In an arty cinema at the end of the 60s I watched Costa-Gavras’s stylish political thriller Z which satirised the brutal military regime then ruling Greece. When the film ended the audience enthusiastically applauded, something I had never previously seen in a cinema, and have rarely seen since.
As Europe’s acknowledged home of political philosophy and practice, Greece of the hated military dictatorship had a special place in the hearts of many Europeans, as it did for Lord Byron when he went off to fight (and die) for Greek independence in 1824. This weekend’s “Solidarity with Greece” demonstrations, in small villages as well as major cities, shows it still does.
In its showdown with creditors, the Greek government of Alexis Tsipras exploits this romantic attachment. And why not? Small countries have to use the assets at their disposal in a big world.
But sentiment alone is rarely an adequate guide to action, is it? The Greeks have a case against the counter-productive and excessive severity imposed on them by their creditors. But the creditors also have a case against the Greeks.
Foreigners did not make their government fiddle the entry qualifications to join the eurozone, rack up debts or force citizens to evade their taxes, unless you count the legacy of the rackety Ottoman empire which ruled Greece from 1453 to 1821.
But the very concept of Greece has always been both powerful and fragile, its existence more usually sustained by foreign or domestic tyranny than by sophisticated philosophies from the 4th and 5th centuries BC. Disunity and rebellion have also been characteristic features of Greek politics and identity.
After defeating successive invasions launched by the mighty Persian empire at Marathon (490BC), at Thermopylae (sort of), at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale, did not the Greek city states soon succumb to civil war which ended in Athens’s defeat by militaristic Sparta? Yes.
And so it went on. Domination by Macedonia meant that the spread of Greek culture across the Mediterranean – previously led by the soft power of trade and settlement – was expanded east and south by the conquests of Alexander the Great (356BC to 323BC). The Romans later conquered, but deferred (“though captured, Greece took its wild conqueror capture”, wrote Horace the poet) to the Greeks, much as the Americans did towards Britain for a while. “We are the Greeks to their Romans,” the future PM, Harold Macmillan, once told a colleague.
In the western Roman empire Rome duly fell (476AD) to barbarian invasions. The eastern half, though battered, morphed into the Christian Byzantine empire which staggered on, a Greek entity, for 1,000 years before Constantinople finally fell to the Muslim Ottomans after the great siege of 1453.
Does any of this matter to the bean counters in Brussels or Berlin this summer? It should.
So should the bean borrowers of Athens acknowledge that German fear of excessive debt and a debauched currency is rooted in troubled German history, the Weimar Republic which led to the Nazi coup, and the fragility of a national identity ravaged by the brutal thirty years’ war (1618-48).
When Greece restored national sovereignty and unity in 1832, Germany was still 40 years away from doing the same.
If Greeks see themselves as victims, so do Germans, who have picked up the bill to rescue East Germany well within living memory and widely resented it (but they were at least fellow Germans).
This is psychologically risky territory as Angela Merkel and her advisers decide what Germany – and the EU – must do to rescue Greece from its own brinkmanship and save Europe from its lackadaisical management of the crisis.
But rebellion comes more naturally to Greeks than to Germans who have often traded liberty for security, not always wisely, but understandable with fluid frontiers which an island people like us should gratefully acknowledge.
In the Ottoman centuries the Greeks had an instinct to side with the Caliph’s enemies, rising in revolt many times and usually being hammered for their pains. The fact that Venetian Corfu remained free and prosperous and that Crete held out until 1670 (the long siege was a fashionable cause for years) only fed an appetite for defiance which broke into open, ultimately successful revolt in 1821. Cue Lord Byron.
Two further points are worth registering here.
Greece’s successive 19th- and 20th-century wars to regain its historic territory, usually involving neighbouring Turkey (as the Ottoman successor state became after defeat in the first world war), were bloody, traumatic affairs. We hear a lot about the Turkish Armenian massacres (were they genocide?), less about the one million Greeks living abroad (resident for centuries) who may have died during waves of displacement and expulsion from Asia Minor. In invading Turkey in 1919, Greece was a part-author of its own misfortune: it lost.
None of this is good for people. Greece had rival governments, once pro-German, once pro-British, during the first world war and remained divided during the inter-war years. Greeks fought like tigers against the invading Italians in 1940 who had to be rescued by the Germans. Even Hitler acknowledged the courage of the Greek resistance which continued long after defeat.
But the German occupation was savage, both to Greeks and their economy. Many starved. Worse, the European peace of 1945 was followed by the Greek civil war of 1946 to 1949 in which Britain and the US backed the Greek government and the Greek communists were backed by Tito’s government in next-door Yugoslavia.
Stalin had agreed to leave Greece in the western sphere of influences in his “percentages” agreement with Churchill at the Kremlin in 1944. He just forgot to tell the Greek comrades. After yet another savage war, they lost, Greece joined Nato – much as it did the EU in 1981 after the Greek colonels were ousted when again the Turks invaded Cyprus (1974) – and Greek democracy was restored.
So the divided legacy of modern Greece remains and is vivid well within living memory – royalist and republican, left and right, urban and rural. The Syriza coalition, led by Tsipras, represents the defeated side in the civil war as Tsipras, a youthful communist of bourgeois stock, explicitly acknowledged in gestures made when he became prime minister in January.
Geographical determinists, the people who argue we are primarily shaped by our environment, might argue that a country with Europe’s longest coastline – more than 8,000 miles and 2,000 islands (mostly unpopulated) – is bound to be fractious.
In one of his Outliers essays, Malcolm Gladwell, made the point differently when he argued that herdsmen who tend sheep and goats on marginal land – in Greece, Sicily, Ireland or Tennessee – have to have short fuses or their neighbours will steal their animals. Hence the importance of the blood feud which persists. Arable farmers don’t have them, it’s harder to steal wheat.
Be that as it may, Tsipras has his new mandate to negotiate with Brussels and Berlin on an emphatic 60% no vote from a deeply divided nation. It’s not hard to see how things could get nasty quickly. And remember, those Germans feel hard done by and put upon too.
