Post-1974: Deconstructing Greece

Poster for multi-child families. Today, the average Greek woman has only 1.3 children.

Although the Colonels failed to turn back the clock, they did slow it down. When they lost power, Greece was still fulfilling its mission of perpetuating the Greek people. In 1975, the fertility rate was 2.4 children per woman, in contrast to 1.45 in Germany, 1.8 in England, and 1.93 in France. Immigration was only just beginning, whereas Western Europe already had large immigrant populations.

Greece has since caught up to the West. Fertility has plummeted to 1.3 children per woman—one of the lowest rates in the world. As Steyn (2011) notes: “In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren—i.e., the family tree is upside down.” Meanwhile, the country has taken in a foreign-born population that is as large, proportionately, as those of Great Britain and France. These trends may certainly change, but one need not extrapolate far into the future to see where they might lead …

How did things change so fast? First, the short answer. The Colonels left in disgrace, thus discrediting their nationalist ideology and creating a climate of indifference to the nation-state. But why, then, did things turn out so similarly in Spain? Its old regime died a quiet death, much like Generalissimo Franco himself, yet post-nationalism has triumphed there just as thoroughly as it has in Greece.

All right. Now the long answer. All of southern Europe had regimes that made patriotism their raison d’être. In short, nationalism had been nationalized. And these regimes used the schools, the media, and other norm-creating structures to instill love of country. In time, however, the structures succumbed to dry rot. The messengers no longer believed their message, and once a new regime came to power, for whatever reason, few were left to make the case for preserving the nation-state.

Another reason was the relative weakness of civil society. Since the State had little counterbalance to its power, whoever controlled it had much more freedom to control the direction of society. This was less true in the United States, for instance. Although university-educated Americans had massively converted to post-nationalism back in the 1940s, conversion proceeded much more slowly beyond this beachhead. Decades passed before the many pockets of resistance were finally overcome and mopped up.

Post-1974 Greece: the ideological motor for change

With the Colonels gone, change was not just moving faster. It was also becoming more deliberate. In the 1960s, it had been driven largely by young people who just wanted to do their own thing. After 1974, the new movers and shakers were more keenly aware of what they were doing … and the long-term consequences.

To some extent, they were merely following a narrative that the West had embraced earlier, after the Second World War. In its soft form, this narrative accepted that nationalism had helped create larger and more open societies. But the time had now come for the next stage: the formation of a “United States of Europe” and, eventually, an international superstate where everyone would be a citizen of the world.

This narrative had a harder version, as follows. Nationalism isn’t just outdated. It’s also evil, having caused the two world wars and the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community. To prevent an eventual third cataclysm, the nation-state should be progressively dismantled and its citizens reeducated.

Even before 1974, this post-national consensus had already been spreading into Greece. It was in the air, and only a totalitarian society could have kept it out. But things did accelerate when the Colonels left the scene. In 1975, Greece reratified the European Convention on Human Rights. That same year, the new constitution affirmed that such conventions “shall be an integral part of domestic Greek law and shall prevail over any contrary provision of the law” (Pollis, 1992). In the early 1990s, Greece embarked on a second round of efforts to comply with the norms of the European Community, which later became the European Union.

Although this process has been called “Europeanization,” a better term would be denationalization. “Europe” had become a transnational space where collective ethnic rights would be much weaker and individual rights much stronger. And such a space would eventually extend well beyond Europe. Turkey was touted as a prospective member, even though most of its land mass lay in the Middle East.

Europeanization was thus presented as a way to empower the individual at the expense of collective identities. Such empowerment would also bring material benefits: a higher standard of living and greater respect for personal freedom. Indeed, just as Greeks had earlier credited nationalism for the West’s success, a conviction now grew that post-nationalism was responsible.

This conviction held sway from the Right to the Left of the political spectrum, though for different reasons. The Right no longer saw institutions like the family, the church, and the ethnos as pre-conditions for economic success. Under the influence of libertarianism, it now viewed them as obstacles to competitive markets and economies of scale. By liquidating these collective restraints on the individual, Greece would replicate the same conditions that had earlier allowed the West to take off economically.

Meanwhile, the Left, under the influence of autonomy theory, saw unchosen collective identities, like gender and ethnos, as obstacles to self-realization. Since people do not choose to be men or women or to belong to an ethnic group, their freedom is diminished. They cannot realize their full potential.

Such thinking differed radically from what Greek nationalists had thought. For them, the secret of the West’s success was the nation-state: a community where one tended to treat fellow citizens with the same trust and deference as one would one’s own family. It was this secure, high-trust environment that made wealth creation so much easier.

The link between personal autonomy and prosperity is therefore neither direct nor causal. Rather, both are made possible by certain internalized restraints on behavior, namely a greater willingness to settle disputes peacefully and a stronger sense of empathy. In short, the “emotional space” of the family is extended to the entire nation. This behavioral evolution has been described with respect to England by Clark (2007, 2009), who sees other changes, such as increased thrift, sobriety, and impulse control, as being just as crucial to the rise of a market economy.

