Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  For much of the last century, Greece had been run, on and off, by the Papandreou family. They were Socialists. The first Papandreou, Georgios, became prime minister in 1944; his son Andreas took over in 1981. When I arrived in Athens, Andreas’s son, another George, had assumed the prime minister’s office, and thus had the unfortunate task of pushing through austerity measures to ward off economic ruin. I couldn’t get to George for an interview—he was busy—so I settled for Nick Papandreou, George’s very tall brother. When I met him, Nick was sitting at a long table at the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, a beautiful old house in a run-down part of Athens. A terrace off the back overlooked the city’s ancient graveyard. Black-and-white family photos hung on one wall; Nick’s novels and books, and pamphlets about his father, Andreas, lined another. Nick, who had an American mother and grew up in Canada and the United States, among other places, sounded American. The Papandreous, I would soon discover, had a long and tangled relationship with the U.S.

  Nick told me a story about riding the Metro in Athens:

  “Nick! Why did your brother bring in the IMF?” one passenger called out.

  “No choice. It was either that or no one gets paid come July first,” Papandreou replied.

  “Well, I am glad to see you taking public transport,” he said.

  “What do you do for a living?” Papandreou asked the man.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Did you ever take side money from your patients?”

  Everybody was listening. “Yes.”

  “Are you still taking money on the side?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now, the way things are, I’d be lynched.”

  The fact that cracking down on doctors counted as a positive development in Greece was a sign of just how troubled Greek society had become. The Papandreous’ country was more than 300 billion euros in debt, which represented 115 percent of the country’s GDP. The European Union and the IMF agreed to bail the country out only if the government passed austerity measures like raising taxes and cutting social services. But reforming Greece required nothing less than a societal revolution that would upend the way people usually operated: from doctors and tax collectors and lawyers who took bribes to cabdrivers who didn’t give receipts. Greece also had a bloated, mismanaged public sector and a stunted private one, both legacies of a political system prone to clientelism and corruption, which had caused the demon-word “socialism” to creep into the censorious Western rhetoric about the country. I wondered how the West had ever allowed Greece, a member of NATO, to become so Socialist in the first place.

  The conventional story about Greece went like this: When Greece joined the European Union, it was poor and fractious. Andreas Papandreou, who came to power on a platform of fiery anti-American populism, reunited the country by offering generous social services, all of which were buoyed by European Union money flowing into the country. Bad habits continued: employment for life in the public sector, politicians with stuffed pockets, an aversion to foreign investment, snail-like growth, a communal lifestyle that kept people happy at the taverna table but stifled individual creativity, a national belief that beating the “system” was something the smart people did. Then, the world economy collapsed. In Greece, the old habits became harder to conceal, but like the wife of an alcoholic who refuses to notice the vodka bottle stashed in the closet, the European Union looked the other way.

  The Greek people, however, were watching. In 2008, riots tore Athens apart. The Greek police shot a fifteen-year-old kid named Alexis Grigoropoulos, and for weeks afterward, high school students and anarchists charged through the streets. “Fuck sixty-eight, fight now!” declared the protestors. The Greek youth lacked jobs, adequate education, and, in a country riven by cronyism and nepotism, a future. They had also noticed that the new flood of money from the West had not filtered down to their own lives, or to the services and universities they needed. “The flames may die down but the coals will simmer,” one young protestor told The Guardian at the time. “One little thing, and you’ll see it will ignite again. Ours is a future without work, without hope. Our grievances are so big, so many. Only a very strong government can stop the rot.” The kids cited 1967 and 1974—neither dates about which I knew much—as inspirations for 2008. “They have no hope in the current system,” a Greek shipping magnate told me about the young people in the streets, “and their only hope is in breaking everything and starting anew.” When I visited, the protests had continued, the riot police—outfitted with shields, billy clubs, tear gas guns, and nine-millimeters—following clusters of anarchists wearing black hoodies, boots, and backpacks, the international uniform of the twenty-first-century’s warrior class.

  The rest of the protestors looked rather upscale. They walked slowly and patiently to the head of Syntagma Square, where the lovely yellow Parliament building overlooked the area from a hill. At sunset, in that truly celestial Athens light, the rest of the square would be in shadow, but the Parliament building glowed. This was where the protestors of Athens spent their days shaking their fists and trying to break down the doors. Greeks ignored, if not tolerated and condoned, a certain level of dissident violence. The Greeks believe in protest, this is how they live, I thought, at that point still having no idea in what such a belief had been rooted.

  * * *

  ONE EVENING I WENT TO SEE where the refugees lived, in a neighborhood called Sofokleous, which was close to the center of the town but tucked away from the tourists. The whole world seemed to be there: the Congolese and the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis and the Afghans, the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Somalis, the Moroccans and the Nigerians. They dreamed of being smuggled deeper into Europe, but if they got caught by the police, they were thrown back to Greece, the first European country they entered. The Greeks were suffering from a financial crisis wrought by the West and a refugee crisis brought on, to a large extent, by the wars of the West. Long before the war in Syria sent thousands more refugees to its shores, the world crises were converging in Greece.

