Greece is where the West both begins and ends. The West – as a
humanist ideal – began in ancient Athens where compassion for the
individual began to replace the crushing brutality of the nearby
civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The war that Herodotus
chronicles between Greece and Persia in the 5th century B.C. established
a contrast between West and East that has persisted for millennia.
Greece
is Christian, but it is also Eastern Orthodox, as spiritually close to
Russia as it is to the West, and geographically equidistant between
Brussels and Moscow. Greece may have invented the West with the
democratic innovations of the Age of Pericles, but for more than a
thousand years it was a child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism. And
while Greece was the north-western bastion of the anciently civilized
Near East, ever since history moved north into colder climates following
the collapse of Rome, the inhabitants of Peninsular Greece have found
themselves at the poor, south-eastern extremity of Europe.
Modern Greece in particular has struggled against this bifurcated
legacy. In an early 20th century replay of the Greco-Persian Wars,
Greece’s post-World War I military struggle with Turkey led to a signal
Greek defeat and as a consequence, more than a million ethnic Greeks
from Asia Minor escaped to Greece proper, further impoverishing the
country. (This Greek Diaspora in Asia Minor was a massive source of
revenue until the Greeks were expelled.) Not only did World War I have a
bloody and epic coda in Greece, so did World War II, which was followed
by a civil war between rightists and communists. Greece’s ultimate
escape from the Warsaw Pact was a rather close-run affair: again, the
effect of Greece’s unstable geographical location between East and West.
Greece struggled on. As recently as the mid-1970s it was governed
by a particularly brutal military dictatorship (led by colonels from the
backwater of the Peloponnese), which lasted for seven years, and fear
of another coup persisted during the initial stage of its reborn
democracy. Even though the Olympic tradition began in Greece in
antiquity and the first modern Olympics were held in Greece in 1896,
Greece was denied the right to host the centenary modern Olympics in
1996 owing to the country’s lack of preparedness in organization and
infrastructure. Greece did host the 2004 Olympics, but the financial
strain that the games put on Greece contributed to the country’s
economic fragility in the run-up to the current debt crisis.
It is not entirely an accident that Greece is the most economically
troubled country in the European Union. The fact that it is located at
Europe’s south-eastern back door also has something to do with it. For
Greece’s economic and political development bear marks of a legacy not
wholly in the modern West.
Roughly three-quarters of Greek businesses are family-owned and
rely on family labour, making meritocratic promotion difficult for those
outside the family. Tax cheating is rampant. The economy suffers from a
profound lack of competitiveness, even as Greece is mainly a service
economy, relying on tourism, in which manufacturing constitutes a weak
sector. Of course, these features have much to do with bad policies
enacted over the years and decades, but they are also products of
history and culture, which are, in turn, products of geography. Indeed,
Greece lacks enough productive land to be an agricultural power.
Then there is political underdevelopment. Long into the 20th
century, Greek political parties had a paternalistic, coffeehouse
quality, centred on big personalities — chieftains in all but name —
with little formal organizational support. George Papandreou, the
grandfather of the recent prime minister of the same name, actually
headed a party called the “George Papandreou Party.” Political parties
have been family businesses to a greater extent in Greece than in other
Western democracies. The party in power not only dominated the highest
echelons of the bureaucracy, as is normal and proper in a democracy, but
the middle- and lower-echelons, too. State institutions from top to
bottom were often overly politicized.
Moreover, rather than having a moderate left-wing party and a
modern conservative one, as is common throughout Western Europe, in
Greece through the early 1990s there was a hard-left party, the
Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which during the Cold War
openly sympathized with radical Arab regimes like Hafez al Assad’s Syria
and Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, and a somewhat reactionary right-wing
party, New Democracy. The drift of both those leading parties toward the
centre is a relatively recent affair.
And so the creation of late of a hard-left party, SYRIZA, and a
hard-right neo-Nazi movement, Golden Dawn (vaguely reminiscent of the
military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974), both harbour
distant echoes of Greece’s mid-20th century past. Ironically, while
Greece’s extreme economic crisis created these radical groupings in the
first place, if these new parties fare badly in the upcoming poll it
might indicate a firm rejection of extremism by Greek voters and a
permanent turn toward the centre — toward political modernity, that is.
There is a tendency in all of this to throw one’s hands up at the
spectre of the Greeks and declare them too much trouble than they’re
worth, at least for Europe. But such an attitude reeks of hypocrisy,
even as it denies Western self-interest. When Greece joined the European
Union in 1981, its economy was manifestly not ready; Brussels had made a
rank political decision, not an economic one — just as it would in
admitting Greece to the eurozone in 2002. In both cases, the
ground-level, domestic reality of the Greek economy was swept aside in
favour of an abstract quasi-historical vision of Europe stretching from
Iberia to the eastern Mediterranean.
Of course, Greece, during the 1980s — when I lived there for seven
years — might have used the influx of cash from the European Union in
order to discipline and reform its economy. Instead, then PASOK Prime
Minister Andreas Papandreou used the money to swell the ranks of the
bureaucracy. Thus, did Greece remain underdeveloped, and the
dream-gamble of Brussels failed. The saddest irony is that the sins of
the hard-left Andreas Papandreou were visited upon his well-meaning,
centre-left son, George, who had his short tenure as prime minister from
2009 to 2011 poisoned by his father’s economic legacy.
But Western self-interest now demands that even if Greece leaves
the eurozone – and that is a big “if” – it nevertheless remains anchored
in the European Union and NATO. For whether Greece drops the euro or
not, it faces years of severe economic hardship. That means, given its
geographic location, Greece’s political orientation should never be
taken for granted. For example, the Chinese have invested heavily in
developing part of the port of Piraeus, adjacent to Athens, even as
Russia’s economic and intelligence ties to the Greek area of Cyprus are
extremely close. It has been speculated in the media that with Greece
short of cash and Russia enjoying a surplus, were the Russians ejected
from ports in Syria in the wake of a regime change there, Moscow would
find a way to eventually make use of Greek naval facilities. Remember
that Greece and Cyprus both have modern European histories mainly
because they were claimed by Western powers for strategic reasons.
In other words, from the point of geography and geopolitics, Greece will be in play for years to come.
Courtesy: Geopolitical Weekly “STRATFOR”