So personal autonomy alone isn’t the secret of economic success. It can in fact ruin a country if there are no internalized restraints on behavior.

Deconstructing Greece

Post-1974, few Greeks were arguing the above points. And those who did were usually Orthodox priests who spoke in the language of another age. Debate thus focused not on post-nationalism itself, but rather on the obstacles to implementing it. These obstacles were summarized by Pollis (1993): 

Historically, the dominant ideology in Greece considered the basic social unit to be the extended family, not the autonomous individual. In such a society, rights and obligations are reciprocal, hierarchical, and differentiated; they are not attributes of individuals possessed equally by all. As such, while equal individual rights were absent, the “family” was responsible for the material well-being of all. With the rise of Greek nationalism—the articulation of a nationalist ideology by the newly formed modern Greek state—, traditional culture and its value system persisted albeit in modified form.

[…] Such an organic conception of society, in which individual autonomy is irrelevant, obviously does not provide fertile soil for the flourishing of individual civil or political rights.

The take-home message, however, was not that post-nationalism is unworkable and should be shelved. Rather, it was the organic conception of society that had to go: 

[…]  Greece’s sovereignty will inevitably erode and its presumed “insularity” will fade as it is expected to conform to and be judged in terms of “European” standards, including those on individual rights, and not in terms of its claimed distinctiveness as an integral ethnos.

[…] While the visible changes are, and will be, in specific areas—the legal sphere, economic structures and policies, monetary policy, product standards, and control over borders—the cumulative impact will challenge and dilute Greek national identity as that identity has been conceptualized from the time of the founding of the modern state. (Pollis, 1992)

For post-nationalists, another obstacle was the school system, specifically the textbooks and their exclusion of the “Other”:

[…] “the Other” is different, for he was Muslim and not Orthodox like the Greek. With a solid and imperious spirit, the young pupil learned to move away from all those who tried to be like him by themselves, from all those who can only be humbler than him because, among other things, “the Greek national group has endowed itself with literary, theatrical, musical, and sculptural expressions that are different from those of the Others who surround it.” (Angelopoulos, 2007)

This rejection of the Other was seen as being inherent to the pre-1974 school system:

[…] beyond the awareness of being different, it is love of Country that helps strengthen the difference between the “Us” and the “Others”: “… in this case not only the language but also Greek education as a whole are elements of identity that distinguished Greeks from the “Others.”

[…] two areas of concern to this common education were particularly emphasized: the language of the ancestors and love of Country, a notion indirectly related to that […] of belonging to the same family […] to the extent that the Country is an entity whose substance is consubstantially maternal/paternal […], for it transfers […] the warm virtues of family relations among people belonging to the same household.” (Angelopoulos, 2007)

People outside this “family”—the Other—were to be viewed with mistrust and as sources of possible future domination or internal conflict (Angelopoulos, 2007). Thus, to bring about a post-national world, a new narrative would be needed:

[…] after the Colonels’ dictatorship, Greek historiography and particularly the national education planners and, consequently, the authors of school manuals, turned away from the nationalist cleavage [between Greeks and non-Greeks] and turned toward organizing a historical narrative that aims to manufacture citizens who are without hate for their neighbors of different origin, language, religion, and upbringing. (Angelopoulos, 2007)

The new narrative would achieve this goal by presenting the Other more respectfully, by showing that he seeks neither to dominate Greece nor to create disorder. In practice, however, this goal clashed with one of the primary duties of education: telling historical truth. The Other had dominated the Greek people, and that domination had been far from idyllic. The new narrative was thus no less prone to mythmaking than the old one. It tended to create a Big Other for whom one should feel only respect, deference, and … subservience.

A new balance might have been eventually struck between respect and truth-telling, either in Greece or in the West as a whole. As things turned out, however, there would not be enough time. No sooner had the Greeks learned deference to the Other than the Other began coming … in droves. 

References

Angelopoulos, C. (2007). Le contenu des manuels grecs d’histoire avant et après les Colonels, in M. Verdelhan-Bourgade, B. Bakhouche, R. Étienne, & P. Boutan (eds). Les manuels scholaires, miroirs de la nation ? (pp. 41-54), Paris: L’Harmatten.

Clark, G. (2009). The domestication of Man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos, 2(1), 64-80.

http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3605643

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Georgiadis, K. (2010).Guardians of the nation: pronatalism, fertility politics and the multi-child family movement in Greece, British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, September 2010, University of Exeter, England.

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29469/

Pollis, A. (1992). Greek national identity: religious minorities, rights, and European norms, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10, 171-196.

Steyn, M. (2011). Mark Steyn: An upside-down family tree, The Orange County Register, December 23

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/people-332895-women-percent.html

The Colonels: How not to turn back the clock

The Colonels ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. They tried to turn back the clock without knowing how a clock works (source)

In Greece, nation-building revolutionized social relations. It created a much larger web of reciprocal relationships among people who were not close kin and who often never met each other. This new environment was vulnerable to abuse, typically by individuals operating within family networks. The public treasury was especially targeted, with the country being forced into bankruptcy twice during the 19th century. The problem was not just that Greeks had to learn new rules for social interaction. They also had to feel motivated to obey them.

