A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

(Jacob Rumans) #1

became a full member in 1981. It had only
recently returned to democracy after the collapse
of the military junta in 1974. Although demo-
cratic government had a difficult passage after
1974, membership of the European Community
was a strong support.


The Greeks suffered more than any nation in the
post-war free world, the civil war from 1946 to
1949 causing widespread devastation. But that
conflict was followed by a period of conservative
parliamentary government under Field Marshal
Papagos and the most durable politician of post-
war Greece, Constantine Karamanlis. In 1963,
George Papandreou was able to form a liberal
reforming coalition until he was dismissed by
King Constantine after a dispute over who should
control the army. A group of extremist army offi-
cers accused Papandreou’s Centre Union Party of
preparing the way for a communist takeover and
organised a coup in April 1967 ahead of the
planned general election. The dictatorial rule of
the Greek colonels from 1967 to 1974 was a dis-
astrous period for Greece. Abuses of human
rights, including torture, were rampant, and so
was corruption. The economy, which had been
doing well in the 1960s, deteriorated sharply. In
1974, beset by vociferous public demonstrations
and resistance following the fiasco of their Cyprus
policy and the shambles of army mobilisation, the
colonels’ junta collapsed.
Cyprus, after a long struggle, had been granted
independence in August 1960 and placed under
the guarantee of Greece, Turkey and Britain. But
the power-sharing constitution never worked
in the face of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot
animosities. Conflict on the island led to the
despatch of a United Nations peacekeeping force
in 1964, and Turkey and Greece themselves came
close to war. Ten years later, in July 1974, the
Greek colonels organised a coup and forced the
president of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, to flee,
preparatory to bringing Cyprus under Greek con-
trol; the Turks reacted by invading and occupying
the northern portion of the island, defeating the
Greek Cypriots. An exchange of populations, with
200,000 Greek Cypriots leaving their homes in
the north, and Turkish Cypriots resettling there,


effectively partitioned Cyprus. All efforts to unite
the two halves and reach a workable compromise
between the two communities had failed by the
early 1990s, but the partition, with a UN force
patrolling the line between the two sides, had
ended the bloodshed.
The Cyprus dispute led to strained relations
between two NATO allies Turkey and Greece.
But Greece’s attachment to NATO after 1974
was ambivalent, partly because it was widely
believed in Greece that the US had supported the
hated colonels. US bases and the US naval pres-
ence in Greece were consequently very unpopu-
lar, both with the conservative governments
headed by Karamanlis, who had opposed the
colonels from exile in Paris, and with the liberal
centre governments of Andreas Papandreou (son
of George Papandreou) in the 1980s.
On his return from exile in 1974, Karamanlis,
with true statesmanship, guided Greece back to
democracy, only for Andreas Papandreou’s
Panhellenic Socialist Party to win the election in
1981, though his administration evinced little
socialism. Papandreou had gained a reputation
as an American-trained economist, but, as else-
where in the world, the shock of the oil-price rise
compounded Greece’s economic difficulties in
the mid-1980s. In opposition, Papandreou had
been stridently anti-Common Market and anti-
American; in government he acted with a greater
sense of responsibility. But by the end of the
1980s he and his ministers became implicated in
financial scandals; his electoral support neverthe-
less remained solid. Greek politics were also
enlivened by his love affair with a former airline
stewardess thirty-five years his junior, pho-
tographed with a telephoto lens bare-bosomed on
the beach. Papandreou was seriously ill with heart
trouble at the same time. He subsequently
divorced his wife, married his mistress and was
narrowly defeated in the general election of 1989.
No party emerged as outright winner, and coali-
tion governments were succeeded in 1990 by a
conservative administration with a tiny majority
led by Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis.
Reforms strengthened the economy after years of
socialist profligacy but also caused hardship. The
elections in October 1993 returned Papandreou

878 WESTERN EUROPE GATHERS STRENGTH: AFTER 1968
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