The Condition of Greece

...In explaining this familiar paradox, it is important to note that only 9 per cent of investment in housing has been public (this contrasts with 69 per cent in Holland, 56 per cent in Britain, 27 per cent in Germany), and this means that there has been no serious planning, little public housing, no "new cities," etc...

...In other words, it has not established a truly modern capitalism (on the model, say, of Western Europe), but rather that special capitalism which grows up in the midst of backwardness without transforming it, characterized by uneven development and radical inequality...

...I think it can be said that American assistance has not led to the creation of a permanent army larger, or much larger, than Greece can afford—though the army is considerably better equipped than Greece can afford and, in any case, it is afforded at the expense of social construction...

...The more energetic advocates of reform, however, were compromised by their real or alleged associations with the Communists, and the rest developed a non-ideological politics of personality and office, incredibly divisive, opportunistic, and empty...

...Given this perceived need—and few Americans in Greece had any other perceptions—it would have made no sense at all not to work with the existing officers' corps, ready as it was to begin immediately the creation of an effective anti-Communist army...

...HI American intervention in Greek politics has sometimes been extraordinarily blatant (as in the days of the Cowboy Ambassador Peurifoy) and sometimes almost discreet...

...So has American economic ideology, quickly adopted in its most backward forms by Greek businessmen and politicians and generally reinforced by American businessmen and diplomats...

...A remarkable ideological coziness grew up between reactionary Greek officers and their American counterparts, many of whom would probably have been liberal enough under other circumstances...

...1. The growth of manufacturing has been slow...

...It was indeed a threat to the whole pattern of priorities and alliances that they had worked out during the 10 years since Papagos came to power...

...to the political Right, producing an extreme distrust of populist leaders, radical programs, and any kind of left-looking policies...

...But in the preceding years we had supported a variety of centrist politicians, and it is probably true that American officials would have preferred governments of the Center-Left, had the CenterLeft shown any capacity to govern...

...all things being equal, it will stand guard forever...

...Yet Vietnam is not a typical case, in part because the Communists were and are so much stronger there than in any other country where Americans have been active during the past 20 years, in part because our response to Communism in Vietnam has been so radically unlimited...

...provided approximately 3.5 billion dollars in assistance to Greece from 1947 to 1962, when the aid program was formally terminated...

...It is tightly locked into the NATO alliance, and if one of NATO's reasons for being is the defense of Greece, the defenders of Greece in turn gird themselves for the sake of NATO...

...I will consider American intervention in Greece under three headings: military, economic, and political...

...And this lead took the usual form: political terrorism against former guerrillas and guerrilla sympathizers, uncontrolled economic growth, close military cooperation with the U.S...

...It is the result of Greek politics, the outcome of local conflicts and contradictions not novel or unfamiliar to any student of Greek history...

...It is al most certainly true that a wider market and a more equalitarian society would be in the greater interest of the greater number of American entrepreneurs...

...Just 20 years after President Truman initiated the policy of coldwar intervention, Greece has arrived at what many people regard as its culminating point: a right-wing military dictatorship...

...But it was designed to perpetuate that control, or rather, to deprive parliament permanently of the power to carry through reforms disliked by the officers, and so it posed a deadly danger to any possible Center-Left majority that intended actually to govern...

...One must, however, make an effort to remember, and a recent book on Greece's participation in NATO is helpful: "[Greece and Turkey] formed the southeastern flank of the NATO alliance," the author writes, "and contributed significantly to the strength of the conventional armies of NATO, which were quite inadequate in comparison with their Soviet counterparts...

...they expressed cautious concern about American interference in local politics, and uneasiness with the NATO alliance...

...finally, to meet the foreign exchange requirements of reconstruction and to stabilize the drachma...

...6. Finally, economic growth in Greece has vastly improved investment and profit opportunities for relatively small numbers of people without transforming the petty bourgeois, familial character of most Greek enterprise, without significantly enlarging the scope of middlelevel entrepreneurial activity, without generating larger firms (or, in the countryside, larger farms) , and without producing a modern working class...

...Sometimes our intentions with regard to Greek domestic affairs have been easy to decipher: thus in 1952 Peurifoy wanted, and got, a strong rightist government under General Papagos...