Nation-building had another down side. Since Greece was composed of lands that had once belonged to other countries, the Ottoman Empire in particular, the nationalist project became wedded to the idea of further territorial expansion. This all too often led to reckless military adventurism. The worst case was the catastrophe of 1921-22 when an expeditionary force pushed deep into Turkey in the hope of recreating the old Byzantine Empire. The Turks not only defeated the force but also ethnically cleansed Anatolia of its historic Greek community.

Yet the overall balance sheet was positive. Writing in 1977 about the Balkans as a whole, Charles and Barbara Jelavich concluded that the initial phase of nation-building had succeeded:

Conditions in the new nations at the end of the century were certainly greatly superior to those in the area at the beginning of that epoch. At that time the Ottoman government was unable to assure the basic conditions of civil peace in its lands. Not only were the local governors unrestrained, but bandits, groups of soldiers, and local warlords with armed retainers made life impossible for the peasant population, Christian and Muslim alike, in many areas. The national governments not only assured the establishment of an orderly system of administration, but they initiated measures directed toward the improvement of general conditions in the country. (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, pp. 326-327)

By the early 20th century, Greeks were living in greater personal safety than ever. But they still confined their relationships of trust to immediate kin and relied heavily on family connections to get ahead. The challenge now was to create a high-trust environment where people would treat each other as they would their own family. Only then would Greece take off economically as the West had earlier. The nationalist project thus sought to alter how Greeks viewed themselves and each other, particularly through the schools and, later, through the national youth movement of Ioannis Metaxas (1935-1941). Under Metaxas, this effort assumed totalitarian proportions with the use of propaganda, popular art, and mass public gatherings.

This social engineering continued after World War II, when a Western-style democracy was grafted on to the existing political culture. Schoolteachers, civil servants, army officers, and journalists were largely “graduates” of Metaxan nationalism. The regime was thus fundamentally nationalist and only superficially a liberal democracy.

The 1960s: a turning point

By the 1960s, however, nationalism began to give way to individualism and consumerism. This shift coincided with the victory of the Centre Union Party in 1964 and … the Swinging Sixties. A new counterculture was spreading among young Greeks. Many adopted its outward manifestations—mop hair, bellbottoms, miniskirts, and rock music—while still adhering to the norms of traditional family life. Others wanted to go further by experimenting with drugs, new forms of mysticism, and alternate sexual lifestyles.

It was against this background that the armed forces launched a coup d’état in 1967. The Colonels, as they came to be known, said they wished to prevent “communism”—a catchall term for anything that threatened the ethnos, the church, and the family. Their rhetoric echoed the ideology of the Metaxas period, when they had been cadets, and they hoped to turn back the clock to that time.

The Colonels stayed in power until 1974, a little longer than Metaxas. Yet their impact on Greece’s subsequent cultural development would be much weaker. In short, they failed to alter the course of history.

This failure had several causes:

Different circumstances

In the mid-1930s, the country was paralyzed by the Great Depression and a deadlocked parliament. Greeks were willing to go along with Metaxas if only for lack of a viable alternative. In contrast, the late 1960s were a time of unprecedented prosperity. Life had never been so good. People were apprehensive about the changing family and sexual values, but most were unsure how far the change would go. Many thought the pendulum would eventually swing the other way. In any case, the demographic implications were hardly critical. Fertility was still well above the replacement level, and the divorce rate remained stable at 6 divorces per 100 marriages.

In short, the Colonels seemed to be reacting hysterically to an exaggerated threat. Their sermonizing was not taken seriously, at least not by most of the population, and they were thus never able to build a popular movement to consolidate their hold on power. While many people collaborated with the regime, they did so largely out of fear or opportunism.  

Coming of TV

TV came later to Greece than to other European countries, and it came during the time of the Colonels. As elsewhere, it centralized the production of news, culture, and entertainment. Such central control would have especially sweeping effects in Greece because of the relative weakness of civil society:

[…] this situation has been associated with a weak atrophied civil society where the state has to take on additional politico-ideological functions. This fits the case of broadcasting. The overextended character of the state has coincided with the underdevelopment of capitalism in Greece. (Papathanassopoulos, 1990)

For the Colonels, central control was a feature, not a bug. They saw it as a way to overwhelm the cultural influence of the political Left, which had now retreated to the local level. They didn’t realize that this same central control would eventually pass into the hands of a post-national elite.

Once the Colonels were removed from power, television would make it that much easier to erase their legacy. The new medium proved to be a two-edged sword.

Beginnings of globalization

The Colonels’ years in power coincided with a general worldwide shift from protectionism to globalization. In this new global economy, Greece found itself drifting toward an uncompetitive dead zone. Wages were lower than elsewhere in Europe but still higher than in nearby African and Asian countries. Conversely, the economic environment was better than in Africa and Asia but still less secure and less conducive to trust than in Western Europe and North America.