  It was a Sunday, and the Sofokleous streets were empty. My friend Iason, a journalist who had reported from Iran and Afghanistan, told me to leave my handbag at home and to dress down, in the hopes that we’d appear like heroin addicts looking for a fix. Only three years ago, this had been a stylish part of town. Then the police decided to push the refugees out of the main city squares where they often lingered, essentially corralling them into these back streets. In a country with little industry and few jobs, there wasn’t much for these foreigners to do but sell handbags, toys, drugs, or their bodies.

  I expected to see a neighborhood similar to the bad parts of West Philadelphia, but I was wrong. As we began our walk down the main thoroughfare, beautiful Athens seemed to fall away, and off a dystopian cliff: Sofokleous was where the dispossessed had been sent to rot. Some refugees looked healthy, selling socks off the sidewalk, screaming at one another. But others were bloodied and beaten, their clothes half ripped off, shoes missing. To our left, we saw three men sticking needles into their ankles; to our right, a woman sidled up to a man for some drugs. One woman’s flesh seemed to be melting off her. Iason told me to walk quickly.

  Turning up a side street, we spotted a man sitting inside a taverna called Klimataria, which first opened in 1927, when Athens was a cow town. Big barrels of wine stood against one wall; enormous pots hung from the ceilings. It looked like a happy place. It was empty. Business had declined by 70 percent, we were told, and soon the restaurant would be moving. The owner, Pericles Spiridou, had thick, wavy white hair, like the gods, and sat alone at a table with a pen and notepad.

  “The immigrants sometimes attack each other in the street with swords,” he said.

  Tourists who came to Klimataria fled with fear. Spiridou was a liberal-minded person. He didn’t disparage the immigrants themselves. Instead, he spoke of politics.

  “Where is the regulation?” he said. “Where is the police? The sta
te does nothing. No one has any control.”

  The state was at fault, but his words conjured notions of forces too big, of changes too massive, coming from places too mysterious. Spiridou was still waiting for some sense to be made of it all. Who were these people? Would anybody do anything about it? Where would they go? Spiridou was forty-nine years old. He had existential concerns. He was sitting at his taverna, seeing a financial crisis coming from the west, refugees coming from the east and south, and his restaurant becoming too dangerous to operate.

  “We’ve lived through many things,” Spiridou said. He looked heartbroken for a moment, and then angry. “Civil war, a dictatorship, the fall of communism. Now what I hope is that I live to see the fall of capitalism. That’s my dream. And I will see it.”

  His leftist language surprised me then, but soon everyone would be discussing capitalism in this way, like any other phase of history, one that would pass.

  * * *

  I USUALLY BEGAN my interviews in Athens with the same question: “How did Greece get to this place?” The narrative for why the Greeks were so angry was first explained to me by a political scientist named Stathis Kalyvas. I was relieved to find Kalyvas, and of all the nuances and details he explained to me that day, I clung to the one statement of his that fit into the worn lock of my consciousness like a key.

  “The best way to think of it is to think of Greece as a teenager,” he told me. “Many Greeks view the state with a combination of a sense of entitlement, mistrust, and dislike similar to that of teenagers vis-à-vis their parents. They expect to be funded without contributing. They often act irresponsibly without care about consequences and expect to be bailed out by the state—but that only increases their sense of dependency, which only increases their feeling of dislike for the state. And of course, they refuse to grow up. But like every teenager, they will.”

  The reason Kalyvas’s explanation appealed to me, I later realized, was because it recalled the language of modernization theory, whose intellectual proponents thought of postcolonial nations as rebellious adolescents. According to Nils Gilman, the image of foreign nations as “‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout the literature on modernization.” At the time of my interview with Kalyvas I hadn’t known anything about modernization theory. But I hadn’t needed to. Mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, a million television news broadcasts, likely even most of my college history courses all used the same language of the maturity and immaturity of nations. That rhetoric was not only condescending, but a kind of Trojan horse: it implied progress and hope—You, young Greece, may be a miserable mess now, but you, too, will grow up one day to be just like us—and so seemed somewhat harmless. But in the process weren’t all foreign countries condemned to failure so that the United States could remain the ideal? These countries would be selected as candidates in need of endless salvation by the United States—and, by extension, me, one of its foreign journalists asking that patronizing question, “What-ever in the devil went wrong here, guys?”

  But Greeks don’t let journalists and their superficial questions off so easily. Almost every Greek person of whom I asked that question did not begin in 2008; they did not even begin in the twenty-first century. They started with one of two dates: 1946 or 1949.