...This takes different forms for different social classes...

...This sort of thing fitted well with the demagogic nationalism on the Cyprus question that later became their stock-in-trade and served to conceal the near-identity of their domestic programs with those of the government...

...as defined by its present and past elites and embodied in their policies in countries like Greece since the late 1940's...

...It would be difficult, then, to make the conventional liberal argument against military assistance: that it produces an outsized and overbearing military machine threatening democratic institutions...

...The U.S...

...In a total population of 8 million that is an extraordinary drain of talent and energy, and one which many Greeks bitterly resent...

...We have watched benevolently while the army became the home of all sorts of anti-modernist ideologies—and became also a political force far more reactionary (in part because it was less corrupt) than the reactionary governments it sustained...

...The result has been to increase dramatically the visibility of economic inequality and to create an atmosphere of super-heated affluence in the chief cities, especially in Athens...

...Domestic unemployment, low wages, and the consequent emigration means that Greek workers are immediately dependent on economic growth elsewhere: a West German slump would be a disaster both for those that have left and for those at home...

...3. The area of most rapid growth has been housing construction, which in various years during the 1950's and early 1960's accounted for two-fifths of gross capital formation—a building boom of huge proportions...

...About 40 per cent of the money was spent for military purposes, and annual grants for those purposes were continued after 1962 in undiminished amounts...

...The kinds of assistance that America at its best provides encourage growth without encouraging structural transformation...

...at whose expense...

...Now Greece's affiliation with the Common Market, strongly pushed by the U.S., virtually precludes such protection and stands as an effective bar to industrial growth...

...But this looks in retrospect less like a serious social movement than a desperate scramble for office...

...About 100,000 Greeks have been leaving their homeland every year for the past decade, most of them young men...

...An expansive economy, like the American, is always represented abroad by particular people, never in its entirety, and these particular people and their self-defense and aggrandizement play an important part in determining policy...

...That independence did not seem to matter much so long as the Right was in firm control of parliament...

...Though the Greek Right, after 1946, never won a majority of the popular vote, the centrist politicians were so hopelessly divided, the power of their various "personality parties" fluctuated so wildly from election to election and from one parliamentary maneuver to the next, that it was inconceivable that any of them could govern the country...

...Certainly, the young Papandreou represents a new radicalism in Greek life, seriously committed to social change, non-Communist but not militantly anti-Communist, and so at war with the built-in assumptions of the whole American mission...

...V Even though the recent coup was probably carried out without American help or prior approval (various rumors about CIA involvement can neither be discounted nor believed) , it is not unfair to suggest that rightist repression is in America's interest in Greece today...

...There are some prices worth paying, surely, but the pervasive anti-Communist ideology makes it impossible for an American official to calculate these, or, if he makes the calculations, to defend them before his superiors...

...perhaps we have been so successful precisely because we have always been willing to be so reckless...

...They adapted, that is, to the American presence and to the general atmosphere of militant anti-Communism that made any assault upon privilege and inequity in Greek life impossible (even though many Americans privately favored such an assault...

...Yet the number of slum dwellings has not significantly declined since 1947 and may even have increased...

...Nor is the regime of the colonels in any sense the direct result of the policy of Truman and his successors...

...We also inherited an army responsible only to the king, pledged directly to him in an almost feudal fashion, and effectively removed from parliamentary control...

...Not that the Center disappeared from Greek life in the years of the civil war and after...

...The strategic compulsion was to create quickly a modern army capable first of fighting the guerrillas and then of playing its assigned NATO role...

...But these very facts constitute a major indictment of the Greek economy...

...Perhaps the Yugoslays will one day have to endure the rule of some leftist version of the Greek colonels...

...But the size of the present army is not all that much bigger than was the size of the same army in the late 1930's, when the Greeks were paying for it entirely by themselves...

...Nor would it have made any sense to question the officers' independence: they were clearly more trustworthy than the Greek people...

...financed the construction of a national electric transmission line and also helped build the wonderful road that sweeps northward to the Yugoslav frontier...

...An American military attache was prominent among the officers at the ceremony, and when asked why he was there—no other attache was present—he replied that the presence of an American was "traditional" at such affairs...

