to Western public opinion. Although Greece had gone through a vicious civil war during the 1940s, parliamentary democracy had survived (largely thanks to US priorities), and the country had scored an impressive economic development in the 1950s and 1960s which had allowed it to become the first associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961. Despite its chaotic political crisis of the mid-1960s, Greece seemed to be an established member of the West. The hijacking of such a country – reputed to be the ‘cradle of democracy’ – by a group of relatively low-raking military officers, was seen as a failure of the West and its leader, the US. Was this, at the end of the day, where the American intervention of the Truman Doctrine (and all the talk about America’s commitment to the ‘free world’) was bound to lead?

This sense of shock largely decided the nature of contemporary academic debates on the Greek junta. Moreover, the late 1960s and the early 1970s was a time of wider international academic debates on the imposition of military regimes (often allegedly with American help of acquiescence), of which the 1973 Chilean example was the most impressive and arguably the most painful. Last but not least, intellectually this was a time when ‘systemic’ interpretations and grand narratives about the international system were ascending, usually focusing on the role of the superpowers (and sometimes inflating it). Generally speaking, the prevailing tendency was to seek generalizations, often ignoring the importance of the specific, and the lack of archival material rather facilitated this trend.

As could be expected, the early interpretations of the junta were dominated by the indignation that the military regime caused internationally. Not unnaturally, the conspiracy theory was prominent in that phase, focusing on the alleged role of the US in the imposition of the Greek junta. A seminal book by one of the junta’s most known opponents, Andreas Papandreou, insisted on the role of the ‘American-driven tanks’.¹ A prominent scholar, James E. Miller, author of one of the chapters of this book, has pointed to the success of this ‘Andreas narrative’ that managed to appeal to the ‘underdog mentality’ of a large part of the Greek public opinion (always ready to see Greece as the victim of great power interdictions), and allowed him to impose his political preponderance at a later stage.² There were, of course, other, more balanced assessments – for example, a major collective volume that formed an integral part of the adverse international reaction to the Greek dictatorship.³ The best account of the Greek junta in the international bibliography, significantly balanced, was written by one of its most renown British opponents, but – inevitably perhaps, for a book written so early – remained rather descriptive.⁴ Last but not least, the ‘dependence theory’, a major intellectual tool of those days, remained central in the grand interpretations of contemporary Greek history. The word ‘dependence’ became a keyword (and often appeared in the titles) of numerous academic works on Greece during the 1970s and 1980s.

We do insist that the major problem of scholars at that time was their lack of access to archival material. Once this was overcome, in the past 15 years, a new bibliography appeared which, as usually is the case in the writing of history, put forward significantly more elaborate and complex conclusions. The unequal US– Greek relationship could not be disputed, but the evidence showed that the coming of the junta was by no means an American decision: it was the result of the crushing failure of the Greek political system to retain control over developments in a country rapidly growing economically and in need of a political reform that the political system was simply unable to effect. Nowadays there is not a single work, based on archival sources, that argues that the junta was of American making, although it is stressed that the Americans – heavily burdened by Vietnam, disagreements in NATO and their own internal turmoil – finally acquiesced to the Greek dictatorship, but only after its imposition .⁵ There have also been well-reserarched contributions on British or French policy towards the junta, the political and social history of the era, as well as (and this is where the subject becomes intriguing for us) Greece’s role in the ascendancy of the international/transnational human rights movement.⁶

Meanwhile, the international scholarly debate on the late 1960s and the 1970s also tended to expand to additional themes. Scholars naturally started by putting forward more elaborate assessments of ‘1968’ – a pivotal event in contemporary history.⁷ Soon, however, they pointed to a major change that was taking place during this period in societies and in international affairs, namely the start of the West’s slide to the post-industrial era. In this new epoch, technological, economic and international developments were effecting important changes in the structure of the international system. It was not only détente or the rise (or so it seemed then) of a ‘Third World’; the now prosperous societies of the West had satisfied their immediate needs and were turning their attention, among others, to human rights, humanitarian issues, communications (facilitated by breathtaking technological advances) and the ‘quality of life’ (thus environmentalism), but also to economic and monetary international cooperation, which became even more salient after the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the first oil shock in 1973. These affected the value systems of Western societies, as well as the needs of diplomacy, which now had to deal with a multitude of international meetings on novel fields. Naturally, at a time of dramatic expansion of international cooperation (necessary after the multiplication of international borders following decolonization), the role of international organizations was elevated.⁸ As is usually the case in such transitional eras, the more ‘traditional’ themes of diplomacy, strategy and the Cold War now co-existed with the ‘new frontier’ subjects. International developments, especially during these eras of transitions, are usually a messy affair, more often than not combining various – even contradictory – trends. It was a very interesting era of wider transitions.

