Facing the Greek junta: the European Community,the Council of Europe and the rise of human-rights politics in Europe

Abstract

In April 1967, a group of colonels seized power in Greece. Since Greece was a member-state of the Council of Europe and held an association agreement with the European Community, both organizations had to define their positions vis-à-vis the new military regime. Very soon, politicians in the parliamentary assemblies of both organizations started to cooperate with the aim of imposing sanctions on Greece. This article examines the inter-organizational dynamics between the European Community and the Council of Europe on Greece during the colonels’ regime. It argues that the European Community imported concrete policy positions and even normative ideas which had first emerged in the Council of Europe. In so doing, the Community prepared the ground for its future human-rights policies.     

Polis and Oikos: The Art of Politics in the Greek City-State

ABSTRACT

The Greek city-state has traditionally been viewed as an entity that was divided into two distinct spheres (oikos and polis) and governed by two distinct arts (oikonomia and politikê technê). The aim of this article is to show that this image of the Greek city-state is not very accurate. The relationship between the oikos and the polis was not exclusive in classical poleis. Particularly in Athens during the democratic period, the polis was depicted as a family writ large, and to the extent that oikos was seen as an entity of its own, it was a part of the polis, not excluded from or opposed to it. My aim is to show that the art of the household and the art of politics were not distinct arts as has been claimed in modern political theory. Furthermore, although the collapse of the classical city-state during the Hellenistic era entailed a privatization of the household, it was not until modern times, from the late eighteenth century onwards—when the concept of the natural right to life and property became firmly established in juridical and political discourses—that the private sphere attained genuine autonomy.     

The Politics of Greek Environmental Policy

This article serves a dual purpose. Its substantive goal is to provide an account of Greek environmental policy formation and implementation over the last twenty years. Its theoretical goal is to examine the relative impacts of specific political factors, as contrasted with aggregate levels of socioeconomic and institutional development, in shaping environmental policy in an industrializing country. such as Greece. More specifically, it is argued that certain aspects of state-society relations and of the internal organization of the Greek state are frequently the major reasons behind the country's difficulties in formulating implementable preventive policy and in implementing adequately constructed policy.     

Modern Greek in the European Union: Language,Economy and Culture

Abstract

For those teaching and researching in Modern Greek Studies outside Greece, discussion of the eighties and nineties is characterised by reference to changes in Greek political life, as well as in the Greek educational system and policy making directly connected with Greece's entry into the European Union. Greece became a member of the EU as recently as 1981. PASOK, viewed membership as temporary but these claims were dropped after 1985. In the same period changes introduced into the linguistic system of the Greek language led to discussions of educational and cultural interest. More recently, however, certain developments concerning the role of strong languages in the European Union have brought to the fore issues concerning weak languages, those spoken by less people in the European Union, and their related cultures. This has once again opened the forum of discussion regarding matters of linguistic survival and cultural variety.     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.     

Declarations of Forgiveness and Remorse in European Politics

This article examines the historical background, proliferation, and later internationalization of public declarations of forgiveness and remorse, first made in Europe a few decades after the end World War II. The author suggests that these declarations should be understood as a political practice, and bases her claim on three premises: (1) after 1945, politicians began apologizing not only for their own crimes but mainly for those perpetrated by the communities they represented; (2) these declarations implied a tacit acceptance of responsibility of both the group that declares its remorse and of the group that accepts and possibly forgives the former for its past crimes; (3) apart from representing a shared collective moral responsibility, declarations of forgiveness and remorse imply the continuity of a nation (or of other kinds of human collectivities). These three premises apply if declarations of forgiveness and remorse are not banal and conventional, but function as a political ritual. The author discusses the main controversies relating to these declarations, such as the problem of collective responsibility or the neglect of the victims of past crimes, and concludes that, despite their flaws, authentic declarations of forgiveness and remorse have important moral and political consequences.     

Human Rights and International Security: The International Community and the Greek Dictators

The Greek junta was notorious for its use of state torture as a means of control. Yet, for most Western governments and organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), Greece's geostrategic location was considered to be a higher priority than the undemocratic behaviour of the ‘Colonels’. This article seeks to synthesise existing historiography with new research in order to examine the complex and interconnected processes that led Western states and key international institutions to tolerate human-rights abuses in Greece in the face of huge protest from international public opinion. It will look at why Western states failed to explain away the ‘Greek case’, as they had done with Portugal and Spain, as an anomaly on the road to defeating a mortal enemy, the USSR, which was committing far more numerous violations. It will also consider why international opinion focused on Greece so intently. It will show how many in the West were lulled by the regime into believing that human-rights abusers can act as agents of stability and security. The article's footnotes aim to draw attention to the many primary and secondary sources that provide additional information on the issue of human-rights abuses by the Greek junta.     

For the Community: Scottish Historical Archaeology and the Politics of Land Reform

In Scotland, land reform is, historically and still today, a defining political issue and a subject of debate. Central to this debate are different ideological understandings of the rural past. In this paper, I discuss the nature of the Scottish land question and explore several of the main—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—ideologies concerning land, as put forward or supported by different constituencies: politicians; landowners; crofters; Scots more generally; and members of the Scottish diaspora. I consider the histories to which these ideologies relate and seek to locate the historical archaeology of rural Scotland in its political and social contexts.     

Perfectly absent: the emergence of the Modern Greek perfect in Early Modern Greek

Abstract

This paper traces the emergence of the Standard Modern Greek perfect ?χω + infinitive in the Early Modern Greek period. It shows that the construction appears in written sources towards the very end of the seventeenth century. Special attention is given to ‘phantom’ perfects, which can be found in editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and non-literary texts as well as in the bibliography and which distort the picture of its emergence.     

Generations,Mobility and Community: Geographies of Three Generations of Greek and Italian Ancestry in Sydney

Geographies of three generations of Greek and Italian ancestry in Sydney totalling 245 000 people in 2001 are identified. A model of community sequences is developed within a conceptual framework of intergenerational spatial, occupational and social absorption. Considerable intra‐ and inter‐generational occupational mobility took place and the third generations showed higher proportions as managers, professionals and associate professionals than persons of Australian ancestry. Second and third generations had occupational profiles which were much closer to the host society than the first generations. Despite occupational mobility, employment, residential and social trends associated with the first generations affected the adult second generations and to an extent the third. Several thousand members of three generations re‐grouped into successive local communities, patronised facilities in core communities, and maintained place identities.