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Karamanlis’s Cautious Success: the Background

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Richard Clogg
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AN ANONYMOUS COMMENTATOR ON THE GREEK POLITICAL SCENE predicted in 1970 that it was unlikely that the Greeks, even if resentful of the Colonels' 'unta, would ‘respond widely to their presently exiled (self- or otherwise) erstwhile political leaders’ and concluded that 'the self-exiled Karamanlis, with his protracted silences, had lost much of his credit with his followers’. He was by no means alone in writing off the old politicians in general, and Constantine Karamanlis in particular, as a serious factor in the Greek political equation. But when the Greek military regime collapsed in July 1974 in the wake of President Makarios's overthrow in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion, President Phaidon Gizikis had no other choice than to summon the 67-year-old Constantine Karamanlis to clear up the mess created by seven years of military government. Karamanlis, far from being a spent force, returned to a welcome verging on delirium and looks set fair for another long term as Prime Minister and most likely, once the new constitution has been enacted, as President of Greece.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1975 , pp. 332 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1975

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References

1 Thucydides’, ‘Greek Politics: Myth and Reality’, The Political Quarterly, Vol. 41, 1970, pp. 465, 463.

2 Leader of the Greek Rally and Prime Minister between 1952 and 1955.

3 There is no satisfactory political biography of Karamanlis. Maurice Genevoix’s The Greece of Karamanlis, London, 1973 (French edition Paris 1972), is a mediocre exercise in political hagiography.

4 Karamanlis’s principal political rival in the 1950s and 1960s, George Papandreou, was likewise the son of a provincial priest in the Peloponnese. The Greek potitikos kosmos or political world has always been more open to talents, and less of a closed caste, than some of its critics would allow.

5 Tsoucalas, C., The Greek Tragedy, Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 141 Google Scholar. Useful studies of Greek politics during this period are Jean Meynaud, Les Forces politiques en Grèce, Lausanne, 1965 (revised Greek edition Athens 1966, 1974) and Keith Legg, Politics in Modern Greece, Stanford, 1969.

6 The Centre Union’s allegations are documented in Mavri Vivios. To khronikon tou eklogikou praxikopimatos tis 29/10/61, Athens, 1961. For a judicious assessment of the question of the manipulation of the 1961 elections see ‘Athenian’ [Rodis Roufos], Inside the Colonels’ Greece, London, 1972, p. 42. Roufos concludes that while there was ballot rigging and illegal pressure, particularly in the army vote, ERE benefited at the most by 4 per cent of the popular vote, not enough to have affected the size of its parliamentary majority.

7 Couloumbis, Theodore A., ‘Post World War II Greece: A Political Review’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 8, 1973, p. 297.Google Scholar

8 Despite the fact that something over fifty books have been written about the Colonels’ Greece, no wholly adequate overall study yet exists of their political system, a system which bears a number of striking resemblances to that of the prewar regime of General Metaxas. But cf. Clogg, Richard and Yannopoulos, George, eds, Greece under Military Rule, London and New York, 1972 Google Scholar, and Bakojannis, Pavlos, Militärherrschaft in Griechenland, Stuttgart, 1972 Google Scholar. More sympathetic to the regime is Bossle, Lothar, Hornung, Klaus and Mergl, Georg, Blick vom Olymp. Griechenland heute: Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Staat, Gesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1973 Google Scholar. A useful article which carries the story forward to the collapse of the military regime is Xydis, S. G., ‘Coups and Countercoups in Greece, 1967–1973 (with postscripts)’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 89, 1974, pp. 507–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An extensive bibliography is appended to Clogg and Yannopoulos, op. cit., 255–64.

9 In the sense employed by Linz, Juan J. in ‘An Authoritarian Regime: Spain’ in Allardt, Erik and Littunen, Yrjö, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems, Helsinki, 1964, pp. 251–83, 374–81.Google Scholar

10 Georgios Georgalas, Ideología tis Epanastaseos, Athens, 1971, p. 7. Georgalas, an ex‐communist, assumed the role of principal ideologist to the regime.

11 Nea Politeia, 4 March 1972. The reasons for their gratitude are obvious. In 1969, for instance, Greek shipowners remitted to Greece from their foreign operations $ 143.4 million. On this they paid a mere $ 0.9 million in tax (0.62 per cent), George Yannopoulos in New Society, 29 August 1974.

12 Georgalas, op. cit., p. 6.

13 It had long been apparent that the civilian government headed by Adamantios Androutsopoulos, which had been installed in the wake of the coup which overthrew President Papadopoulos in November 1973, had no real power. Effective power was largely concentrated in the hands of the military eminence grise of the post‐Papadopoulos regime, Brigadier Dimitrios loannidis, the head of the all‐powerful military police, (ESA) and an erstwhile close collaborator of Papadopoulos.

14 According to ‘Athenian’ [Rodis Roufos] approximately 1,500 officers of the three armed forces were retired in 1967 and 1968 against an annual average of retirements between 1963 and 1966 of circa 330, op. cit., p. 112.

15 Official figures issued at the time put the number of dead at fifteen and the injured at 300. Much higher figures had been bandied about by the regime’s emigré opponents.

16 The Sunday Times, 2 March 1975.

17 See e.g. Eleni Vlachou’s comments in Kathimerini, 27 February 1975.

18 For a detailed and up to date, if somewhat over‐legalistic, account of the Cyprus issue, viewed from the Greek Cypriot viewpoint, see Polyviou, Polyvios, Cyprus. The Tragedy and the Challenge, London, 1975 Google Scholar.

19 It has been suggested that the rank and file of students do not necessarily share the political views of their elected leaders and that the primary cause of the present extreme politicization of university students is to be found in inadequate educational provision and, more particularly, in a lack of dialogue between teachers and the taught. Once substantial reforms are introduced, it is held, then student politics will lose much of their present febrile quality.

20 There had been six earlier referenda in 1920, 1924, 1935, 1946 and 1973 but that of 1974 was the only one not to have been conducted in abnormal conditions and free of allegations of manipulation.

21 The Times, 23 December 1974, 8 January, 6 March 1975.

22 Xenophon Zolotas, Governor of the Bank of Greece, has recently suggested that these oil reserves may be larger than has so far been publicly announced; The Energy Problem in Greece, Athens, 1975, pp. 19–20.

23 The complex issues involved in the dispute are analysed in Phylaktopoulos, A., ‘Mediterranean Discord. Conflicting Greek‐Turkish Claims on the Aegean Seabed’, The International Lawyer, Vol. 8, 1974, pp. 431–41Google Scholar. The basic point at issue is whether the Greek islands lying off the coast of Anatolia generate their own continental shelves, or are contained within the Turkish continental shelf.

24 For a cogent demolition of the view, widespread in Greece, that the coups of 1967 and 1973 and the Cyprus crisis of summer 1974 were part of a plot masterminded by the American administration, see Mortimer, Edward, ‘Southern Europe in Crisis. The Balance shifts against America’, The Round Table, No. 256, 10 1974, pp. 386–9Google Scholar. Mortimer nonetheless remains critical of recent US policy towards Greece.