It is in the study of this challenging ‘grey area’ of profound, pivotal transitions that this book has the ambition to contribute, connecting the debate on the Greek junta with these crucial international developments. The Greek junta was a profoundly anti-modernist (indeed, reactionary) force, and the Colonels proved on successive occasions that they were unable to comprehend the changes. They proved exceptionally incompetent even in more traditional domains such as the economy, European policy, strategy and military affairs, as their record on Cyprus clearly demonstrates. Last but not least, Greece is a small country which is not expected substantially to influence such grand changes in the international system. However, exactly because of its high symbolic value for Western societies, and as its dictatorship seemed to point to a Western ‘failure’, Greece did become an indicator of the new trends of the international system. This book thus discusses the military dictatorship in a small state of Southern Europe as a case study, in order to point to continuities, as well as to structural changes in the international system during this period. There has been no overall archive-based appraisal that examines how and why the actions of the Greek junta had such widespread international reverberations; how they affected the policies of state and non-state actors, and how their legacy influenced the evolution of the attitude of international organizations, international law and practice, as well as the rise of transnational activism. At the same time, the volume aims to promote a better understanding of how, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Southern European dictatorships contributed to the intermestic volatility of the West and to the tendency of its citizens to question conventional Cold War politics. Last but not least, the study of Southern European transitions to democracy also reveals interesting threads uniting these processes with the rise of the new agendas of the international, especially the European, system. The Greek dictatorship may have been a parochial military regime, but its rise and fall interacted with significant international trends. Thus, it can serve as a case study for promoting a better understanding of international and European trends during the 1960s and 1970s.

The structure of the book aims to cover, as far as possible, these research priorities. Part I deals with the interaction of the Colonels with state actors. This is the part of the book that deals with the more ‘traditional’ themes of international affairs. The policies of the major Western powers were profoundly realistic, and they tended to bypass difficult issues that might jeopardize Greece’s participation in the Western alliance, even if the country was under a distasteful regime. Still, this part also assesses the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy and the restrictions encountered by Greece’s allies in their efforts to base their policies towards the junta on ‘realist’ Cold War assumptions.

Part II discusses the emerging, new frontier issues: the rising transnational human rights agenda for which the Greek junta became a totemic rallying point; the role of international organizations (although it is argued here that the more specialized, ‘regional’ ones tended to be more effective than the global UN); transnational activism; and the role of international environmental cooperation both in exposing the anti-modern character of the junta, but also in aiding the diplomacy of the Greek transition to democracy. The anachronistic junta was internationally isolated, and this impeded the country’s continuing modernization, but simultaneously it became the catalyst for international organizations and transnational movements to develop and flourish. As can be expected, this part focuses more on issues of ‘soft power’ – it deals with what, at that time, were seen as the ‘idealist’ aspects of international affairs.

Part III has a more comparative flavour. It discusses the dictatorships in Southern Europe (and the Turkish military’s intervention in politics in 1971) and their transitions to democracy. Chapters in this section analyse the different models of transition, and how these intersected with attempts to foster a European identity which finally led to the upgrading of the EEC’s soft power into a stabilizing and democratizing force for Southern Europe. This new EEC role also significantly compensated for the growing anti-Americanism in the region.

The volume brings together a team of established and early career scholars from the fields of International Relations, Political Science, Diplomacy and International History. In methodological terms, the emphasis is on the availability of archival evidence which, we feel, facilitates more definite and lasting conclusions. However, this is combined, in several of the chapters, with a re-evaluation of older theories of political science, theories of transition and the Neo-Classical Realist theory. Our starting point (although, we admit, this may not be the prevailing thesis internationally) has been that these disciplines are not incompatible, at least under certain conditions; there is a broad space where scholars can communicate and gain from each other’s methodological tools, allowing for both prudent and accurate generalization and at the same time for emphasis on the specific. Of course, inevitably each one of us will do it in the discipline’s own way, namely, what John Lewis Gaddis has described as the political scientists’ tendency for ‘general particularization’ and the historians’ option for ‘particular generalization’.⁹ We are satisfied that the chapters in this volume rather confirm our assumption of compatibility and point to the possibilities for synergies in the future as well.

In Part I, Chapter 2, James E. Miller discusses the policies of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration towards the collapse of Greek democracy in the mid-1960s and the imposition of the junta in 1967. He argues that US officials tried to head off a coup by dissuading King Constantine from such a move, but largely ignored the possibility of a revolt from lower ranks of the army. He also sketches the role of the fear for Andreas Papandreou, who had become a particular bête noir for US Embassy officials. Last but not least, he explains how the US finally decided to come to terms with the unpleasant reality of the Greek junta, especially after the failure of King Constantine’s counter-coup in December 1967.

Based mostly on the Richard Nixon tapes, Harry Papasotiriou shows, in Chapter 3, that the US President had two main priorities regarding Greece. First, at a time of increased Soviet influence (and naval presence) in the Mediterranean, he wanted to support Greece as an ally regardless of its regime, so long as it was pro-Westrun. Although Nixon put pressure, both publicly and privately, on the junta to implement reforms, geopolitics took precedence over values. Second, Nixon wanted to court Greek–American voters in his effort to get re-elected in 1972. His Greek policy during the months before the 7 November 1972 presidential election is shaped mainly by electoral considerations. In this regard, it was politics that took precedence over values.

In Chapter 4, Maurice Vaïsse argues that Franco–Greek relations during the junta are an indicative example of French diplomatic practice, based on the recognition of states rather than of governments. This allowed Paris to continue almost normal diplomatic relations with the regime of the Colonels. Contrary to the attitude of the French public opinion, always hostile to the dictatorship, successive French Presidents (Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing) did not disrupt relations with Greece, which continued to grow in the economic field as well. The turning point came under Giscard d’Estaing, who favoured the return of democracy to Greece and its integration into Europe.

Antonio Var...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• PART I International actors
• PART II International institutions and transnational processes
• PART III Transitions in Southern Europe: the comparative perspective
• Index