11: Coming of Age in Europe

11 Coming of Age in Europe

1974–2004

Many things would never be the same again after 1974. The role of the national army as a means of internal control came to an end, seemingly for good. It was a role that can be traced back all the way to the Bavarians in the 1830s. Since 1909, army officers had repeatedly taken it upon themselves to make and break governments. Now, the bitter lesson of seven years of military dictatorship and the fiasco of its ending had been learned. The transition from dictatorship to pluralist democracy would call for adroit statesmanship on the part of Karamanlis. Unreconciled elements within the army would have staged another coup given half a chance. Indeed, several plots would be foiled during the first years of transition.

The first parliamentary election in almost exactly ten years was held on 17 November 1974. Only four months had passed since the collapse of the junta. The day had been chosen because it was the first anniversary of the suppression of the student revolt at the Athens Polytechnic. The election was won handsomely by a new political party that had been created almost overnight to supersede the National Radical Union that Karamanlis had led in the 1950s and 1960s. New Democracy was created very much in the image of its leader. Role models for Karamanlis, after a decade of exile in Paris, were General de Gaulle and the Gaullists.

This new centre-right political force was sharply differentiated from its pre-junta incarnation in another way too. Gone were the fierce anti-Communism and the automatic Cold War alignment with the strategic interests of the United States. One of Karamanlis’s first acts after his return was to withdraw Greece from the military wing of the NATO alliance. This was a way of channelling public anger against America, which had at the very least tolerated the regime of the ‘Colonels’ and in many quarters was blamed (and continues to be, to this day) for the disaster in Cyprus. Another of his acts, which would prove politically longer-lasting and more far-reaching, was to renew Greece’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) as a full member. This had been frozen, on the European side, with the imposition of dictatorship. The process was restarted by the Greek government in June 1975. The move away from the tutelage of the United States towards European institutions, which had begun in the wake of the Cyprus conflict in the 1950s, would be completed over the next fifteen years.

No less significant was the lifting of the ban on the KKE, the Communist Party of Greece, in time for the party to participate in the November election. The ban had been in force since 1947. The last time that the KKE had contested a parliamentary election had been in January 1936. This time it won an increased yet still modest share of the vote, but fewer seats. There was no question, now, of holding the balance of power as the communists had done in 1936. The main opposition party in the new parliament was once again the Centre Union, by this time led by Georgios Mavros, who had been one of the lieutenants of the elder Papandreou in the pre-junta parliament. The Centre Union would soon be eclipsed by another newly formed party, which in 1974 came in only just ahead of the communists but three years later would emerge as the official opposition, and from 1981 would go on to dominate Greek politics for three decades.

This was the Panhellenic Socialist Movement founded and led by Andreas Papandreou, and known by its Greek acronym, PASOK. Back in the 1960s, ‘Andreas’ – as he has been universally known to friends and foes alike – had instilled terror in government and diplomatic circles with his radical left-wing views. During the junta years, spent mostly in exile, he had become a rallying point for opposition to the dictatorship. In the uncertain climate of 1974, Andreas’s moment had not yet arrived. PASOK’s founding declaration, dated 3 September that year, announced ‘the beginning of a new political Movement’ intended to express ‘the desires and needs of the ordinary Greek, a Movement that will belong to the peasant, to the worker, to the artisan, to the wage earner, to the employee, to our courageous and enlightened youth’. Its stated aim was to create ‘a polity free of foreign control or intervention, a polity free of the control or the influence of the economic oligarchy’.¹ PASOK in its early days combined a populist appeal to the integrity of the nation with an agenda for social reform that had previously been proposed only by the communists. Greece, according to PASOK, should now seek its place on the world stage among the non-aligned nations that sided with neither bloc in the Cold War.

Above all, the new movement was to be new. It was not even to be called a ‘party’. Its symbol was a dark green half-sun topped by spiky green rays, presumed to be rising, though it could as well have been setting. An early critique by a historian and political scientist, published not long after its rise to power in 1981, would prove correct: ‘PASOK is … the prodigal son of the Center rather than the illegitimate offspring of the Left.’² But in one important respect neither of the two political forces that between them would determine the future shape of the metapolitefsi was new at all: both PASOK and New Democracy were the projections of charismatic individual leaders whose careers had been shaped during the pre-junta period.

In the event, metapolitefsi came to stand for far more wide-ranging transformations than those to to the political system, drastic though these were. Less than a month after the election, Karamanlis held a referendum on the future of the monarchy on 8 December. In another break with its pre-junta past, this time a centre-right government held aloof from the contest. It was probably the only time in their history when the people of Greece were able freely to express their opinion on the subject. Just under 70 per cent voted for a republic, on a turnout of 77 per cent. A new republican constitution was adopted the following year. Ever since, the official name for the Greek state has been the ‘Hellenic Republic’. This is the constitution that remains in force today, subject to some later revisions. A year later, after much deliberation and public discussion, an act of parliament established that demotic Greek was to replace the hybrid katharevousa as the official language of education – and therefore, in practice, in most walks of life (exceptions are the Church and the law). This move brought an end to another form of polarization, between rival forms of written Greek, that had become codified in the early twentieth century. During the second half of the 1970s, the divisions that had split Greece along different fault lines for half a century were finally, and rapidly, disappearing.

Another transformation that has come about since 1974 has had an incalculable and continuing effect. This one took place outside the country’s borders and beyond the control of the Greek state and its institutions. This was the division of Cyprus by the Turkish army. Ever since 1974, the Republic of Cyprus has had jurisdiction in practice over slightly less than two-thirds of the island’s territory. The Constitution of 1960 remains legally in force, with its national flag and both Greek and Turkish as official languages. In theory, and in international law, the government of the Republic of Cyprus retains legitimate authority over all of Cyprus, with the exception of the two British sovereign base areas. But the reality since 1974 has been that the southern part of Cyprus has become a second Greek nation state. This is a situation with few precedents (Germany and Austria come to mind), and it is anybody’s guess how it might evolve in future.

Greek Cypriots after 1974, with international support, rebuilt their devastated country and its economy with spectacular success. Relations between the two Greek governments, of Greece and of Cyprus, have been cordial throughout the period. There has been no return to the mutual vendetta between the Greek junta and the democratic Cyprus of Makarios. Instead, successive governments in Greece have loyally stood up for their sister state, both diplomatically and in providing for its defence. But although the Cypriot state shadows the Greek in many things – its national anthem, national holidays, the form of the Greek language used in its education system and bureaucracy – in other ways the period since 1974 has seen the beginning of a divergence both in politics and in culture. The word ‘Helladic’ has been heard with increasing frequency, not just in Cyprus but to some extent in Greece too, to distinguish the Greek state and its subjects from the Greek institutions and the Greek citizens of the island of Cyprus – a subtle distinction from ‘Hellenic’, since both peoples regard themselves equally as Hellenes.

For these very good reasons, the story of the Greek nation since 1974 may be predominantly, but never can be only, the story of a single Greek state.

A DECADE OF ‘CHANGE’

Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) swept to power in an electoral landslide in October 1981, capturing just short of 50 per cent of the popular vote, and close to 60 per cent of seats in parliament. It had been done on the one-word promise of ‘CHANGE’. A great many things did change during the rest of the decade, not least among them the governing party itself and its charismatic leader.