...Growing inequality is a usual feature at least of the early stages of development in a capitalist economy, but in Greece this feature has been exaggerated by the simultaneous slowness of growth in industry...

...Today the Greek army stands guard against a Russian thrust southward...

...The government issues no statistics on income distribution (few governments do), but profits have been high since 1951, while wages have lagged behind, rising at a rate only slightly above that of the cost of living, and farm income (the income of most Greeks) has lagged considerably further behind...

...Still, it could be argued with considerable success that Yugoslavia is today the better society, or at least, the one for which we can entertain higher hopes...

...This is not an easy question to answer, for there is no agreed-upon procedure for measuring the factors involved: political terrorism, intellectual freedom, economic inequality, etc...

...It would be enormously useful to attempt a careful comparison along these lines of recent Greek and Yugoslav history...

...Ellis, Industrial Capital in Greek Development, 1964...

...A genuinely indigenous insurrection and a relatively sophisticated intervention: which has produced the better society...

...For the success of Communist insurgency in Yugoslavia was simultaneous with the success of British and then American intervention in Greece...

...I want to argue, however, that the effect of American intervention has been to reinforce a system which periodically produces such regimes and to oppose all tendencies toward the radicalization of Greek society...

...I mean interest in the narrow and specific sense: not your interest or mine, not the interest of the U.S...

...The American aid program was partly responsible for establishing opposite priorities, pushing rapid growth in fields like tourism at the expense of industry...

...It is a little hard to imagine at this late date just what that role was...

...Nothing less than militant anti-Communism was acceptable in an army which had just fought and might again have to fight considerable numbers of its own people and whose conscripts needed to be watched and purged...

...2. Greek economic growth has been accompanied by sharply rising inequalities...

...It is hard to talk about American intervention these days without talking about Vietnam...

...Similarly, the new Center-Left, representing many different forces in Greek life, could hardly help but represent also a nascent anti-Americanism, a repudiation of those same 10 years...

...The percentage of the total labor force involved in industry has not grown at all: it was 13.2 per cent in 1928, 13.4 per cent in 1951, 13.1 per cent in 1961...

...One may hope for further "culminations," of course, but for the moment that seems a plausible conclusion...

...it is appropriately equipped and indoctrinated...

...They advocated reductions in military expenditure and so questioned the immediacy of the Russian threat...

...It was a direct result of the successfully fought civil war that a strong lead could come only from the Right...

...This was due to a genuine pessimism among many American economists as to the possibility of industrializing Greece, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to a willingness to tolerate or encourage development in those fields that an entrepreneur would freely choose: that is, where profits promised to be high, and finally to a reluctance to allow the kinds of tariff protection that would have been necessary to sustain new industry...

...In 1952, Greece had ten combatready divisions...

...5. Both Greek economic development and American investment have had the effect of increasing the country's dependence on foreigners and foreign economies...

...For there is no better bureaucracy than that which soldiers create and very few, surely, within which patterns of thought so quickly become habitual...

...And so they simultaneously reinforce oligarchic rule and threaten it—threaten the oligarchs because of the enhanced resentments and capacities of the population at large (two consequences of uneven development) and at the same time provide them with the material force to meet the threat...

...Today, many American businessmen abroad are involved in catering to local upper classes and a kind of mutual identification tends to grow up that expresses itself both socially and ideologically, affecting the whole tenor of the American presence and reinforcing its rightward bent...

...Still, when a decisive challenge to rightist power actually emerged in the early 1960's, in the form of a unified Center-Left led by Papandreou, American officials could hardly help but view it as a threat...

...The ideological compulsion of American policy was to create a strongly and permanently anti-Communist army in a country where a very large percentage of the people could plausibly be said to have collaborated with the Communists or to have supported them in the very recent past...

...for military equipment...

...In 1956 there even appeared, briefly, a kind of popular front—an electoral coalition of the old republican parties with the Communist-dominated EDA...

...Third, the ideology of free enterprise and the economic interests that develop around it...

...It showed, indeed, a remarkable capacity for survival...

...Thus, the enormous expansion of tourism means more and more men at work in one or another of the servile trades: waiters, guides, bellhops, etc...

...has spent close to two billion dollars on the Greek economy, about a quarter of it on relief shipments, largely of foodstuffs, the rest in monetary grants...