The Colonels did little about these trends, largely because they trusted the business community and saw it as a natural ally in the fight to defend the nation from communism. The business community, for its part, had its own ideas about globalization. In 1972, the Association of Greek Industrialists called for the importation of foreign workers to fill unskilled and often seasonal jobs in agriculture, tourism, and shipping (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 163). The AGI was actually making explicit a policy that its members had already adopted:

In late 1972, there were according to the Greek government around 15,000 to 20,000 foreign workers in Greece who came mainly from Egypt and other African countries (cited by Nikolinakos, 1974:81; other authors put forward a figure of 60,000 workers, Rombolis, 1980:231). The proposals of the Greek industrialists highlighted the paradox of the situation. At a time when over 300,000 Greeks were working in European countries mainly in low-skill industrial jobs, Greece had to import African labor to meet its needs in the same sectors? For Marxist analysis, which was dominant at that time, the aim of the AGI and the government was to stabilize and even reduce the wages of Greek workers (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 163)

Some light is shed on this foreign labor program by a letter that the African student union published in a Greek newspaper in 1978 (albeit after the time of the Colonels):

We denounce the existence of a traffic in black workers from Africa by Greek industrialists and ship-owners, who promise the black workers high wages. Once in Greece, the Blacks, victims of blackmail in all its forms, accept the worst jobs for very low wages without managing to get a contract of employment. When their services are no longer wanted or when they organize and become demanding, they are fired and cannot even benefit from an airplane ticket to go home. (Abog-Loko, 1981)

The same newspaper had earlier published an article stating that a community of 15,000 African workers had become established in downtown Athens (Abog-Loko, 1981).

This time period thus saw the start of de-Europeanization and population replacement. The Colonels failed to see the long-term consequences, in large part because they conceived the threats to Greece’s social fabric in geopolitical or even conspiratorial terms. In reality, the most serious threats would come from banal sources, including supposed friends and allies.

Cold War as the first priority

The Colonels blamed the decline in traditional values on the Communists who, in turn, were said to be taking orders from Moscow. The Culture War thus became subordinated to the Cold War. There was a pervasive belief that the end of communism would bring an end to the assault on the family, the church, and the ethnos. At the very least, the Culture War would be half-won.

By committing Greece more than ever to the Cold War, the Colonels also committed Greece more than ever to NATO. This “NATO-ization” of Greece paved the way for the country’s entry into other supranational bodies, specifically the Common Market and, later, the European Union. As a result, Greek bureaucrats became accustomed to the idea of being accountable to decision-making bodies that lay outside the country.

The Cold War furthermore shifted the Colonels’ attention from their own country to more distant ones, about which they were prone to misinformation and self-deception. They were especially won over to the idea of Africa’s key role in the fight against communism, and to this end they sought to assist the continent’s anticommunist regimes by bringing its soldiers to officer training schools in Greece. Yet terms like “communist” and “anti-communist” often had no clear meaning in Africa. Many regimes sided with the West for opportunistic reasons, and more than a few tried to curry favors from both sides. In hindsight, Africa proved to be a sideshow with little influence on the outcome of the Cold War.

The Colonels would eventually be undone by military adventurism and Cold War thinking. In 1974, they backed a coup to depose the president of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, and unite that country with Greece. Makarios seemed to be an easy target. He had sought closer relations with the Soviet Union (as a counterweight to Turkey’s claims on his island), and the Colonels presumed that NATO would view the coup favorably.

Turkey, however, was not amused and responded by invading Cyprus. As in 1921-1922, Greece was now up against a much stronger opponent. And, again, the West remained neutral. The Colonels could do nothing but watch Turkey ethnically cleanse the northern half of the island. They then gave up power, having lost all credibility.

Conclusion

History has not been kind to the Colonels. At best, they wanted to turn back the clock without knowing how a clock works. At worst, they unthinkingly aided and abetted the very processes that were eating away at Greece’s social fabric. In all fairness, however, social conservatives elsewhere were making many of the same mistakes.

If the Colonels had played their cards right, they might have hung on to power for a while longer. But they would still have had trouble stopping or even slowing down the processes of social atomization, dissolution of the family, and denationalization. These processes had a momentum of their own that could not be easily reversed.

First, the main motor of change lay beyond the country’s borders, in Western Europe and North America. Greeks could reject foreign culture and ideology, but they had neither the resources nor the population size to create an alternate world-system.

Second, the nationalist project was at least partly responsible for the Culture War. Nationalists wanted to move Greeks away from the little world of the family and toward the big world of the nation-state. In this larger world, however, behavioral norms would be determined by elites in the arts and entertainment who were often hostile to traditional values. In this and other ways, nationalism heralded what globalism would later bring.

References

Abog-Loko, J. (1981). La communauté noire en Grèce, Peuples Noirs Peuples Africains, 22, 55-84

Jelavich, C. & B. Jelavich. (1977). The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, A History of East Central Europe, vol. VIII, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Papathanassopoulos, S. (1990). Broadcasting politics and the state in Socialist Greece, Media, Culture and Society, 12, 387-397.