It was the first time that Greeks had ever elected an explicitly socialist government. It was also the first time since the early twentieth century (some would say ever) that a change of government had come about entirely through the democratic process, without either violence or the threat of violence, and without interference, whether actual or suspected, by the army, the throne or foreign powers. In that sense 1981 marks a turning point. It would prove to be the first of many orderly changes from one government to the next, a pattern that at the time of writing has not been broken since.

The most radical and far-reaching changes brought about by PASOK were all introduced during its first few years in power. All were domestic, and can broadly be described as social. The most dramatic, and long overdue, was the retrospective recognition of all combatants who had fought against the occupying powers during the Second World War as the ‘National Resistance’. For the first time in almost forty years, the role of communists and other supporters of the left in resisting the Axis could be openly and publicly acknowledged. Historians were no longer obliged to step around a taboo topic. Memoirs of those who had taken part began to be published. Novelists, who as a rule had studiously avoided the subject too, now began to mine their own and the collective memory, to begin to come to terms with experiences that until this time had been buried in silence. Veterans of the left were no longer persecuted or marginalized, but became eligible for the pensions that the ‘anti-communist state’ of the 1950s and 1960s had awarded to former collaborators but not to them. Those who had found refuge in the Soviet bloc during the civil war, and their descendants, were for the first time free to return. The long-delayed process of healing had begun. It would not be completed until shortly after the fall of the second PASOK government in 1989.

Other legislative changes related to family law. Adultery ceased to be a criminal offence. Divorce (never outlawed, as in Catholic countries) could for the first time be obtained by mutual consent, without the obligation to prove adultery as before. Civil marriage was introduced, despite objections from the Church. Women’s rights and new standards of gender equality for the first time entered the statute book. Spending on pensions and social welfare went up by almost 50 per cent during PASOK’s first four-year term in government. A national health service was created in 1983. New universities and technical colleges sprang up all over Greece. At the same time, the old hierarchy of university governance was shaken up, in part along the lines of the American system that Papandreou had known in his previous life as an economics professor.

PASOK also changed the way that governments were run. Beginning in 1982, at the highest ranks of the civil service tenured professionals were replaced by political appointees. The day-to-day exercise of power became politicized in a way it had not been during earlier periods when governments had been less stable or more extreme, such as the 1930s. Since the early 1980s, commentators have noted the absence of a corps of capable senior civil servants to manage transitions between governments, or indeed to advise on the implementation of policy.³ The creation of a genuinely mass party, for the first time in Greek history, also had a transformative effect on the traditional system of patronage, one that has come in for trenchant criticism ever since. It was no longer individual members of parliament who were expected to distribute privileges to their voters, but the party to its members. Far from abolishing the inherited system of patrons and clients, often identified with ‘corruption’, the effect of PASOK’s dominance of the political landscape was to reshape it into a state-run institution.

Perhaps the most visible sign of change during the 1980s was the increase in the general standard of living. This was brought about not by growth in the economy, as it had been in the 1950s and 1960s, but by expansion of the state. The role of the state at this time has been called ‘parasitical’. The growth in the size of an increasingly politicized civil service was only slightly greater during the 1980s, under PASOK, than it had been under New Democracy before it. But the combined effect was that over the two decades until 1991 the number of public servants more than doubled. PASOK policies on welfare and tax have come in for even more excoriating criticism. The traditional ‘tax and spend’ policy associated with left-of-centre governments, according to one caustic observation, in the Greek case became ‘spend and don’t tax’ – since the taxation system itself became one of the channels through which successive governments (not only PASOK) would seek to ‘buy’ electoral support.⁴

But if the methods had changed, there was little that was new about attitudes to tax and the state in Greece in the 1980s and 1990s, either on the part of governments or those governed. Kapodistrias at the end of the 1820s or King Otto’s Bavarian advisers in the 1830s would have recognized the situation perfectly. Papandreou and PASOK, no less than those early predecessors, were committed to bringing their country into line, at least superficially, with what passed for ‘modernization’ in the developed world at the time. And superficially, at least, they were remarkably successful, just as their predecessors had been in the 1830s. But the mapping of standards and practices derived from the developed world onto attitudes and behaviours that were deeply ingrained in quite different traditions would once again begin to produce fractures, in the period of metapolitefsi just as in the early years of the Greek state. It is often said that these attitudes are the legacy of centuries of Ottoman oppression. The truth is that they arose out of the very particular conditions of the creation of the Greek state itself, which was seen in its earliest years as a cash cow to be milked in lieu of the plunder that had dried up with the departure of the oppressors. It is debatable how far that perception had changed during the last decades of the twentieth century – or indeed has changed today.

Paradoxically, one of the most effective agents of change during the 1980s and beyond, the one that most conspicuously had an impact on living standards and that also affected the entire landscape of the country, was neither Papandreou nor PASOK but something that they had started out by fiercely opposing. This was Greece’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor of the European Union (EU) of today. Very much thanks to the personal initiative of Karamanlis, going back to his first premiership at the end of the 1950s, and renewed after 1974, Greece became the tenth member in January 1981. Papandreou came to power ten months later. PASOK had from the beginning been viscerally opposed to the EEC. The agenda for ‘CHANGE’ left no room for dependency on foreign powers, neither the United States (whose influence in Greece would never recover after 1974) nor the emerging European supranational body. But the Greek equivalent of ‘Euroscepticism’ was a short-lived phenomenon, and it peaked in the election of October 1981.

After four years of being an unwilling partner in the European enterprise, the PASOK government began to discover unexpected advantages of membership during its second term, after being re-elected in 1985. The economy was struggling. Greece, as one of the poorest members, was a net beneficiary, and the benefits exceeded all expectations. In those early days leading up to the completion of the European Single Market in 1992, a large part of the EEC budget was taken up with transfers from the wealthiest states to the poorest. It was a version of PASOK’s own policy of income redistribution writ large. Huge sums came to Greece in the form of ‘Support Frameworks’ and ‘Stability Packages’, while the Common Agricultural Policy brought unprecedented subsidies to Greek farmers. Not surprisingly, the farmers were grateful. There were votes in EEC membership after all.

And so, almost in spite of itself, PASOK during its second term began to morph into a Western-style social democratic party. From its instinctively Europhobic beginnings it became increasingly wedded to the project of European integration. Thanks to the influx of European funds, in tandem with changing attitudes, lifestyles began to look more Western too. Greek cinema had never recovered the ground it had lost to television after 1968. Now people stayed at home to watch TV – especially after the licensing of the first commercial channels in 1990. The traditional men-only kapheneion, where elderly denizens played backgammon, drank coffee and disputed the contents of the daily newspapers, began to be displaced by smart bars where young people of both sexes would congregate. The taverna serving locally produced food, with a predictable menu subject to official price control, had increasingly to compete with Western-style restaurants offering international cuisine. The old, somewhat relentless, conventions of Greek hospitality were relaxed. As a foreigner, it became permissible to be entertained to a meal in a public restaurant rather than lavishly at home – though never to pay for it. In the eyes of visitors from Western Europe or North America, Greece was rapidly becoming less ‘exotic’ and more ‘European’. For the majority of Greeks, life was becoming more comfortable than it had ever been.