...Higher investment in manufacturing would have meant slower growth during the past 15 years, but it might at least have begun the creation of an economic system capable of holding its young men...

...But the obstacles to such domination seem to grow greater every year—while in Greece the colonels' rule is, for the moment at least, unchallenged...

...But there are a number of important qualifications to be made of the bright picture these statistics suggest...

...Any effort to change these policies must strike at the sources, and begin to cut them off...

...But the precondition of that achievement may well be an American attack on the American mission: a critique of NATO, of official anti-Communism, and of the capitalist character of foreign aid...

...for whose benefit...

...But that means to oppose the rebuilding of the Left, for the Communists retain the allegiance of from 10 to 20 per cent of the electorate, and any leftist leader seriously committed to social change is going to have to rely on their support at critical moments and to pay a price for it...

...Once again I should say: these are not the direct results of American assistance...

...But our past interventions have been limited in character, even sophisticated, and it is worth exploring their consequences, if only to conclude that what is wrong with American policy in Vietnam is not merely its madness...

...Couloumbis, Greek Political Reaction to American and NATO Influences, 1966...

...In fact, its very reappearance seemed to depend upon the end of cold-war politics...

...Second, the anti-Communist ideology of American society in general and so of the American mission in Greece...

...11 The U.S...

...These headings are conventional and convenient, but it should be remembered that they can be misleading...

...We have acted—for example, by our selection of officers to study in the U.S.—so as to preserve the rightist character of the officers' corps...

...It is, of course, to everyone's material advantage that so many leave: the emigrants earn more money abroad than they possibly could in Greece...

...he certainly intended to bring Greece "the benefits of democracy," though it may be doubted that that was his only or even his primary intention...

...4. Greece has been flooded with American consumer goods—because of "buy American" policies, because of the uncontrolled demand of local elites and the absence of local competition, perhaps also because of discriminatory tariffs...

...The fact that these interests endure long after even the most fervent military ideologist might well have forgotten them has something to do with their institutionalization...

...First of all, the character of American strategic thought, the interlocking system of commitments that have followed from it, and the institutional arrangements that follow from the commitments: all these together generate interests which are not illusory even if they sometimes seem fantastic...

...As a result of all this, Center-Left politicians were occasionally tempted to experiment, however nervously, with a neutralist and popular front politics...

...Not that this was Truman's goal...

...By and large, this money seems to have been spent sensibly and with good will: to restore agriculture after the destruction of the German occupation and the two civil wars...

...That is the immediate work of the American Left...

...IV In an important sense, I think, the Greek coup supports the thesis of Barrington Moore's recent book Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: that economic growth in the absence of radical social change culminates in rightist repression...

...Perhaps this kind of response has been a possibility latent in every American intervention...

...This too gives rise to a system of commitments and alliances and-in the usual absence of effective anti-Communist reformers—ties the U.S...

...It might even be said that Greece today is in the grip of its army because, free of that grip, it might have begun to free itself also of the NATO commitment...

...So the Center-Left, when it finally reappeared years after a successful counter-insurgency, was still not the anti-Communist Left of the American liberal dream...

...Unemployment has been high, despite emigration: Greece has had its reserve army...

...In 1947 we inherited from the British a Greek army thoroughly purged not only of all leftists, but also of all republicans (Greek republicans were generally "left" only in the most formal sense) and from which large numbers of young men were excluded because of their participation in ELAS, the wartime resistance movement...

...Housing has been provided for those who can pay for it, and above all luxury housing for those who can pay for that...

...emigration reduces unemployment and raises wages at home...

...The crucial issue is the political character of the army and not its size...

...It would be ridiculous to claim that the American economy requires the exploitation of the Greek market, or, if it did, that it would require the kind of market generated by uneven development, upper-class affluence, extensive speculation, etc...

...The effect of American policy has been to preserve this double inheritance...

...This is a "tradition" we must take into account in explaining those other traditions that the colonels are defending...

...Having come to Greece to oppose a Communist insurrection, we have stayed to oppose any rebuilding of the Left that might conceivably admit the Communists or their sympathizers to the centers of power...

...Enthusiastic announcements about economic growth should always be taken as an invitation to ask questions: growth of what sort...

