by Tony Judt
Karamanlis was not himself ideologically anti-Communist nor even especially close to the armed forces. But it is not irrelevant that he was born in Greek Macedonia and was profoundly anti-Slav. Of peasant background and Orthodox faith, he was instinctively provincial, nationalist and conservative—a fitting representative of his country and a safe pair of hands in the eyes of American diplomats and Greek officers alike, evincing no desire to enforce civilian oversight of the military or investigate too closely the growing rumors of anti-parliamentary political networks and conspiracies in high places. Under Karamanlis, Greece remained stable, if economically stagnant and more than a little corrupt.
But in May 1963 a left-wing parliamentarian, Dr. Grigoris Lambrakis, was assaulted in Thessaloniki while speaking at a peace rally. His death five days later created a political martyr for the Left and the nascent peace movement in Greece, while the authorities’ studied failure to investigate the murky background to Lambrakis’ assassination gave rise to widespread suspicion.218 Six months later Karamanlis narrowly lost the elections to George Papandreou’s Center Union, a centrist party backed by the country’s growing urban middle class. The following year, at a fresh round of elections, Papandreou’s party and its allies did better still, winning an absolute majority of the votes cast and increasing their share from 42 percent to 52.7 percent.
The new parliamentary majority demanded an investigation into the rigging of the 1961 elections, and tensions began to mount between parliament and the young King Constantine. The king’s conservative political sympathies were public knowledge, and he was under increasing pressure from the Right to dismiss Papandreou, who was eventually maneuvered into resigning. He was succeeded by a series of interim prime ministers, none of whom could form a stable parliamentary majority. Relations between parliament and court were strained still further when a group of liberal-leaning army officers was accused of plotting with George Papandreou’s son Andreas. In March 1967, twenty one of them were court-martialed.
Parliamentary government in Greece had by now ceased to function in all but name. Conservatives and army officers warned darkly of growing ‘Communist’ influence in the country at large. The king would not work with the majority Center Union, which he accused of depending on the votes of the far Left, while the opposition National Radical Union refused to back successive efforts to install ‘caretaker’ governments. Finally, in April 1967, the National Radical Union itself formed a minority government just long enough for the King to dissolve the parliament and call for new elections.
Popular frustration at the parliamentary stalemate, and a widespread feeling that the king had played an unacceptably partisan role, suggested that the forthcoming elections would produce a further swing to the Left. Proferring just this excuse—the ‘Communist threat’ insistently invoked in Greece since 1949—and pointing to the undoubted inadequacies of Greece’s democratic institutions and the incompetence of its political class, a group of officers working inside the army’s long-established right-wing networks seized power on April 21st.
Led by Colonel George Papadopoulos, they poured tanks and paratroopers into the streets of Athens and other Greek cities, arrested politicians, journalists, trade unionists and other public figures, seized control of all the usual strong points and declared themselves the saviors of the nation: ‘democracy’, as they explained, would be ‘placed in a sling’. King Constantine passively, if unenthusiastically, assented and swore the conspirators into office. Eight months later, after a half-hearted attempt at a ‘counter-coup’, Constantine and his family fled to Rome, un-mourned. The junta appointed a regent and Papadopoulos was named prime minister.
The colonels’ coup d’état was a classic pronunciamento. Initially violent and always repressive, Papadopoulos and his colleagues dismissed nearly a thousand civil servants, imprisoned or expelled politicians of the left and center, and turned Greece in upon itself for seven stifling years. Anti-modern to the point of parody, the colonels censored the press, outlawed strikes and banned modern music along with mini-skirts. They also banned the study of sociology, Russian and Bulgarian in addition to Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. ‘Populist’ in style but paternalist in practice, they were obsessed with appearance. Under the colonels’ regime long hair was forbidden. The uniforms of palace guards and other ceremonial officials were replaced with gaudily ‘traditional’ Greek costume. Athens in particular took on a tidy, martial air.
The economic consequences of the Greek coup were mixed. Tourism did not suffer—politically-conscious travelers who boycotted the colonels’ Greece were readily replaced by tourists attracted to cheap, if suffocatingly over-regulated resorts. Foreign investment, which in Greece’s case had only begun a decade or so before the coup, and a steady increase in GNP—rising at an annual average of 6 percent since 1964—were unaffected by political developments: as in Spain, low wages (abetted by the repression of all labour protest) and a regime predicated on ‘law and order’ offered a benevolent environment for foreign capital. The junta even had widespread initial support in the rural districts from which the colonels mostly came, especially after they cancelled all peasant debt in 1968.219
But the autarkic instincts of the colonels favored a return to old-established national habits of import-substitution—inefficient local manufacturers producing low-quality products and protected against foreign competition. This was bound eventually to bring the military regime into conflict with the country’s urban middle class, whose interests as consumers and producers alike would within a few years triumph over their relief at the dismissal of the bickering politicians. And the colonels, mediocre even by the undemanding standards of their kind, had nothing to offer for the future: no project for Greek integration into the emerging and expanding European Community, no strategy for a return to civilian rule.220
Moreover the regime, secure enough at home, was increasingly isolated abroad—in December 1969 the Council of Europe unanimously voted to expel Greece; two months later the EEC broke off all negotiations with the junta. More brazenly than most, the colonels’ regime rested on force alone. It was thus altogether appropriate that the dictatorship should fall in the course of an incompetent attempt to apply force beyond its frontiers, to resolve the long-running problem of Cyprus.