Before long the change would spread to the physical landscape. Projects born in the late 1980s, and funded by European programmes, would go on to completion during the next decade and a half: among them a network of motorways that has reduced journey times across the mountains of the mainland from a whole day to a few hours, a much-enlarged Metro system and a new airport for Athens, and the spectacular Charilaos Trikoupis Suspension Bridge across the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, almost three kilometres long, which opened in 2004.

Apart from the move towards European integration, which was unplanned, it was probably in external relations that the promised ‘CHANGE’ was least in evidence. When it came to foreign policy, PASOK has been described as ‘a party with a Western mind and a Third World heart’.⁵ In its language and symbolic gestures, during its early years, it spoke from its heart. Its actions were usually more pragmatic, and more closely aligned with Western priorities than its heart would acknowledge. For that reason, actual change from the policies of the past was much less than many observers were expecting.

By the time of PASOK’s first election victory, the previous government had already rejoined the military wing of the NATO alliance that it had left in 1974 – and for a very good reason. NATO had not been able to prevent the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. But it was only through membership of the military alliance that Greece could hope to maintain its armed forces in a ratio to those of its much larger and better-armed neighbour. And mediation by NATO still looked like the best protection against further conflict with another member of the same alliance. Greece was in a weak position, as much less strategically important in the Cold War than Turkey. And although it was hardly the fault of Greece’s post-1974 civilian governments, it was an uncomfortable fact that the war in Cyprus had been started by the Greek junta, with its attempt to topple Makarios and impose Enosis, and not by Turkey.

Another factor had entered the equation, to strain relations with Turkey still further. This was the discovery of an oilfield off the northern Greek island of Thasos in late 1973. The international oil crisis caused by the Yom Kippur War that autumn was beginning to bite. With the shortage of oil threatening the entire Western economy, Turkish exploration ships began to prospect beneath the continental shelf in international waters in the Aegean. This was the beginning of an ongoing dispute that has still not been resolved, about the extent of Greek jurisdiction over the Aegean seabed and airspace. Once again, Turkish governments were attempting to revise the terms of their country’s founding ‘National Pact’, in response to conditions that could not have been foreseen at the time when it had been drawn up after the First World War. Greek responses were no less robust under PASOK than they had been under its predecessor. Indeed Papandreou’s rhetoric was the more belligerent. When a Turkish survey ship put to sea to prospect for oil in the Aegean in the summer of 1976, Papandreou in opposition notoriously called upon the Karamanlis government to sink it. By the time that PASOK came to power in 1981, no one could plausibly claim any longer that the Greek left was ‘soft’ on the integrity of the state or lacking in patriotism.

Finally, there was a darker side of life that proved stubbornly resistant to the promised ‘CHANGE’. This was domestic terrorism. After 1974 there was a proliferation of tiny splinter groups on the far left that had been formed to oppose the dictatorship. For some of those, the revolutionary potential of the brief student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973 became an end in itself. Resistance to the ‘Colonels’ had seen respectable professors and middle-class students experimenting with home-made bombs. Methods that today would be called ‘terrorist’ were widely approved among those who resisted the regime, and indeed by some of their foreign supporters. During the years of the junta, little damage had been done. But among a tiny minority the methods of the tight-knit underground cell, bomb attacks and targeted assassinations had a continued appeal after the change to civilian rule. The most notorious, and longest-lasting, of these terrorist groups styled itself ‘Revolutionary Organization 17 November’ or ‘17N’ for short – in this way appropriating the historic date of the suppression of the Polytechnic uprising. When 17N was finally wound up by the Greek police in 2002, its leader was found to have been a former mathematics student who had been living underground since 1971, and was by then fifty-eight years old.

The campaign by 17N began in 1975, with the murder of the CIA station chief in Athens. At the time this could be seen as the extremist tip of widespread anti-Americanism that had already seen the murder of the US ambassador to Cyprus the year before. Other murders followed, of police officers who had either been involved in repression under the junta or in enforcing public order more recently. Then in 1983, right in the middle of PASOK’s first term of office, the group stepped up its activities. Altogether twenty-three people are known to have been its victims, including a prominent newspaper owner, several industrialists, members of parliament, and American, British and Turkish diplomats.

Throughout almost three decades of small-scale but deadly terror, the inability of successive Greek governments to put a stop to it brought many allegations of incompetence, or complicity, or both. The declared ideology of the group has been summed up as ‘anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-statist and anti-totalitarian’.⁶ While their apparent ambition to become the spearhead of a mass movement never stood any chance, there has remained a constituency within Greek public opinion that shares these attitudes. Even as recently as November 2017, when the temporary release of one of the ringleaders of 17N on parole provoked international criticism, a group of supporters turned up outside the prison to welcome the event. Although 17N is now a thing of the past, political violence has not disappeared from Greece. The view can be heard even today that targeted terrorism of this sort remains a potential threat. This was one case of ‘CHANGE’ that PASOK was able to bring about only after it had been in power for the greater part of twenty years.

By the end of the 1980s nothing had changed more radically than the PASOK administration itself. During its second term of office, from 1985 onwards, its largesse led to the growth of a widespread sense of entitlement. At the same time, the cost had proved beyond the means of the state. A loan from the EEC came with stringent conditions attached. For a time these lowered the real value of wages very considerably. Disillusionment with the governing party and its promises set in. The next few years saw a wave of strikes and demonstrations. It soon began to emerge that the sense of entitlement went right through the party organization too, all the way to the top. Cases of fraud and misappropriation of public funds began to become regular news items. When it emerged that a prominent banker and owner of government-supporting media had built his business empire on more than $200 million embezzled from the bank where he had been employed, the scandal reached far beyond Greece. From his temporary refuge in the United States, the accused banker, George Koskotas, made lurid claims about bribes paid to senior members of the government. While the country prepared for a parliamentary election in the summer of 1989, several ministers were forced out or resigned in disgust. Papandreou himself stood accused, and would remain under suspicion until he was acquitted by a narrow majority vote in the Supreme Court in 1992.

The Koskotas scandal was probably the deciding factor with the electorate. But other things came together during 1988 and the first six months of 1989 to doom Papandreou’s chances of a third consecutive term in power. A series of revelations about clandestine surveillance by government agencies brought back all too familiar memories of the pre-junta ‘para-state’. Then there was ‘Andreas’ himself. Shortly before the election campaign, Papandreou had undergone surgery in the United Kingdom for a serious heart condition. The possibility of having to find a new leader at short notice paralysed a party that had never learned to function independently of its charismatic chief. The charisma was no longer the same either. Papandreou’s affair with Dimitra Liani, an air hostess half his age, had become public knowledge in 1988. As the election campaign gathered momentum, he made clear his intention to divorce his American wife and marry Liani, which he did shortly afterwards. How far this damaged his reputation is hard to tell. It has often been said that traditional-minded male voters identified with the virility projected by the national leader. On the other hand, the divorced Margaret Papandreou had been a champion of the women’s movement in Greece. She, their children and their supporters took the divorce badly.

A near-decade of ‘CHANGE’ ended on 18 June 1989, when New Democracy by a narrow margin took the largest share of the popular vote but did not have enough seats in parliament to form a government.