...At the present time, we apparently pay (precise figures are not easy to come by) about one third of the Greek defense budget, most of this being spent in the U.S...

...Economic decisions are often made for political reasons, and political decisions for military reasons...

...their remittances have become a major source of national income...

...But rightist politicians and generals have their own reasons for joining this resistance, and it is probably true that Greek governments since 1947 have had the kind of army they required and probably would have had it whether we paid for it or not...

...This is one of the more important lessons to be learned from the Greek experience: that it is naive to expect a regime seriously committed to social reform to emerge out of a successful struggle against Communist insurgency, or against leftist rebels of any sort—a lesson confirmed by recent events in the Dominican Republic...

...And I want to argue, further, that this is, not the inevitable, but the probable effect of American intervention in general, given the ideologies that determine its course...

...Still, it would also be wrong to pretend that American businessmen-on-the-spot do not have an interest in Greece as-it-is...

...Given this assistance and within the frame it helped create, Greece has had a remarkable period of economic growth...

...This was obviously an army worth defending against the very real possibility (in 1956, for example, and again in the mid-sixties) of a Center-Left or even a popular front majority in parliament...

...The absolute numbers have grown, but only in a minor way, for population has remained fairly stable as a result of very high rates of emigration...

...Nevertheless, the general scope and character of American assistance has contributed significantly to these results...

...The Greeks have proven themselves capable of producing repressive rightist regimes in the past without American assistance...

...Democracy will one day return to Greece, as a result of Greek efforts and struggles...

...officers in Greek strategic planning, and finally the subordination of the Greek army to NATO's Mediterranean command —all these served to cut the army loose from effective domestic control and to place it into the hands of our own officers and of those Greeks they most trusted (one of whom, of course, was the king) . Thus the rightist character of the Greek army and its relative freedom from the Greek parliament both need to be explained at least in part by the strategic and ideological compulsions of American policy...

...From 1951 to 1961, the average annual rate of growth was 6 per cent (it has reached 8 per cent more recently)—a rate similar to Italy's and not so far from Germany's average for the 1950's of 7.5 per cent, though of course Greece started from a much lower base...

...What price has Yugoslavia paid for destroying and Greece for failing to destroy the social and institutional basis of old authoritarianism and traditionalist mythology...

...These, I believe, are the sources of American policies in Greece...

...Immediately after the recent military coup, Le Monde asserted that the Greek army was "wholly dependent" on American money, but that has not been true for many years...

...And the wealthy are dependent too: the greater inequalities become, and the more visible, the more they come to rely on the American presence to guarantee their position...

...And it was for this reason that anti-parliamentary politics were encouraged in the Greek army and various plans for military take-over were actually developed at NATO headquarters and as a part of NATO strategy— though the Greek participants in such planning undoubtedly had Greek purposes in mind as well...

...The effective control over military policy that we established during the civil war, the participation of U.S...

...it is partly a consequence of bureaucratic immobility...

...the Greek army was the only European army which had successfully fought a full-scale war against the Communists...

...The army was a political force precisely because of its "nonpolitical" independence, and this too has been enhanced by American intervention...

...to rebuild and enlarge the economy's infrastructure, especially the transportation and energy systems (the U.S...

...This is not the place to attempt any careful analysis of these definitions and policies, but I do want to suggest three sources of both, sources directly relevant in explaining the pattern of military, economic, and political intervention that I have just outlined...

...This was symbolized best in that famous egg-breaking ceremony of last April, the formal reconciliation of the king and the colonels...

...That is more money, relative to population, than we have provided for any other country, with the exception of Vietnam...

...This is one of the factors distorting the regional balance of Greek development, drawing large numbers of people into the cities where they can neither find useful work nor share in the material splendor...

...American officials in Greece, in collaboration with rightst politicians and generals, have for some time resisted Center-Left demands for reductions in the defense budget...

...as a democratic society, or even as a world power, but rather the interest of the U.S...

...but at the same time, "Athens has come to be nearly encircled by a zone of shabby, one-room shacks" (Ellis...

...They cut themselves off from any organized popular base and turned parliamentarism, for a time, into a facade behind which old and new oligarchs operated freely...