The island of Cyprus, part of the Ottoman Empire since 1571, had been administered by Britain since 1878 and unilaterally annexed at the outbreak of World War One. In the far-eastern Mediterranean, close to Turkish Anatolia and far removed from the Greek mainland or any other outlying Greek islands, Cyprus nonetheless had a Greek-speaking, Eastern Orthodox majority increasingly disposed to seek union with the Greek state. The Turkish minority, some 18 percent of the island’s population, was understandably opposed to any such arrangement and was vociferously supported by the authorities in Ankara. The fate of Cyprus—caught between British efforts to dispose of a troublesome imperial inheritance and longstanding Greek-Turkish hostility—remained troublingly unresolved throughout the Fifties.
Denied their project of ‘Enosis’—union with Greece—the majority of the island’s Greek-Cypriot leadership settled somewhat reluctantly for independence, which the UK granted in 1960, retaining only certain transit rights and a strategically important airbase. The new Republic of Cyprus, its sovereignty and constitution guaranteed by Britain, Turkey and Greece, was ruled by a Greek-Turkish ‘partnership’ arrangement dominated by the presidency of Archbishop Makarios, once exiled by London as an armed and violent terrorist, now the respected spokesman of ‘reasonable’ Greek Cypriot ambitions.
Meanwhile the island’s Greek and Turkish communities lived alongside each other in suspicious unease, interrupted by sporadic outbursts of inter-communal violence. The governments in Athens and Ankara both advertised themselves as the protectors of their respective compatriots and occasionally threatened to intervene. But prudence, and international pressure, kept them from doing so, even when attacks on Turkish Cypriots in 1963 led to the arri
val of a UN Peacekeeping Force the following year. Despite the Greek Cypriots’ near-monopoly of public employment and positions of authority (loosely comparable to the Protestant majority’s exclusion of Catholics from privileges and power in Ulster)—or perhaps because of it—the situation in Cyprus appeared stable. But if Cyprus was no longer a crisis it remained very much an ‘issue’.
Thus in 1973, when students in Athens (first at the Law School, later at the Polytechnic) embarrassed the colonels by publicly opposing their rule for the first time, the military’s response was to divert attention and seek to shore up public support by re-asserting the Greek claim to Cyprus. General Ioannides, a ‘hard-liner’ who displaced Papadopoulos as junta leader following the Polytechnic demonstrations, plotted with George Grivas and other Greek-Cypriot nationalists to overthrow Makarios and ‘re-unite’ the island with Greece. On July 15th 1974, units of the Cypriot National Guard along with hand-picked Greek officers attacked the Presidential Palace, expelled Makarios (who fled abroad) and installed a puppet government in anticipation of direct rule from Athens.
At this juncture, however, the Turkish government announced its own intention to invade Cyprus in order to protect the interests of the Turkish-Cypriot community, and promptly did so, on July 20th. Within a week, two-fifths of the island was in Turkish hands. Unable either to prevent or respond to this move by vastly superior Turkish forces, the junta appeared helpless: ordering full mobilization one day, canceling it the next. Faced with widespread public anger at this national humiliation, the Greek dictators themselves turned to the ageing Karamanlis and invited him to return home from his exile in Paris. By July 24th the former Prime Minister was back in Athens and had initiated the country’s return to civilian rule.
The transition was accomplished with remarkable ease. Karamanlis’s New Democracy party swept home in the November 1974 elections and repeated its success three years later. A new constitution was approved in June 1975, although the opposition parties initially protested over the heightened powers granted to the president of the republic (a post occupied by Karamanlis himself from 1980). With unexpected alacrity, Greek domestic politics took on a familiar European profile, divided roughly equally into a center-right (New Democracy) and a center-left (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement led by the late George Papandreou’s American-educated son Andreas).
The smoothness of Greece’s return to democracy was due in part to Karamanlis’s skill in breaking with his own past, while at the same time conveying an image of seasoned competence and continuity. Rather than re-establish his discredited Center Union he had formed a new party. He called a referendum on the discredited monarchy in December 1974, and when 69.2 percent of the voters demanded its abolition he oversaw the establishment of a republic. In order to avoid alienating the military he resisted calls to purge the army, preferring instead to impose early retirement on the more compromised senior officers while rewarding and promoting loyalists.221
With the monarchy out of the way, and the army neutralized, Karamanlis had to address the unfinished business of Cyprus. Neither he nor his successors had any intention of re-opening the Enosis question, but nor could they publicly ignore Turkey’s presence on the island, even after Makarios’s return there in December 1974. In a largely symbolic move that attracted widespread domestic approval on Left and Right alike, Karamanlis pulled Greece out of the military organization of NATO for the next six years in protest at the behavior of a fellow NATO member. Greek-Turkish relations entered an ice age, marked by the Turkish minority’s unilateral declaration in February 1975 of a ‘Turkish Federated State of Cyprus’—only ever recognized by Turkey itself—and by sporadic diplomatic tiffs over territorial claims in the eastern Aegean.