IDENTITIES IN CONFLICT

By the time that happened, the fortunes of political parties and their leaders in one small Balkan state (or for that matter in even smaller Cyprus) were becoming overshadowed by momentous developments elsewhere. These would prove sufficient to change the geopolitical map of Europe and would irreversibly reshape power relationships across the entire world. In the euphoria of the time it was possible for serious historians in the West to talk of the ‘end of history’.

The election that PASOK lost in June 1989 fell on the same day as the second round of voting in Poland that began the peaceful transition from communist to democratic rule. During the next three months, while, one after another, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed and the ‘Iron Curtain’ dividing the continent came down, Greece was ruled by an unlikely cohabitation. A coalition of far-left parties, including the once-banned KKE, made common cause with the centre-right New Democracy to outflank PASOK. Such a thing would have been unimaginable at any previous time in the country’s history. A second election in the same year, held in November, coincided with the symbolic opening of the Berlin Wall. This time, in Greece, a precariously balanced ‘rainbow’ coalition held the ring for another three months. It would take a third election, in April 1990, before New Democracy could form a government, with the flimsiest of majorities, that would hold onto power for the next three years.

Most memorable about the three governments that came to power in Greece between 1989 and 1993 was not anything they did, but rather the orderliness of the process by which they came and went. This was the strongest proof yet that democratic institutions had at last become fully embedded in Greek political life. The New Democracy government was headed by the septuagenarian Konstantinos Mitsotakis, a dynastic descendant of the Venizelos family. While it lasted, the Mitsotakis government brought to bear on Greece a measure of the ‘neo-liberal’ agenda associated with the US and UK administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher respectively in the previous decade – and a foretaste of the ‘austerity’ to come much later.

But these internal political shifts were dwarfed in importance by the fallout from the end of the Cold War. After 1989, Greeks, like everybody else, would have to come to terms with a new political and economic reality. How they did so, and the new strains and renewed anxieties brought about by the adjustment, would become the main story of the Greek nation during the last decade of the century and beyond.

Firstly and most obviously, the new situation brought Greece and Greeks almost unlimited opportunities. For the first time since the 1930s, the Greek state would no longer be cut off from its Balkan hinterland to the north. While every other Balkan state found itself forced into an abrupt transition from a communist command economy to the ‘capitalist’ system of the West, Greece was the only country in the region already to be fully integrated into that system. Those with an eye to history, and not distracted by ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’, could see the possibilities for a rejuvenated ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. It was like the second half of the eighteenth century all over again. Greeks, their language, and institutions in which they were already deeply embedded were poised to play a transformative role throughout the region, this time founded not just upon a shared religious tradition but on the enlightened self-interest of mature democratic nation states. The prospects had never looked so good for the kind of Balkan civic cooperation dreamed of by Rigas Velestinlis almost exactly two centuries earlier.

To some extent, slowly and modestly, this prospect has been realized over the intervening years. Greek firms invest and do business in many of the neighbouring states to the north. This is particularly the case in Romania, where their presence and their visibility intriguingly (and of course within limits) mirror the ascendancy of the Phanariots in the same region during the eighteenth century. The accession of both Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union in 2007 would no doubt have hastened this process further, had it not been for the financial crisis that began shortly afterwards.

But the role played by Greece and Greeks in the economic, political and cultural life of the region since 1989 has been much less than might have been expected. Throughout much of the Balkans, particularly in the early 1990s, the ‘ancestral voices’ had it. Greece would be spared the shooting wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia throughout the decade, but not the passions or the fears that fuelled them.

This is because the second consequence of the end of the Cold War was a return to the ‘ethnic’ rivalries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the deeper religious divisions underpinning them. One of those conflicts, which had been frozen during half a century of authoritarian communist rule, was the ‘Macedonian Struggle’. This one had peaked during the first decade of the century. It ought to have been laid to rest by the Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War in 1913. Then, the geographical area known as Macedonia had been split among the aspiring nation states of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. But inevitably this left behind unfinished business.

The population of ‘Slavo-Macedonians’ (speakers of a Slavic language who had become subjects of the Greek state after 1912) had become greatly reduced after many of them allied with the communist side in the Greek Civil War of the 1940s. Because it has never been officially recognized, the size of this community in the 1990s and beyond cannot be reliably estimated. Probably many more Greeks in the region speak a Slavic language at home and among themselves than would willingly identify as ‘Slavo-Macedonians’. And, despite the suspicions of generations of Greek officialdom, there is no reason to suppose that as a group they are any less loyal to the state than other Greeks. On the other side of the border, the southernmost part of what had previously been Serbia had been constituted, since 1943, as the ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’. For as long as Yugoslavia remained an integral, federal state, this was purely an internal matter for the Yugoslavs. Then on 8 September 1991 a referendum in the Socialist Republic came out in favour of full independence, following the examples of Slovenia and Croatia a few months earlier. A new ‘Republic of Macedonia’ applied to the EU and the UN for international recognition.

The reaction in Greece and among Greeks worldwide was visceral and extreme. Outside observers, including representatives of international organizations, foreign ministries and media around the world, have repeatedly found it incomprehensible. What possible threat could the new state be – landlocked, impoverished, with no army to speak of, with a population a fifth the size of that of Greece, and split between a Slavic-speaking majority and a sizeable minority of ethnic Albanians?⁷

Internationally minded Greek commentators at the time, and historians more recently, have been relentless in cataloguing the series of ‘errors’ on the part of successive Greek governments that followed. Over the next four years Greece would become isolated over the issue. Prospects for a leading role in the redevelopment of the Balkans after Communism seemed to have been needlessly squandered. But this is one of those cases where it is hard to tell whether governments and the educated elite were leading public opinion or being led by it – as was certainly happening elsewhere in the Balkans at this time. In the first months of 1992, huge demonstrations took to the streets in Athens and Salonica. Newspaper editorials were uncompromising. Protests were not confined to Greece. In Australia, Greek and Yugoslav immigrant communities clashed in several cities.⁸ As late as 1996, an academic publisher in the United Kingdom pulled out of a contract to publish a serious anthropological study based on fieldwork in northern Greece, for fear of commercial reprisals to its operations in Greece, while the author received death threats.

It was not the independence of the republic to their north that raised tempers to such a pitch among Greeks. It was the name. The claim by another state to a name that Greeks saw as indissolubly part of their own history and geography (since ‘Macedonia’ is the name of a region of Greece) was seized upon as an existential threat. In February 1992 the Mitsotakis government boxed itself into a corner by committing itself to the public position that ‘no use of the term “Macedonia” in the appellation of the newly independent state would be recognized by Greece’. This was no more than to enshrine as official policy the popular, if unwieldy, slogan that had already gone viral: ‘No to the name of Macedonia and its derivatives!’⁹ Arrivals at Athens airport were met by ground staff wearing lapel badges that read (in English): ‘Macedonia is Greek. Read history!’