Pteroudis, E. (1996). Emigrations et immigrations en Grèce, évolutions récentes et questions politiques, Revue européenne de migrations internationals, 12, 159-189 (Espagne, Portugal, Grèce, pays d'immigration).

Wikipedia - Greek military junta of 1967 to 1974

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3734925856292601239#editor/target=post;postID=8918764241089378555 .

Greece's finest hour ... and after

American editorial cartoon from 1940 (source). Today, Greeks remember Ioannis Metaxas for his defense of Greece from Italian invasion in 1940. Few remember his refusal to enter the broader conflict of World War II. His death marked the end of his country’s isolationism and the start of its gradual absorption into larger supranational entities: NATO, the Common Market, the European Union and, finally, the current system of globalism and post-nationalism.

If Ioannis Metaxas is today remembered, it is as the Greek David who fought off the Italian Goliath back in 1940. In that year, Greece was the only country that not only repelled an Axis invasion but actually drove deep into Axis-occupied territory. Metaxas is thus remembered as the man who heroically led Greece into World War II and into partnership with the Allies.

Yet that last detail is false. Metaxas was never an Allied leader. He actually kept Greece out of World War II by maintaining peaceful relations with Germany and by spurning British offers of assistance. At the time of his death, he was hoping that Germany would broker a peace deal between Greece and Italy.

Metaxas was an isolationist with a long history of isolationism. He had opposed Greece’s entry into World War I and was one of the few who had publicly opposed the 1921-1922 campaign that sent Greek forces deep into Turkey … and ultimately to a humiliating defeat. Even when war became unavoidable, in 1940, he sought to contain it as much as possible.

Greece would eventually enter World War II, but standard history texts gloss over the actual sequence of events: Metaxas’ death in January 1941, his replacement with a pro-British prime minister, and the landing of a British expeditionary force—ostensibly to counter an imminent German invasion.¹ The Germans did invade, in April, and it was only then that Greece entered the broader European conflict.

Why, then, is Metaxas praised as an Allied leader? There are different reasons. For some, this myth diverts attention from his fascist ideology. For others, it justifies a postwar narrative in which the Greek people realize they can no longer be an island unto themselves. Greece must be part of the larger world: first NATO, then the Common Market, then the European Union and, finally, the current system of globalism and post-nationalism.

Postwar Greece

World War II was followed by civil war between Royalists and Communists (1944-1949). There then began a long period of sustained economic growth and rising incomes—similar to the postwar boom elsewhere. When older Greeks feel nostalgic, this is the time they think back to.

These better times owed much to the intense nationalist culture that had reached almost totalitarian proportions under Metaxas. People were now more likely to view fellow Greeks with empathy, the result being a society more conducive to trusting relationships and, hence, productive endeavor. Meanwhile, opportunities for productive endeavor grew as economic relations intensified with Western countries.

This was the basis of Greece’s newfound prosperity, but it was an unstable one. As incomes rose, people developed a wider range of socially defined needs, and these new needs tended to crowd out the old ones of family, church, and ethnos. People also found it easier to acquire individual tastes and lifestyles, and the more hardened individualists gravitated toward the arts and entertainment to indulge their need for sensation, interaction, and adulation. They were thus well positioned to reshape the ambient culture in their own image. Finally, increasing contact with the West—through trade, tourism, and foreign films—brought more contact with modern Western values. For younger and better educated Greeks, the West became the cultural model to follow.

Note

1. Was Germany planning to invade Greece before the landing of the British expeditionary force? This is doubtful. The invasion of Greece forced the Germans to postpone their invasion of the Soviet Union—an indication that the decision had been made at short notice. It’s likely that the death of Metaxas, and the landing of British troops, raised fears on the Axis side that the Allies would use Greece for an invasion of Central Europe, much as they had back in 1918.

Had it not been for the British intervention, Greece would have probably stayed out of the war, like neighboring Turkey.

References

Metaxas Project – Inside Fascist Greece

http://metaxas-project.com/

Sarandis, C. (1994). The ideology and character of the Metaxas regime, in T. Veremis (ed.) The Metaxas Dictatorship: Aspects of Greece, 1936-1940, (pages 156-157), Sunflower University Press.

Wikipedia. Ioannis Metaxas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Metaxas

Constructing the Greek state - part 2

The Ioannis Metaxas regime (1936–1941) was the high-water mark of Greek nationalism. It sought to create an emotional bond between Greeks and their nation that they had previously felt only for their families and immediate kin. In this, Metaxas was trying to replicate a process of nation-building that had happened over a much longer time in Western Europe. (source)

Greece is a young nation. This statement may seem absurd, since the Greeks have a long history that goes back thousands of years. For most of that time, however, they existed as an ethnic community within larger multicultural states that were often ruled by non-Greeks. This was especially so during the centuries of Muslim rule under the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire allowed its subject peoples much freedom to manage their affairs, but this self-government seldom rose above the local level. It was at this level that the Greeks were accustomed to running their lives—within the family, at the church, and among fellow villagers.

