mourned. The junta appointed a regent and Papadopoulos was named prime minister.
The colonels’ coup d’etat was a classic
The economic consequences of the Greek coup were mixed. Tourism did not suffer—politically-conscious travelers who boycotted the colonels’ Greece were readily replaced by tourists attracted to cheap, if suffocatingly over-regulated resorts. Foreign investment, which in Greece’s case had only begun a decade or so before the coup, and a steady increase in GNP—rising at an annual average of 6 percent since 1964—were unaffected by political developments: as in Spain, low wages (abetted by the repression of all labour protest) and a regime predicated on ‘law and order’ offered a benevolent environment for foreign capital. The junta even had widespread initial support in the rural districts from which the colonels mostly came, especially after they cancelled all peasant debt in 1968.[223]
But the autarkic instincts of the colonels favored a return to old-established national habits of import- substitution—inefficient local manufacturers producing low-quality products and protected against foreign competition. This was bound eventually to bring the military regime into conflict with the country’s urban middle class, whose interests as consumers and producers alike would within a few years triumph over their relief at the dismissal of the bickering politicians. And the colonels, mediocre even by the undemanding standards of their kind, had nothing to offer for the future: no project for Greek integration into the emerging and expanding European Community, no strategy for a return to civilian rule.[224]
Moreover the regime, secure enough at home, was increasingly isolated abroad—in December 1969 the Council of Europe unanimously voted to expel Greece; two months later the EEC broke off all negotiations with the junta. More brazenly than most, the colonels’ regime rested on force alone. It was thus altogether appropriate that the dictatorship should fall in the course of an incompetent attempt to apply force beyond its frontiers, to resolve the long-running problem of Cyprus.
The island of Cyprus, part of the Ottoman Empire since 1571, had been administered by Britain since 1878 and unilaterally annexed at the outbreak of World War One. In the far-eastern Mediterranean, close to Turkish Anatolia and far removed from the Greek mainland or any other outlying Greek islands, Cyprus nonetheless had a Greek-speaking, Eastern Orthodox majority increasingly disposed to seek union with the Greek state. The Turkish minority, some 18 percent of the island’s population, was understandably opposed to any such arrangement and was vociferously supported by the authorities in Ankara. The fate of Cyprus—caught between British efforts to dispose of a troublesome imperial inheritance and longstanding Greek-Turkish hostility—remained troublingly unresolved throughout the Fifties.
Denied their project of ‘
Meanwhile the island’s Greek and Turkish communities lived alongside each other in suspicious unease, interrupted by sporadic outbursts of inter-communal violence. The governments in Athens and Ankara both advertised themselves as the protectors of their respective compatriots and occasionally threatened to intervene. But prudence, and international pressure, kept them from doing so, even when attacks on Turkish Cypriots in 1963 led to the arrival of a UN Peacekeeping Force the following year. Despite the Greek Cypriots’ near-monopoly of public employment and positions of authority (loosely comparable to the Protestant majority’s exclusion of Catholics from privileges and power in Ulster)—or perhaps because of it—the situation in Cyprus appeared stable. But if Cyprus was no longer a crisis it remained very much an ‘issue’.
Thus in 1973, when students in Athens (first at the Law School, later at the Polytechnic) embarrassed the colonels by publicly opposing their rule for the first time, the military’s response was to divert attention and seek to shore up public support by re-asserting the Greek claim to Cyprus. General Ioannides, a ‘hard-liner’ who displaced Papadopoulos as junta leader following the Polytechnic demonstrations, plotted with George Grivas and other Greek-Cypriot nationalists to overthrow Makarios and ‘re-unite’ the island with Greece. On July 15th 1974, units of the Cypriot National Guard along with hand-picked Greek officers attacked the Presidential Palace, expelled Makarios (who fled abroad) and installed a puppet government in anticipation of direct rule from Athens.
At this juncture, however, the Turkish government announced its own intention to invade Cyprus in order to protect the interests of the Turkish-Cypriot community, and promptly did so, on July 20th. Within a week, two-fifths of the island was in Turkish hands. Unable either to prevent or respond to this move by vastly superior Turkish forces, the junta appeared helpless: ordering full mobilization one day, canceling it the next. Faced with widespread public anger at this national humiliation, the Greek dictators themselves turned to the ageing Karamanlis and invited him to return home from his exile in Paris. By July 24th the former Prime Minister was back in Athens and had initiated the country’s return to civilian rule.
The transition was accomplished with remarkable ease. Karamanlis’s New Democracy party swept home in the November 1974 elections and repeated its success three years later. A new constitution was approved in June 1975, although the opposition parties initially protested over the heightened powers granted to the president of the republic (a post occupied by Karamanlis himself from 1980). With unexpected alacrity, Greek domestic politics took on a familiar European profile, divided roughly equally into a center-right (New Democracy) and a center-left (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement led by the late George Papandreou’s American-educated son Andreas).
The smoothness of Greece’s return to democracy was due in part to Karamanlis’s skill in breaking with his own past, while at the same time conveying an image of seasoned competence and continuity. Rather than re- establish his discredited Center Union he had formed a new party. He called a referendum on the discredited monarchy in December 1974, and when 69.2 percent of the voters demanded its abolition he oversaw the establishment of a republic. In order to avoid alienating the military he resisted calls to purge the army, preferring instead to impose early retirement on the more compromised senior officers while rewarding and promoting loyalists.[225]
With the monarchy out of the way, and the army neutralized, Karamanlis had to address the unfinished business of Cyprus. Neither he nor his successors had any intention of re-opening the
Cyprus itself thus became an object of international concern, as UN diplomats and lawyers were to spend fruitless decades trying unsuccessfully to resolve the island’s divisions. Meanwhile Greek politicians were thereby relieved of responsibility for the island’s affairs (though they remained constrained by domestic politics to express a continued interest in its fate) and could turn to more promising horizons. Less than a year after the fall of the colonels, in June 1975, the government in Athens formally applied to join the EEC. On January 1st 1981, in what many in Brussels would come to regard as a regrettable triumph of hope over wisdom, Greece became a full member of the Community.
Unlike Greece, Portugal had no recent experience of even the most vestigial of democracies. Salazar’s authoritarian reign had been peculiarly and self-consciously retrograde even by the standards prevailing when he first took over power in 1932—indeed, in its mix of censorious clericalism, corporate institutions and rural underdevelopment,Portugal quite closely resembled post-1934 Austria. Appropriately enough, post-war Portugal was favored by retired Frenchmen nostalgic for Vichy France—Charles Maurras, disgraced leader of the Action