At just this time, the veteran Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos died. His funeral in Salonica on 1 April 1992 became the occasion for a national outpouring of feeling over the issue. This was because Andronikos, back in 1977, had crowned his career with the discovery of the royal tombs of the ancient Macedonian dynasty and with it the proof that beneath the modern village of Vergina in Greece lay the remains of the long-lost capital city of the ancient kingdom. The partially cremated remains of King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, had been found in one of the tombs. Some archaeologists have been sceptical about these identifications, as archaeologists will. But they had already been widely accepted before 1992. The crowd that followed Andronikos on his last journey could have been grieving for a dead king of their own. The physical presence of Philip II of Macedon, and on incontrovertibly Greek soil, provided the crowd with a tangible link back through the byways of history. Andronikos’s discoveries could seem like a comforting, visible proof that ‘Macedonia is Greek’, whether by that was meant a name or a place or both.¹⁰

A year later, in 1993, a cumbersome compromise was thrashed out at the United Nations. The new state would be internationally recognized under a name that was explicitly intended to be temporary, pending a more elegant solution. This was ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, or FYROM for short. Greece, having previously refused to recognize any name that included ‘Macedonia’, had reluctantly to agree, as did the government of the new republic, led by Kiro Gligorov, a few months later. The issue then remained deadlocked for twenty-five years, during which time most governments have quietly recognized Greece’s northern neighbour by the name ‘Macedonia’. But not Greece, where the English acronym FYROM is still mandatory. Some Greek politicians even refuse to allow the full form of the name, as though the acronym had become a word in itself and had nothing to do with the contested ‘Macedonia’. In daily speech, and indeed on road signs that direct traffic towards its border, the neighbouring state is still known by the name of its capital city, Skopje. In Greek the name ‘Macedonia’ can only ever be applied to the northern provinces of Greece. And a usage that is now routine in English, on both sides of the Atlantic, is still liable to cause offence to most Greeks. It remains to be seen whether the belated agreement, signed between the prime ministers of the two countries on the border, not far from the town of Kastoria, on 17 June 2018, will be ratified by their respective parliaments, or accepted in daily usage. If it is, then both ‘FYROM’ and ‘Republic of Macedonia’ will disappear from maps, to be replaced by ‘Republic of North Macedonia’, or ‘North Macedonia’ for short, almost three decades after the dispute first arose.

Back in 1993, Greece’s acceptance of the compromise ‘FYROM’ brought down the New Democracy government. Antonis Samaras, who as foreign minister had taken a strong populist line over the issue, had been dropped from the government the previous year. In response, he set up his own rival political party, called Political Spring, with an explicitly nationalist agenda. It took only two more defections from the ranks of the ruling party to put an end to the government’s majority in parliament. PASOK and Papandreou returned to power – but soon decided to follow a policy over the name of the neighbouring state that aligned more closely with the populism of Samaras than with the stance taken by the previous government.

Abandoned, as Papandreou saw it, by its Western allies, Greece took unilateral action in February 1994. A trade embargo against FYROM caused damage to the economy of both countries, and probably helped to foment ethnic tension within the fledgling state, which would experience violent confrontations between its Slav majority and Albanian minority in 1995 and again in 2001. The measure did nothing to resolve the issue of the name, not least because most foreign actors were inclined to dismiss it as trivial. With vicious wars still going on between Serbs and Croats, and within Bosnia and Herzegovina, these were bound to be higher priorities for international institutions. The most that could be achieved was an ‘interim agreement’ between Greece and FYROM in September 1995. According to this, Greece agreed to lift the embargo and to recognize the state under its temporary name, in return for modifications to its constitution and its flag.

These were important concessions. Because even if the international community has always played this down, the early stages of FYROM’s pitch for independence had been driven by exactly the same kind of nationalist passions that were in evidence throughout the former Yugoslavia. The original form of the FYROM flag had been based on the motif of the ‘sunburst’ or ‘Vergina star’. Since the late 1970s this emblem has been associated in the public imagination with the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, because it features prominently as a decorative motif among the treasures of Andronikos’s excavation. In its earlier version, the constitution of the new republic had referred to a minority of its own ‘Macedonian’ subjects in Greece. And wild talk of extending that territory to the sea and embracing Salonica, however implausible it might sound, had hardly been conducive to neighbourly relations. If the memoirs of its first leader, Gligorov, later published in Athens, are to be believed, his agenda in the 1990s had been the exact equivalent of the ‘Grand Idea’ for Greece that had dominated Greek thinking during the later nineteenth century: ‘We have already achieved the freedom of one third of Macedonians … and have not yet addressed the question as to what happens about our brothers in the other dispersed parts of Macedonia.’¹¹

But if the crisis was defused in 1995, Greece had lost badly in terms of international prestige and to some extent also in realizing its potential for economic and cultural activity in the Balkans.

Another change that came with the ending of the Cold War has proved even more far-reaching and irreversible. This is inward migration. Throughout its history, the Greek state had always exported surplus population. The dramatic influxes of refugees during the decade of war between 1912 and the early 1920s were the exception. Then, the incomers had all been Orthodox Christians and most of them Greek speakers. Now, with the opening of the northern borders and the relaxation of travel restrictions for citizens of the former Soviet Union, a steady stream of new arrivals began. At first and for some time afterwards, many of these were ‘ethnic’ Greeks, either from Albania or from the Russian hinterland of the Black Sea. These last were known, often dismissively, as ‘Russo-Pontians’, who spoke either a different dialect from standard Greek or, as often as not, no Greek at all. They were the descendants of settlers who had been attracted to Russia in the time of Catherine the Great, two centuries before. Albania had been a closed country, not even aligned with the Soviet Union, under the autocratic rule of its communist leader Enver Hoxha for most of the last half-century. There are tragic tales of families that had been arbitrarily split up at the end of the Second World War coming to terms with painful reunion after more than a generation.¹²

Soon it was not just ‘ethnic’ Greeks who were arriving over the mountains into northwest Greece. Such was the poverty in post-communist Albania that Greece became overnight a magnet for economic migrants. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Throughout much of the 1990s the largest proportion of immigrants to Greece was made up of Albanians. The immigration service was soon overwhelmed. Very many, perhaps the majority, worked illegally in the country for years. Crime rates rose, especially for various forms of robbery. Press reports and daily discourse routinely placed the blame on ‘Albanians’, although it has been noticed that the assumption is not borne out by police reports. Soon migrants were arriving from further afield, as well as from other formerly communist states in the Balkans. A report from 1996 mentions Poles, Filipinos, Egyptians and other Africans, and estimated the number of illegal immigrants at between five and seven per cent of the total population.¹³ For the first time in its history, Greece in the 1990s was rapidly becoming ‘multi-cultural’.