Above the local level, there was only a weak sense of common identity. And this broader identity was more religious than ethnic. While people were almost always sure of their religion, they were often less sure of their ethnicity. Many Orthodox Christians would alternately identify themselves to census takers as either Greeks or Macedonian Slavs (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, p. 208). Slavs became “Greek” by attaining a certain level of education, which typically was dispensed in that language (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, pp. 14-15).

In addition, a common ethnic identity could not easily develop in a land where Greeks had to live with other people. This was the case over most of present-day Greece. Almost half the population of Crete was Muslim, and the same was true for Western Thrace, and parts of Macedonia. Elsewhere, Christian Slavs or Albanians often predominated. Co-existence with Muslims was possible, but it came at a high cost. As Jelavich and Jelavich (1977, pp. 5-6) note:

In the decaying Ottoman Empire individual Muslims often suffered as much as their Christian counterparts did from bad government, but they still enjoyed important basic privileges, such as a far better chance in court, fewer taxes, and a recognized superior status. […] Christians, however, usually were supposed to observe certain prohibitions that were as galling to their personal pride as to their material interests. For instance, in theory they could not bear firearms, wear conspicuous or rich clothes, or don the color green, sacred to the Muslims. They were supposed to dismount when passing a Muslim on horseback; their houses could not be richer than or overlook those of their Muslim neighbors. Christian churches could not have bells or belltowers; new churches were not to be built, but old ones could be repaired.

Just as ethnic identity often extended no farther than the fields around one’s village, the same little world also circumscribed one's zone of relative peace and security. People disliked venturing too far from home, for fear of bandits. Many of these outlaws were Greeks, but the most powerful ones were Muslims—in general, discharged soldiers for whom banditry was little different from soldiering. Some of them ruled over large stretches of territory and commanded their own private armies. In time, especially during periods of weakness, the Ottoman Empire would regularize their existence by appointing them to official posts. There was thus no fine line between banditry and State power. The State itself ruled by virtue of force, and not by consent of the governed.

Constructing the Greek state

This old order ended with the War of Independence (1821-1829) and the creation of a Greek state. Nation-building would take place over a shorter time than it had in Western Europe. It would also be a more deliberate process. Finally, it would involve a more explicit rejection of the old order—a time when Greeks didn’t have their land all to themselves.

Initially, the new state was Greek only in name, being a protectorate of Great Britain, France, and Russia under a Bavarian king with a foreign-staffed civil service and army. Greeks would not run their own country until the late 1830s, and a democratically elected legislature would not be formed until 1844.

As citizens and as voters, the average Greek would now have to assume responsibility—especially financial responsibility—for a much larger circle of people who were neither family members nor neighbors. The only common denominator was a sense of shared citizenship. The result?

In 1838 Greek finances had been put under a French supervisor, Artemonis de Regny. By 1843 the entire financial situation of the country was disastrous. With the exception of a single year the state had been run on deficit spending. Payments on the loan had been suspended for four years. (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, p. 75)

Greece’s finances remained precarious. A second debt crisis occurred scarcely a half-century later:

The financial problem became increasingly serious. By 1892 the service on the debt took a third of the budget. In the next year Greece was bankrupt. (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, p. 173)

The problem wasn’t that Greeks were financially irresponsible. The problem was that they had previously exercised financial responsibility within the confines of a small community, or simply an extended family. A bad decision would primarily impact close relatives, who could easily retaliate. There was thus a system of checks and balances that just did not work in the new Greece.

Greeks were now interacting within a large social and economic environment while maintaining the mental reflexes of a much smaller one. People thought long and hard before dealing with strangers (and for good reason). They instead preferred to deal with other family members, even when a non-relative might be more competent. The worst part was that these family networks would conspire to plunder collectively owned goods, starting with the public treasury and extending to almost any space of social interaction. Beyond the world of one’s immediate kin, Greece was still a low-trust society, and a low-trust society is necessarily a poorer one.

To overcome this problem, Greek nationalists sought to strengthen national identity—to extend to the entire nation the sort of trust and emotional bonding that was normally felt towards one’s family. In short, they wanted to replicate the cultural evolution that the West had gone through. They wished to create a large nation-state with a correspondingly large society where one could easily interact with, and trust, complete strangers.

To this end, it was felt necessary to assimilate the country’s Christian minorities and expel its Muslim minority. This process had already begun during the War of Independence, with massacres of Muslim civilians being among the first acts of the Greek rebels (Jelavich & Jelavich, 1977, p. 440). It continued through a process of Turkish reprisals and Greek counter-reprisals, culminating in a mass exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922-1923.

Meanwhile, a national educational system was designed with a common curriculum. The Greek language was standardized, and steps taken to replace Turkish and Venetian loan-words with terms of Greek origin. Historic sites were made accessible to the public and used to instill national pride. In all this, Greece was following the example of Western nation-states.

Metaxas and the high tide of Greek nationalism

Greek nationalism reached its height under the Ioannis Metaxas regime (1936–1941). This period saw the use of organized youth activities, modern media, and popular art to promote national sentiment. By 1941, over one sixth of all Greeks were wearing the dark blue uniform of the national youth movement (EON). Metaxas himself became the focus of a personality cult that presented him as the “First Peasant,” the “First Worker,” and the “National Father.”

