Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World
By MARK MAZOWER June 29, 2011
YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.In the 1820s, as it waged a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape from the prison house of empire. For philhellenes, its resurrection represented the noblest of causes. “In the great morning of the world,” Shelley wrote in “Hellas,” his poem about the country’s struggle for independence, “Freedom’s splendor burst and shone!” Victory would mean liberty’s triumph not only over the Turks but also over all those dynasts who had kept so many Europeans enslaved. Germans, Italians, Poles and Americans flocked to fight under the Greek blue and white for the sake of democracy. And within a decade, the country won its freedom.
Over the next century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states.
In the aftermath of the First World War, Greece again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.
It is ironic, then, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war while the rest of Europe cheered. And many cheered again a few months later when a young left-wing resistance fighter named Manolis Glezos climbed the Acropolis one night with a friend and pulled down a swastika flag that the Germans had recently unfurled. (Almost 70 years later, Mr. Glezos would be tear-gassed by the Greek police while protesting the austerity program.) Ultimately, however, Greece succumbed to German occupation. Nazi rule brought with it political disintegration, mass starvation and, after liberation, the descent of the country into outright civil war between Communist and anti-Communist forces.
Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman used the intensifying civil war there to galvanize Congress behind the Truman Doctrine and his sweeping peacetime commitment of American resources to fight Communism and rebuild Europe. Suddenly elevated into a trans-Atlantic cause, Greece now stood for a very different Europe — one that had crippled itself by tearing itself apart, whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in Athens telling Greek policy makers what to do and American napalm scorched the Greek mountains as the Communists were put to flight.
European political and economic integration was supposed to end the weakness and dependency of the divided continent, and here, too, Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s, first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe. And it gave the European Union the taste for enlargement and the ambition to turn itself from a small club of wealthy Western European states into a voice for the newly democratic continent as a whole, extending far to the south and east.
And now today, after the euphoria of the ’90s has faded and a new modesty sets in among the Europeans, it falls again to Greece to challenge the mandarins of the European Union and to ask what lies ahead for the continent. The European Union was supposed to shore up a fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new front line, throwing all these achievements into question. For we are all small powers now, and once again Greece is in the forefront of the fight for the future.
Independent.co.uk
Mark Mazower: A strategy for international insecurity
Washington's predicament is that it is not powerful enough to impose peace on its own terms
Thursday, 23 March 2006
The invasion of Iraq marked a diplomatic revolution. For the first time since Suez, a major power - and in this case the world's most powerful military state by a very large margin - deliberately launched a war outside its traditional sphere of influence without being threatened with imminent attack. The new US policy, which implied war might be more than merely a last resort in the face of imminent danger, flew in the face of prevailing international norms.
Once war had seemed a natural part of international life. But not for many decades past. Nazism, and two world wars, have left their mark. It was, after all, fascism's unabashed militarism (and not its racism) that so shocked the world. That is why the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg faced charges of conspiring to wage aggressive war, as if they were not statesmen but criminals ganging up on the civilised ways of a peace-loving world. Whatever may be the difference between conspiring to wage aggressive war and plotting a war of "pre-emption", it is not enough to hide the fact that the national security strategy of George W Bush takes us in a new and dangerous direction.
The image of the US has been so deeply tarnished that it will take years to recover. In addition, the sight of a rampaging rogue superpower has completely transformed the position of the UN as well. Badly regarded by the Bush administration, it has thereby acquired new virtues in everyone else's eyes.
Whose bidding does the UN exist to serve? Is its prestige bolstered or diminished by having turned - in the eyes of many of its members - into the repository for an alternative, more consensual and far more desirable way of ordering the world's affairs than that posited by the Bush administration? These questions are symptomatic of the intense spotlight that now shines on that institution too.
Behind the war itself, there was little strategy but ideology aplenty. The neo-conservatives appear to have believed - and it was more an article of faith than an analysis - that toppling Saddam would automatically democratise first Iraq and then the rest of the Middle East, and that this process would facilitate a peace settlement between Israel and her Arab neighbours.
The fallacies are now self-evident, but to bring out the truly lethal consequences, we might compare the situation in the Middle East at present with that in eastern Europe. Both are zones where, after 1918, older empires collapsed and were succeeded by newly-minted nation-states. And in both, this territorial settlement was vulnerable because these nation-states did not really exist except in the wishful mind of their sponsors. Interwar Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia were not so different in that respect from Mandatory Iraq; they were all patchworks, with substantial minority populations.
Yet nearly a century later, how differently they have turned out. In eastern Europe, ethnic cleansing wiped out many minorities, while the bitter experience of the Second World War made people aware of the fragility of regional peace. Pan-European political and legal frameworks stabilised borders and inhibited changes to them by force. Relations amongst once hostile neighbours dramatically improved.
The transition to democracy after 1989 was mostly smooth. Czechs and Slovaks divorced quietly. Even the break-up of Yugoslavia failed to trigger off a wider conflict. Everyone felt they had too much to lose and today, eastern Europe's problems are chiefly those of economic enlargement.
In the Middle East, things took another path. Right at the outset, Woodrow Wilson brought independence to Slavs but denied it to Arabs; instead, colonial rule by Europeans replaced that of the Ottomans. The main consequence of the Second World War was not the shock of experiencing total war but the creation of Israel, which destabilised the region still further. And whereas Eastern Europe fell under Soviet hegemony and thus avoided becoming a plaything of the superpowers during the Cold War, in the Middle East the American-Soviet antagonism ran through the region, as each power wrestled with the other through its proxies.
External interventions and the conflict with Israel militarised politics and undermined democracy. Even before 2003, therefore, the Middle East state system had travelled in the opposite direction to that taken by eastern Europe. But it took the invasion of Iraq to reveal how easily it could all unravel.
The EU has - for obvious reasons - not played the same kind of stabilising role in the Arab world that it has in eastern Europe. There is no carrot of membership (except possibly for Turkey), and thus no European incentive to democratise. Rather, democratisation has been introduced by the Bush administration, and rendered suspect because of this.
When one looks back to the days of the Eisenhower administration, one sees how far the US has moved from playing the role of honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet Washington's predicament is that while it can no longer act as an effective intermediary, neither is it powerful enough to impose peace on its own terms.
Can the European Union do more to make a difference? Yes, if it recognises how far its own security now depends upon calm beyond its borders. For decades the EU devoted itself to tackling the chief 19th-century threat to the continent - the Franco-German antagonism. This it did so successfully that the problem no longer exists. The task for a new generation of EU leaders is to show what their very considerable soft economic power can do to project an alternative route to peace.
The writer is a Professor of History at Columbia University, New York
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