Another development that affected many parts of the world during the same period was the resurgence of religion as a determinant of identity. This was especially visible throughout the Eastern European states that had had a strong Orthodox tradition before the imposition of communist rule. In Greece, an influential group of intellectuals, mostly with a background of involvement in the political left, began to instigate the ‘rediscovery of a forgotten but authentic Orthodox tradition’. This movement has been described as not ‘a mere religious revival, but a real acquaintance with the spiritual legacy of Greek Orthodox civilization, a civilization clearly differentiated from that of the West’.¹⁴ Known collectively, though never by its adherents, as ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’, this intellectual current has gone hand in hand with other visible signs of a revival of religious practice. These include increasing church attendance, the funding and building of new Orthodox churches in Greece, Cyprus and in many places further afield, such as Australia. A particularly noticeable sign has been the transformation of the self-governing monastic community of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Orthodoxy, which has seen a remarkable resurgence with a rejuvenated and often highly educated intake of monks in recent decades.¹⁵

The academic philosopher Christos Giannaras has published a series of books in which he identifies an essentially Byzantine Christian substratum of Greek society and communal life, and seeks to wean fellow Greeks away from what he sees as slavish adoption of ideas and practices emanating from an alien West. In an overtly more political mode, Kostas Zouraris seeks to uncover this Christian and Orthodox ‘authentic’ Greek way of life in all periods of Greek history. Zouraris is a former communist who at the time of writing holds a portfolio in the government of Alexis Tsipras, representing the minority coalition partner ‘Independent Greeks’, a small party of the far right. Zouraris has also taken a strident public position on the ‘Macedonia’ issue, a fact that in itself demonstrates the uneasy co-existence of national with religious identity – since the majority Orthodox population of FYROM logically belongs on the same side of the East/West divide that ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’ has brought back to prominence.

Although never spilling over into violence as in neighbouring former Yugoslavia, these tensions and these cross-currents of identity were strong in Greece throughout the 1990s and into the new century. Sometimes they manifested themselves in unexpected ways. In the Yugoslav wars, for instance, Greek public opinion generally, and sometimes strongly, aligned with the Serbs. This put the country at odds with opinion almost everywhere in the Western world. The reason is not far to seek. The Serbs share the same Orthodox heritage. Both nations have built their modern identity on an antipathy to the Ottomans who had ruled over them for several hundreds of years. And in pre-Yugoslavia days, Greece had fought alongside Serbia against their common oppressors. (The fact that Serbia at that time had included the territory of FYROM could be conveniently overlooked – that was one of the cross-currents.)

The last of the Yugoslav wars was fought in 1998 and 1999 over the province of Kosovo. There, the Albanian-speaking majority had asserted its independence from a federation that by this time consisted of only Serbia and Montenegro. Unlike most of the previous conflicts, this one brought overt armed intervention from abroad, led by the United States. For three months, from March to June 1999, NATO bombers attacked Serbia. The Greek government, as a member of NATO, was obliged to support the operation officially, but did not take part in it. At the same time a tide of public revulsion took to the streets of Greece’s cities. At one point demonstrators broke through police lines to invade the official residence of the British ambassador. As the ambassador later recalled, more serious damage was only averted because the residence’s footman, himself a Cretan, shamed the rioters by telling them that the house they were ransacking had belonged to the great Venizelos.¹⁶

Public reaction against the NATO bombing of Serbia had been stoked by the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, who had been elected the previous year. Archbishop Christodoulos would do much during his ten-year reign to bring the Church back into the forefront of public life in Greece. Never afraid to court controversy, he was a fiery speaker and could rouse a crowd. Christodoulos was a modernizer in some respects – greatly extending the Church’s charitable work and for the first time making systematic use of social media, for instance. He shared with the ‘Neo-Orthodox’ movement a deep suspicion of globalization and an insistence on the particularity of the Greek Orthodox historical experience. This brought him into conflict with a government that by this time was working hard to consolidate Greece’s position within the European Union. In 2000 the PASOK government decided to remove religious affiliation from the identity cards that are compulsory for all Greek citizens, in line with practice elsewhere in the EU. Christodoulos and the bishops once again mobilized public opinion in a series of protests that lasted for almost a year. A petition calling for the restoration of religious data on ID cards gathered more than three million signatures – close to half the adult population of the country.

In the end the government held its ground. The issue petered out and the Church gave up its campaign – but not before the whole question of the relation between Church and state had been thoroughly aired in Greece and its reverberations had been picked up around the world. In the case of the ID cards, it was literally identity that was at stake. People were once again forced to ask themselves, as they had first done probably during the 1830s, when the Autocephalous Church of Greece was created, what is it that defines a Hellene? Is it religion, ethnicity, the ancient heritage (as exemplified in the debacle over the name of FYROM), or participation in the secular institutions of the state?

In the wake of the ending of the Cold War, during the 1990s and beyond, questions and anxieties that are as old as the Greek state itself were finding new forms of expression – but not necessarily answers.

EUROPE’S GOOD CITIZEN

Andreas Papandreou died on 23 June 1996. Six months earlier, as he lay terminally ill in the Onassis Heart Hospital in Athens, his party had elected a very different figure to succeed him as prime minister – and only later, with some reluctance, as party leader. Kostas Simitis had studied law and economics in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Like his predecessor he had worked as an academic before becoming a politician. There the similarities ended. Whereas the larger-than-life personality of ‘Andreas’ had always roused powerful passions, Simitis was (and is) a quiet, retiring man of unassuming appearance and polite, almost diffident manner. Papandreou’s populist rhetoric was always far fiercer than his actions. Simitis, by contrast, set out quietly to transform Greek politics and the standing of his country among its peers.

Simitis has been described, in hindsight, as ‘one of the most successful prime ministers in Greek history’.¹⁷ He also served for the longest continuous term, narrowly beating the records set by Karamanlis between 1955 and 1963 and Papandreou between 1981 and 1989. Simitis’s programme can be summed up in the one word, frequently used by his supporters and inner circle to this day: ‘modernization’. His approach to governing was what would nowadays be called ‘technocratic’. He brought new talent into his top team, in the form of high-calibre advisers. Foremost among these was Nikos Themelis, who became director of the prime minister’s office in 1996 and loyally served Simitis throughout. Not coincidentally, the indefatigable Themelis also emerged during the same years as a best-selling and much respected novelist, writing historical blockbusters that brought to life a more nuanced picture of Greek society during the last decades of Ottoman rule than could be found in official histories. Academic experts were brought in to advise on such matters as infrastructure, pension reform, IT and administration. Not all of their proposals proved politically possible to implement. Reform to the pension system, which might have pre-empted the much more savage cuts introduced during the ‘crisis’ period since 2010, was shelved in 2001 in response to political pressure.

It has been said that Simitis’s ‘technocratic’ approach ‘never gained the sympathy of the Greek electorate’.¹⁸ But two successive election victories, in 1996 and 2000, proved that he was at least as popular as a party that had been somewhat tarnished by the populism and unrealized promises of the previous decade. It was from within the ranks of PASOK itself that the most systematic opposition to his modernization programme came. A populist wing that remained loyal to the ideas and the example of ‘Andreas’ was a constant threat to the prime minister’s authority, and after Simitis’s resignation in 2004 would oust the ‘modernizers’ from its senior ranks. The fact that the implementation of government policies was in the hands of such a small group of trusted advisers has also been identified as a weakness – though one not confined to the Simitis administration alone.¹⁹

The programme of ‘modernization’ soon coalesced around two high-profile, overriding objectives. Both were sufficiently eye-catching to mobilize popular support across a wide spectrum that went far beyond party politics. One was to host the 2004 Olympic Games, the other to join the European single currency, the euro. A little over a year after the Simitis government came to power, its bid to the International Olympic Committee was successful in September 1997. At first cold-shouldered from the euro project, Greece was accepted, more or less at the last minute, into its third stage at the beginning of 2001, and joined the new currency in time for its launch a year later.