Metaxas blamed the failures of the past 100 years on Greeks pursuing narrowly defined self-interests at the expense of the nation as a whole. This pursuit of personal freedom impoverished Greek society and actually made everyone less free. His political philosophy is summarized by Sarandis (1994, pp. 151-152):

The individual must merge with the whole, and his own will was to be submitted to that of the nation. No one would be absolutely free and no individual could exist outside the state. Everything constituted part of the state, through which alone the will of the Greek people would be expressed. And this collective national will transcended the present and was independent of the living components of the nation, since it represented the volition not only of this era but also of the people of previous generations through thousands of years of history. Furthermore, individuals would subordinate their interests and suppress their own appetites and selfishness before the national collective welfare; only thus could they be powerful and consequently free.

This was clearly a Greek variant of fascism, even though Metaxas would later defend his country against fascist Italy. Today, such thinking might seem absurd, especially the notion of gaining freedom by suppressing freedom. Yet Metaxas was addressing a real problem. He wanted to stop the plundering of collective resources and turn Greece into the kind of high-trust society that older nation-states took for granted.

Metaxas’ legacy would last long after his untimely death in 1941. As growing numbers of tourists flocked to Greece during the postwar era, they were enchanted to find a nation with a strong sense of history and shared identity. They assumed this Greece was age-old, when in fact it had scarcely existed a half-century before. 

References

Jelavich, C. & B. Jelavich. (1977). The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, A History of East Central Europe, vol. VIII, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Metaxas Project – Inside Fascist Greece

http://metaxas-project.com/

Sarandis, C. (1994). The ideology and character of the Metaxas regime, in R. Higham & T. Veremis (eds.) The Metaxas Dictatorship: Aspects of Greece, 1936-1940, (pages 156-157), Sunflower University Press.

Wikipedia. Ioannis Metaxas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Metaxas

The Greek debt crisis - part 1

In early 1989, Poland legalized Solidarnosc as a political party and Hungary announced that it would become a multi-party state. These two moves set off a domino effect that spread throughout the entire Eastern bloc. (source)

The debt crisis that is today crippling Greece strangely resembles the one that overwhelmed Eastern Europe back in the late 1980s. The resemblance is not just confined to the existence of a huge debt. A quarter-century ago, there was a growing feeling among East Europeans and their elites that no solution was possible within the limits of the current ideology. As the debt became more and more unmanageable, more and more people came to see it as part of a larger problem. The debt crisis thus sparked a broader civilizational change. It became possible to debate a much wider range of issues that had hitherto been ruled off-limits to debate.

Will the current crisis play out in a similar way? Will one or two countries reach a breaking point and begin a process of change? And will this change then spread to other countries, with the result that an entire world-system will collapse like a house of cards?

Perhaps. But keep in mind a key difference between then and now. In the late 1980s, there was an alternate world-system that could inspire hope in those who wanted change. No such alternative exists today. There are simply countries that are less integrated into the current system and its ideology of globalism and post-nationalism. People will certainly become disillusioned, but without an alternate model their disillusionment will not necessarily lead to change.

Thus, the process may be slower and more erratic than the one a quarter-century ago. Change will likely come in fits and starts. Much more effort will be needed not only to explain why globalism is fundamentally unsound but also to articulate a viable alternative. And such an effort will have to be directed at people in all walks of life, including the elites. No, it won’t be easy.

In the next few posts, I will examine the roots of the Greek debt crisis, which is much more than about debt and much more than about Greeks. What does it portend for them and for the rest of us?

Survival of the cutest?

Please take care of me! (source) Child neglect is common in Papua New Guinea, even in regions where food is relatively abundant. Did juvenile hair color become lighter as a way to elicit maternal care? 

If we exclude people of European descent, blond hair is most common among the natives of Oceania, specifically within a zone stretching from central and western Australia, through Papua New Guinea and into Melanesia and nearby islands. This coloration is due to a genetic variant of TYRP1 that is rare or nonexistent outside Oceania (Kenny et al., 2012).

Among central Australian Aborigines, blond hair varies by age and sex:

Up to 10 years of age the color distribution is approximately the same in both sexes at about 85% “fair” to 15% “dark.” Over the age of 11 years it is difficult to find a “fair” male while female “fairness” falls off more gradually.

[…] In the males the onset of darkening becomes apparent from about the 8th year. In adolescence the hair ranges from medium brown to black (observations in this group are very limited) while beyond 20 years practically all are in the “dark” category. […] In the females darkening becomes definite only after about the 20th year, and even in old age does not often exceed light brown. (Abbie & Adey, 1953)

We see the same age and sex pattern in Solomon Islanders:

An interesting hair phenotype that is sometimes seen in Island Melanesia (as well as among Australian Aborigines) is “blondism,” in which individuals exhibit the characteristic darkly pigmented skin of the region while also having blond hair. This trait was most commonly observed in children whose hair generally darkened around puberty (Robins, 1991). However, in some cases, blondism persists into adulthood, although the hair appears somewhat darker than what is seen in children (Norton et al., 2006).