  “So what happened here?” I would say.

  “Look, in 1946…” they would begin.

  “Papandreou handed out pension plans by giving one to everybody who fought in the 1946 to 1949 civil war,” one said.

  “What civil war?” I asked.

  Even if they started with Greece’s early years in the European Union, their statements inevitably led back to this much earlier history. This shared history was one of the few things that united them: the conservative academic and the Communist apparatchik, the shoe salesman and the novelist, my friend Iason and the random guy I spoke to on the street. My interviewees kept referring to “the junta” and “the intervention,” and something called “Polytechnic,” all of which I gathered, with a slowly building dread, had something to do with the United States. Greece’s economic system might have been poorly managed by the Greeks, but this system had emerged in response to political events that had been equally devastating.

  “The intervention, as you know…”

  “You know, because of the U.S. intervention in Greece…”

  “Didn’t you know the first U.S. intervention of the post–Cold War period was in Greece?”

  In Greece?

  As I sat with them, not knowing about these things—about my own country—I felt as if a physical separation lay between us, as if I inhabited an entirely other universe. I had been charged with writing about them, for a magazine thousands of people would read, and yet whatever I wrote would to Greeks inevitably be read as if the magazine had dispatched an alien from another planet. Spiridou has seen a connection between the financial crisis and the refugee crisis, as if it was the dominant political structure of the world that was responsible for Greece’s catastrophes. If a crisis of this magnitude could happen, could it possibly be only a few years old? Didn’t it in fact mean that the entire economic architecture of the world was somehow faulty? And wasn’t it to some degree our architecture? Wasn’t this the American Century?

  * * *

  THE AMERICANS’ AFFECTION for fascism in the 1930s fell disproportionately on the small country of Greece. (The Americans at that time also supported Mussolini.) The threat of Bolshevism overshadowed any American concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the right-wing military dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, but at the heart of American policy was a belief that the Greeks could not govern themselves. The American ambassador in Greece at the time, Lincoln MacVeagh, said he supported Metaxas because the Greeks possessed immature political institutions. A Foreign Affairs magazine article in 1936 argued that the Greek problem was a problem of “national character”; yet another writer at the time called this problem a “disinclination to obey a leader and the concomitant tendency to split up into cliques and groups.” Those crazy Greeks, indeed.

  American concern for Greece’s “democracy” was minimal. When MacVeagh returned to America, he called the unpopular and often sinister dictator Metaxas the “savior of the country.” And yet, “Greece is still Greece,” he wrote, “slowly modernizing out of its backward depths … and inveterately disobedient and individualistic whenever immediate and constant pressure is not applied.” The supposed Bolshevik threat may have served as the United States’ practical, strategic reason for backing a right-wing dictatorship, but it would be the Americans’ deep belief in the Greeks’ backwardness that excused that dictatorship’s violence—and eventually the Americans’ violence, as well.

  One of the less famous examples of Nazi horror during World War II was its occupation of Athens. During their three-year occupation of the country, the Nazis wreaked havoc on Greek society, subjecting the population to starvation, torture, imprisonment, and death, and forever rending the bonds among the Greek people. Inevitably, the terror gave way to an insurgency by Greek rebels who were, to varying degrees, leftists and Communists. When the war ended, those who organized the leftist resistance continued fighting with the royalist Greek army that had tolerated, and at times collaborated with, the Nazis. It was, as the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, put it, a fratricide. The Greek Civil War was also one of the first battles of the Cold War.

  The Greece that the United States inherited from the British after World War II was not only poor and war-torn, much of the population homeless, but also corrupt, oligarchic, and violent, ruled by a despised king, a tiny right-wing elite, and a vast network of thugs, port dwellers, and longshoremen, who served as the king’s underground army. Up in the mountains, Communist guerrillas, many of them former resistance fighters who had battled the Nazis on behalf of the Allies, as much as for themselves, continued their ugly war. If they were beholden to anyone, it was to Tito’s Yugoslavia, not to the Kremlin; Stalin had little respect or concern fo
r the Greek guerrillas. That fact didn’t matter to the Americans. As they saw it, all of the countries around Greece had fallen: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania. Greece would be the place where the West would take its stand. The Americans’ “domino theory,” introduced to American students in lesson plans about Vietnam, originated with Greece, which was seen as the first piece to fall before knocking down Iran in one direction and Italy in the other. Greece would stay anti-Communist at any price. In 1947, Truman went to Congress and pleaded with them to pass the Truman Doctrine.

  The president’s language seventy years ago sounds surprisingly familiar. “The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government’s authority,” the president told Congress:

  The United States must supply this assistance. We have already extended to Greece certain types of relief and economic aid but these are inadequate. There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government.

  I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

  Totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union would “undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States,” Truman said. “I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way … The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”