These successes were not just emblematic in themselves. Each had knock-on effects on the daily lives of Greeks. The Olympics provided a focal point for an ambitious series of infrastructure projects, not just in and around Athens but at venues all over the country. Despite much carping and scepticism expressed in foreign media over the years leading up to the Games, all of the targets were met, even if often at the last minute. As well as the sporting facilities themselves, most of the large-scale infrastructure projects that had been launched with European finance since the late 1980s were also brought to completion. In Athens the landscaping of a large area of formerly busy and polluting streets at the foot of the Acropolis was carried out to a high standard at the same time. In other cities and towns, public works greatly improved the physical environment. Private enterprise kept pace, with hotels and restaurants all over the country undergoing a facelift, sometimes extensive.

As for entry into the euro, the incentive of membership of the single currency was sufficient to bring about a minor economic miracle in Greece during those years – or so, at least, it appeared at the time. GDP grew strongly between 1994 and 2003. From 1997 until the eve of the financial crisis, in 2007, per capita income grew by an astonishing 33.6 per cent, according to one set of statistics, exceeded during the same period only by Ireland.²⁰ Standards of living had never been higher.

In its relations with other countries, too, the Simitis government did much to change the way that Greece was seen from abroad, and scored important successes. Joining the euro was only the most visible component of a sustained ‘charm offensive’ that aimed to bring Greece closer to the heart of the collective European project than it had ever been before or has been since. By the mid-1990s, at home a broadly based consensus had emerged that Greece’s future security and prosperity (probably in that order) could best be assured within the architecture of the Maastricht Treaty that had brought the EU into being in 1992. At European Heads of Government meetings, in the European Parliament and throughout other EU institutions, the newly social-democratic PASOK from 1996 onwards began to work at consensus-building with like-minded partners in the capital cities and parliaments of Europe. The Greek Presidency of the EU during the first six months of 2003 was widely praised, and marked the cumulative achievement of the previous years of good citizenship.

Under Simitis’s two terms of government, relations in the Balkans greatly improved – even if the issue of the name of ‘FYROM’ remained unresolved. At least the country was no longer isolated in international fora. With Turkey, relations at first had gone from bad to worse, despite a brief thaw in the late 1980s. In 1996 commandos of both countries landed on two uninhabited islets close to the Turkish coast, known collectively in Greek as Imia and in Turkish as Kardak, and planted their respective national flags. War was only narrowly averted on that occasion, thanks once again to American intervention. A move by the government of Cyprus to purchase ground-to-air missiles from Russia ratcheted tensions even higher. As late as February 1999, well into Simitis’s watch, Greece controversially hosted a visit by Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, who was wanted in Turkey as a terrorist. In a dramatic move, Turkish special forces arrested Öcalan as he was leaving the Greek Embassy in Nairobi and flew him back to Turkey for trial. It was a deeply embarrassing moment for Greek diplomacy.

It would also prove to be a turning point. The Öcalan affair cost (if only temporarily) the scalp of the PASOK foreign minister, Theodoros Pangalos, a flamboyant politician whose grandfather had been one of the prime instigators of the 1909 putsch that had brought Venizelos to power, and had then ruled Greece briefly as dictator in the 1920s. Pangalos was replaced by a far more conciliatory figure. Georgios Papandreou also had a famous grandfather. This Papandreou is often known by the diminutive form of his name, Giorgakis, to distinguish him from the elder Georgios Papandreou, who had been prime minister in 1944 and again in the 1960s. Son of Andreas, Georgios Papandreou would go on to become the third prime minister of this political dynasty. Appointed foreign minister by Simitis in 1999, Papandreou brought flexibility and a new approach to the decades-old stand-off with Turkey.

Politically, two closely intertwined issues made dialogue with Turkey at once timely and necessary. Both issues related to the European Union and its ambitions for enlargement to the east. Cyprus was already a candidate for membership, strongly supported by Greece. Turkey, too, had applied as long ago as 1987, but Greek governments until now had exercised their right of veto to block progress, beyond an agreement for Turkey to join the customs union in 1995. At a time when most states throughout the region looked to membership of the EU as their best prospect for the future, there were obvious advantages for both Greece and Turkey if they could settle their differences, at least as far as EU expansion was concerned. Tentative talks began between Papandreou and his Turkish counterpart, İsmail Cem, in June 1999.

Then, in a most unexpected manner, the forces of nature intervened. Early in the morning of 17 August the Turkish city of Ismit was devastated by one of the most severe earthquakes to hit the region in modern times. Half a million Turks were left homeless, with many thousands dead. Damage extended to Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul. In the international relief effort that followed, trained disaster recovery units from Greece were among the first to arrive on the scene. The response to human tragedy on such a scale in a neighbouring country was widespread and spontaneous. Three weeks later, the next earthquake to strike the region brought severe damage to the northern suburbs of Athens and panic to the entire city. Damage and loss of life were far less this time. But it was the turn of Turkish relief units to play a conspicuous part in recovering survivors and helping to clear the debris. Relief efforts and public sympathy were now reciprocal.

In national media and public opinion in both countries, as well as in political circles, age-old stereotypes of the feared and despised ‘other’ were overlaid by images of destruction and loss that could happen to anyone, at any time, in a part of the world where the earth’s crust is on the move. ‘Earthquake diplomacy’, as it quickly became dubbed, gave a new impetus to the efforts of politicians to move beyond the old political antagonisms. The earthquakes, and these responses by their neighbours, brought about a real shift in public opinion in both Greece and Turkey, one that would continue for several years afterwards.²¹ In the immediate aftermath of this détente, at the Helsinki summit at the end of 1999, Greece lifted its objection to Turkey becoming a candidate state to join the European Union. Pragmatically Greece had much to gain and nothing to lose by this gesture of solidarity with the rest of the EU. Plenty of other reasons would intervene to stall the beginning of accession talks with Turkey until 2005, and subsequent developments on both sides would combine to make accession a vanishingly remote possibility a decade later. But for Simitis and Papandreou there was a real and lasting prize to be won. This was the full accession of Cyprus.

By 1999, efforts to bring about a formal peace across the ‘Green Line’ that divided Cyprus had been going on for twenty-five years. Attitudes had become entrenched on both sides. The self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) had been established in 1983, but was (and remains today) recognized only by Turkey. Travel between the Republic of Cyprus and the occupied territories (as the TRNC is always called in Greek) had been denied to Cypriots of both communities, although holders of foreign passports could cross at a single checkpoint manned by the United Nations in central Nicosia. How, in these circumstances, was Cyprus to join the European Union, with its acquis communautaire and free travel within and among member states?

A breakthrough came in 2002, with the election of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the previously banned AKP party in Turkey, as prime minister. Hard though this now seems to believe, the AKP government came to power in 2002 determined to push for full membership of the EU. Erdoğan was therefore – back then – prepared to compromise over Cyprus. Overruling the entrenched position of the veteran leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, Rauf Denktash, the Turkish government opened talks at the United Nations, aimed at reuniting Cyprus. A successful resolution of the Cyprus issue would remove one of the most intractable obstacles to Turkey’s own accession.