Cyprus itself thus became an object of international concern, as UN diplomats and lawyers were to spend fruitless decades trying unsuccessfully to resolve the island’s divisions. Meanwhile Greek politicians were thereby relieved of responsibility for the island’s affairs (though they remained constrained by domestic politics to express a continued interest in its fate) and could turn to more promising horizons. Less than a year after the fall of the colonels, in June 1975, the government in Athens formally applied to join the EEC. On January 1st 1981, in what many in Brussels would come to regard as a regrettable triumph of hope over wisdom, Greece became a full member of the Community.
Unlike Greece, Portugal had no recent experience of even the most vestigial of democracies. Salazar’s authoritarian reign had been peculiarly and self-consciously retrograde even by the standards prevailing when he first took over power in 1932—indeed, in its mix of censorious clericalism, corporate institutions and rural underdevelopment,Portugal quite closely resembled post-1934 Austria. Appropriately enough, post-war Portugal was favored by retired Frenchmen nostalgic for Vichy France—Charles Maurras, disgraced leader of the Action Française, was much admired by Salazar and corresponded with him until his death in 1952.222
The general standard of living in Salazar’s Portugal was more characteristic of contemporary Africa than continental Europe: per capita annual income in 1960 was just $160 (compared with e.g. $219 in Turkey, or $1,453 in the US). The rich were very rich indeed, infant mortality was the highest in Europe, and 32 percent of the population was illiterate. Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability—upon being informed that oil had been discovered in Portugal’s Angolan territories he commented merely that this was ‘a pity’.
Like the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu, Salazar was obsessed with the avoidance of debt, and conscientiously balanced every annual budget. Fanatically mercantilist, he built up unusually high gold reserves which he took care not to spend on either investment or imports. As a result, his country was locked into poverty, most of the population working on small family farms in the north of the country and latifundia further south. With no local capital available to finance domestic industry and foreign investors distinctly unwelcome, Portugal was largely dependent upon the export or re-export of primary commodities, including its own people.
Right up to his death in 1970, it was Salazar’s proud boast that not only had he kept Portugal out of the devastating foreign wars of the century, but he had navigated his country between the Scylla of rapacious market capitalism and the Charybdis of state socialism. In fact, he had all too successfully exposed his subjects to the worst of both: material inequality and exploitation for profit were more marked in Portugal than anywhere else in Europe, while the authoritarian state in Lisbon smothered all independent opinion and initiative. In 1969 just 18 percent of the adult population was eligible to vote.
In the absence of domestic opposition, the only resistance to Salazar came from the military, the country’s sole independent institution. The Portuguese armed forces were ill paid—rather than expend scarce resources on wages, Salazar actively encouraged impecunious army officers to marry into the better-heeled bourgeoisie. But until 1961 the regime could count on at least their passive loyalty, in spite of two abortive and easily crushed military coup attempts in 1947 and again in 1958. Reform-minded junior officers in the army or navy might chafe at the stagnation around them, but they lacked allies or any popular base.
All that changed in 1961, when Delhi forcibly annexed Portugal’s mainland Indianterritory of Goa and armed revolt broke out in the African colony of Angola. The loss of Goa was a national humiliation, but rebellion in Africa was more serious still. Portugal’s considerable African ‘provinces’, as they were known, comprised Angola, Guinée-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands in West Africa, and Mozambique in the south-east. Of these Angola, with nearly half a million European residents in a total population of under six million, was by far the most important. Its untapped material wealth—in iron, diamonds and recently-discovered offshore oil—had led Salazar reluctantly to permit foreign investment (notably by the US company Gulf Oil), and in th
e course of the Sixties the territory was taking on growing economic significance for Portugal itself.
It was also in open revolt. In order to crush the growing Angolan nationalist movement, Lisbon inaugurated in 1967 a ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy based upon resettlement of the population into large, controllable villages: by 1974 more than one million peasants had been moved. The plan failed to break the insurgency, although it had baneful and enduring effects on Angola’s society and rural economy. It did, however, increasingly alienate the soldiers who were called upon to enforce it: both the impecunious officers who had joined the colonial army as a route to upward social mobility and the reluctant conscripts sent abroad to suppress the rebels.
In Angola the rebels were divided between different factions and the Portuguese army was able to contain them, at least for a while. In Mozambique, where 60,000 Portuguese soldiers were kept busy protecting a European settler population numbering just 100,000, or in Guinée and Cape Verde, where the charismatic Amilcar Cabral tied down over 30,000 Portuguese troops in thankless guerilla warfare against ten thousand insurgents, the situation was becoming untenable. By the beginning of the 1970s its African wars were consuming half the annual defense budget of Europe’s poorest country. One in every four Portuguese men of military age was being conscripted to serve in Africa—and, after 1967, for a compulsory minimum term of four years. By 1973, 11,000 of them had died there: a mortality rate considerably higher, as a share of the national population, than that suffered by the US Army at the height of the Vietnam War.