This is similar to the situation in Europe, where blond hair likewise is more common among children and women (Shekar et al., 2008; Steggerda, 1941). Among Europeans, however, blond hair is much less specific to juveniles, being maintained throughout life in most individuals.

Origins and adaptive value

How did this “Oceanic” blondism come about? The evolutionary path may be analogous to that of European blondism.

European women naturally have hair that is more brightly and diversely colored (Shekar et al., 2008; Steggerda, 1941). This is consistent with a need to attract prospective mates, since bright and/or novel colors are more likely to be noticed and remembered. Most alleles aren’t sex-linked, so this kind of sexual selection would have spilled over on to European men, changing their hair color as well (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008).

All of this implies that ancestral European women faced a competitive mate market. At higher latitudes, too many women had to compete for too few men, especially among hunter-gatherers. On the one hand, hunting distances were longer on average, thus increasing male mortality. On the other, men were less polygynous because of the higher costs of provisioning women and their offspring, especially during winter. This excess of females over males in the mate market was greatest on the continental steppe-tundra that covered most of Europe during the last ice age. Northern Asia also had steppe-tundra, but only in arid regions farther north where human occupation was not continuous, particularly at the height of the last ice age (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008).

In equatorial Oceania, the evolutionary path may have been both similar and different. As in Europe, there is an aesthetic preference for blond hair:

In Samoa, all fair hair is considered 'ena'ena, a word that is usually translated as brown, although when English-speaking Samoans use this term in reference to hair, they typically gloss it as 'blond'. This makes sense since, when one is bleaching Polynesian hair, it goes through a series of reddish- brown shades prior to arriving at blond, and even then retains a reddish hue. When describing hair, Samoans specify the actual shade of 'blond' by using certain modifiers with 'ena'ena, such as 'ena'ena manaia, which literally means 'really nice brown hair', but which refers to a very fair reddish colour.

The hair of female spirits is most commonly said to be 'ena'ena manaia, and they are wont to decorate it with a red hibiscus (Mageo, 1994).

But what is the adaptive value for young children? They are, after all, the ones who most often have this hair color. What kind of selection pressure could have favored blond children?

One possibility is child neglect. Papua New Guinea has a relatively high rate of child malnutrition—35% on average, with some regions having rates as high as 78%. Yet malnourished children are found in areas that have an apparent surplus of food. Lepowsky (1987, p. 75) notes that “the reported pattern of child malnutrition did not follow environmental or ecological patterns but cultural ones.” The ultimate cause seems to be “maternal detachment”:

These women take a guarded attitude toward infants, extending the greatest amount of their affection and parental care toward children who are physically strong and who survive the first couple of years of life. (Lepowsky, 1987, p. 78)

For this reason, child naming is delayed for a few weeks after birth, and the ritual thanking of the father’s kin is delayed for about six months. Mothers take for granted that their offspring may not survive this period.

Thus, in equatorial Oceania, child survival depends very much on the degree of maternal attachment, i.e., the mother’s fondness for her child. Has this factor favored “cute” features, like blond hair? Is blondism a child’s way of eliciting more maternal care during infancy?

References

Abbie, A.A. & W.R. Adey. (1953). Pigmentation in a central Australian tribe with special reference to fair-headedness, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 11, 339-359.

Frost, P. (2008). Sexual selection and human geographic variation, Special Issue: Proceedings of the 2^nd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4),169-191. http://137.140.1.71/jsec/articles/volume2/issue4/NEEPSfrost.pdf

Frost, P. (2006). European hair and eye color - A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 85-103 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10905138

Kenny, E.E., N.J. Timpson, M. Sikora, M-C. Yee, A. Moreno-Estrada, C. Eng, S. Huntsman, E.G. Burchard, M. Stoneking, C.D. Bustamante, & S. Myles (2012). Melanesian blond hair is caused by an amino acid change in TYRP1, Science, 336, 554.

Lepowsky, M. (1987). Food taboos and child survival: A case study from the Coral Sea, in N. Scheper-Hughes (ed.) Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children, (pp. 71-92), Springer.

Mageo, J.M. (1994).  Hairdos and Don'ts: Hair Symbolism and Sexual History in Samoa, Man, New Series, 29 (2) 407-432

Norton, H.L., J.S. Friedlaender, D.A. Merriwether, G. Koki, C.S. Mgone, & M.D. Shriver. (2006). Skin and Hair Pigmentation Variation in Island Melanesia, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 130, 254–268.

Shekar, S.N., D.L. Duffy, T. Frudakis, G.W. Montgomery, M.R. James, R.A. Sturm, & N.G. Martin. (2008). Spectrophotometric methods for quantifying pigmentation in human hair—Influence of MC1R genotype and environment. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 84, 719–726.

Steggerda, M. (1941). Change in hair color with age, Journal of Heredity, 32, 402-403.