And so was born the Annan Plan, named after Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, in whose name it was drawn up. Five successive drafts between late 2002 and the end of March 2004 were vigorously debated in the EU, the UN, among the ‘guarantor powers’ of the 1960 Constitution, and within the two communities of Cyprus itself. In its final version, the Annan Plan envisaged a confederation on the model of Switzerland. Every Cypriot would be simultaneously a citizen of the renamed ‘United Cyprus Republic’ and of one of its two constituent states, a Greek-Cypriot state in the south and a Turkish-Cypriot state in the north. Each state was to have equal constitutional rights, irrespective of their difference in size and population. Those who had lost their homes in 1974 would not have the right to return, but would be entitled to compensation. A new inter-state boundary would increase the size of the Greek-controlled area by some seven per cent, to be implemented over three years. Over a longer period, most but not all foreign troops would be withdrawn.

It was the nearest thing there has ever been to a comprehensive solution to the Cyprus ‘problem’. By the time the accession treaty for Cyprus and nine other candidate countries was signed in the ancient Agora of Athens in April 2003, the Annan Plan had gathered behind it a great deal of international momentum and political capital. The governments of both Greece and Turkey were well disposed, a rare alignment. It already enjoyed the backing of both the European Union and the United Nations. EU negotiators could be forgiven for supposing that final terms would be hammered out in time for the accession of the ten countries, which the treaty had fixed for 1 May 2004. Expectations rose even farther when a few weeks after the treaty had been signed in Athens, the Turkish-Cypriot side took the initiative in opening crossing-points between the two zones in Cyprus. Many thousands of Greek Cypriots crossed over, to visit the homes that none of them had seen for almost thirty years, and a whole generation had never seen at all. Elections in the TRNC at the end of the year brought to power a more moderate leader than the veteran Denktash. Public opinion among Turkish Cypriots began to swing behind the Annan Plan.

But, in a phrase that characterizes many such negotiations, ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’. Negotiations went to the wire. When the final round failed to come up with agreement on all the terms, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, filled in the blank parts of the text himself. The future of Cyprus was finally to be determined by simultaneous referenda to be held in both communities on 24 April – with just one week to go before the treaty of accession to the EU was due to come into effect. In Greece, Simitis had lost the parliamentary election to New Democracy just a month before. In opposition, PASOK supported the Plan. The new government, headed by Kostas Karamanlis, nephew of the former prime minister and president, declared itself neutral, but was not against. Erdoğan was still pushing strongly for acceptance. Opinion polls in the TRNC showed that a ‘yes’ vote was very likely there. Clearly, European officials were counting on the popular vote to rubber stamp an agreement that had been made at a higher level. It was a reunited Cyprus that was expected to join the Union a week after the poll. There was no Plan B, to put off accession or renegotiate its terms if the vote were to go the other way.

There was no question, in 2004, of the foreign policy of the Greek state being driven by Nicosia, as had happened half a century earlier. But neither was Athens in a position to direct public opinion in that other sovereign state whose citizens were also part of the Hellenic nation. Left to themselves to govern the Republic of Cyprus in their own way, the Greek Cypriots had had a quarter of a century to establish their own political institutions, based upon the Constitution of 1960. Since 1974, the economy of the Republic of Cyprus had far outstripped the impoverished and isolated north of the island. Its citizens already enjoyed a significantly higher standard of living than in Greece itself. Even if PASOK had still been in power to urge its own diplomatic agenda, Greek Cypriots were masters in what was left to them of their own island. They would make up their own minds.

Presidents of Cyprus are directly elected and enjoy considerable executive power. Tassos Papadopoulos, elected in 2003, was a lawyer who had played a prominent part in the EOKA struggle against British rule in the 1950s. His election campaign had been supported by parties of both left and right that feared concessions being made to Turkey. In the run-up to the referendum on 24 April, Papadopoulos threw the weight of his government against the Annan Plan. His much quoted, succinct declaration in Greek can most accurately be paraphrased, ‘I undertook the government of a sovereign state, I will not hand on to my successor a mere statelet.’ The Plan was rejected by 72 per cent of Greek Cypriots – a proportion only slightly higher than voted simultaneously to accept it on the opposite side of the ‘Green Line’.

For many international observers, probably for most, the Greek Cypriots had thrown away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But at the time, and ever since, the Plan and its shortcomings, from the Greek point of view, have been searchingly exposed.²² The effect of the double referendum in 2004 has been to perpetuate a division of the island that more than a decade later must surely be irrevocable. But the Greek-Cypriot Republic of Cyprus did not fare so badly. European negotiators may have assumed that the accession they were negotiating was for the whole of the island, and technically this is indeed the case today. But in practice, since 2004, Greek Cypriots have gained all the benefits of the acquis communautaire, whereas the Turkish northern part of Cyprus remains excluded. Just like the creation of Cyprus as an independent state in the first place, this was a consequence that had been foreseen by few and intended by none. Even so, it deserves to be ranked as another success for the PASOK government led by Kostas Simitis, and one that would have been impossible without the diplomatic initiatives and consensus-building of Simitis and his foreign minister, Georgios Papandreou.

The four-year term of the second Simitis government was due to end in April 2004. When the next parliamentary election was called at the beginning of the year, for 7 March, Simitis announced his intention to stand down as party leader. Papandreou was elected in his place. But not even the dynastic name of the leader was enough to revive the fortunes of PASOK at the polls, after eleven years in power. Like so many Greek governments before it, this one had been badly damaged by a series of financial scandals in its closing years. Simitis was not implicated in any wrongdoing, but had been slow to dismiss those who were. So the final achievements of his premiership, the accession of Cyprus to the European Union and the Olympic Games that August, went ahead without their principal architects.

The Athens Olympics were widely described by the world’s press as a triumph. For Greeks, wherever in the world they lived, the return of the Games to Athens, where the first modern Olympics had been held in 1896, was a renewal of that century-old vindication for their nation and its place in the modern world. On 13 August 2004 a faultlessly choreographed opening ceremony in the newly built Olympic Stadium at Marousi, outside Athens, presented a living pageant of more than four thousand years of history. Beginning with the stylized marble figurines produced in the Cyclades in the early Bronze Age, it continued through Minoan Crete and the palaces of Mycenae to the arts, athletics and sculpture of the classical period. Alexander the Great appeared in his chariot flanked by spears, reproducing a famous ancient image. Then came the icons of the Byzantine Orthodox Church, and straight afterwards, without any indication of any intervening gap, the heroes of the 1821 Revolution and the 1896 Olympic Games. The twentieth century was represented by the Karagiozis shadow-puppet theatre, a rebetika band playing bouzouki, and the paintings of Giannis Tsarouchis – the first two of these, at least, deeply rooted in the nation’s eastern and Ottoman past. Much of the musical accompaniment was drawn from the old rural traditions of the Greek mountains and islands. Visually, the whole series of tableaux was dominated by the floating figure of a winged angel.

The omissions were as striking as the historical re-enactments themselves. Successive conquerors, from the Romans in antiquity to the Ottomans in the late Middle Ages, were left out of the story completely. It was Greek history as it might have been, compressed into a series of powerfully realized visual images. At least for the three weeks of the Games, the conflicts of identity that had begun to resurface in different forms during recent years could be set aside.

It was a confident, consummate performance, perfectly done. In this way, the History of the Greek Nation, first conceived by Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos in the 1850s and 1860s, was distilled down to its barest essentials and packaged for a worldwide audience. Surely, that August evening in 2004, the modern nation had at last come of age?