Abstract
On November 16, 2016, Barack Obama climbed the central stage of Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens as a part of his official visit in the Greek capital amid an enthusiastic welcome. He delivered one of his last official speeches as U.S. President in a packed house, in front of enthusiastic audience of young academics, entrepreneurs, students, and top politicians who treated him like a Rock Star. That day showed to every analyst around the world that the Greeks, or at least a large number of them, were ready to show their appreciation to the American President for the immense help he offered to their country during one of the most critical political and economic crises of the modern Greek state. Perhaps a less objective analyst might say that it was well expected for the Athenian audience to be enthusiastic with the arrival of No. 44 in the Greek capital, and to Stavros Niarchos Foundation, since each and every one was carefully handpicked by the U.S. Embassy in Athens. Thus, it would have had been almost impossible to discover an anti-American among the 900 people who patiently waited for hours in order to pass the exhaustive security check control for the event. However, even outside Niarchos Foundation, the typical anti-Americanism which had flourished since 1974 among the Greek people did not find a fertile ground that day. There were no violent marches outside of the American Embassy in Athens, or troubles inside the Greek universities, while the traditional march on November 17 of that year was one of the smallest and significantly less violent than ever before. A large part of the Greek public opinion was allured by Obama’s charisma, and they were also remembering his personal involvement in the Greek crisis in the summer of 2015. His involvement was delayed considerably, but it was catalytic in preserving Greece within the Western camp and protecting the American geostrategic interests in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Notes
- 1.
On November 14, 1973, a group of students of the Law School of Athens and of the National Technical University of Athens occupied the premises of the central campus of the Technical University protesting against the Greek junta. Within a short period of time thousands of Athenians arrived outside of the campus to declare their support to the students and their anti-regime sentiments. The occupation ended violently with an army tank crashing the central gate of the university in order for the security forces to enter the campus, leaving behind 24 dead civilians. Every 17th of November a large rally takes place in Athens with the participation of left and leftist political parties and groups, which begins from the campus of the Technical University and ends in front of the U.S. Embassy in Athens amid violent crashes with the police. For more details regarding the Polytechneio Uprising of 1973 see Kornetis (2013: 253–285).
- 2.
An accurate and brief description of Andreas Papandreou’s conduct as a Prime Minister comes from Vassilis Fouskas and Constantine Dimoulas (2013: 123): “From the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, state expenditure became possible due to internal and external borrowing which resulted in the massive contribution of the state’s economic activity to the GDP… PASOK cabinets attempted to build all the above on borrowing. State expenditure became larger and larger as a percentage of GDP … because the government of PASOK threw most of its borrowed money in supporting state expansion for political and electoral purposes.”
- 3.
Loukas Papadimos’ government November 11, 2011, to May 17, 2012, and Panagiotis Pikramenos’ government May 17, 2012, to June 21, 2012.
- 4.
George Tzogopoulos (2016: 89) presents a very interesting study on the way the German media approached the crisis. As he argues, the well-established newspapers in Germany such as Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Süddeutsche Zeitung held a more balanced attitude towards Athens, publishing articles that were in favor of the Greek bailout program and others that were against. For example, Harald Uhlig, the German economist at the University of Chicago and one of the hardest critics of Greece, was frequently publishing opinion articles in Handelsblatt asking for Greece being left alone to face the crisis by itself. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung openly expressed the view that Greece should not count to any sort of assistance from the EU, while it held a positive attitude towards the German economist Joachim Starbatty who had warned the government of his country that he would have had recourse to the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Federal Constitutional Court, in case Germany was to take part in the bailout package. Last but not least, Süddeutsche Zietung openly opposed the will of the EU to participate in the loan package that Greece was to receive, while at the beginning of the crisis the same journal had published an article about Greece under the title “Help? Rather not.” Nevertheless, the main effort in the anti-Greek expedition that had been promoted by the German media was held by Bild. The tabloid was not simply against any sort of financial support of Greece but it also published a long story that was arguing that the Greeks were continuing the old sins with the money of the German tax payers.
- 5.
The decision group that was formed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund was monitoring if Greece was economically operating in accordance with the fiscal obligations that were deriving from the bailout program.
- 6.
That particular G8, the 27th, is considered the high-water mark of the anti-globalism movement and is remembered for the death of an Italian youth, Carlo Giuliani, at the hands of the Italian Security Forces.
- 7.
17 November was formed in 1975 following a rather peculiar ideological formula that was combining Marxism-Nationalism with Trotskyist militant ideas. It was responsible for the murder of 23 people and for numerous bomb attacks against foreign embassies, police stations, and residencies of members of the political, economic, and judicial elite of Greece. For more details, see Lekea (2014).
- 8.
In 1968 members of the exiled KKE objecting the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring abandoned the ranks of the Greek Communist Party and established a new anti-Soviet Communist party the KKE Interior. It established close relations with the Italian Communist Party and with the Romanian regime. ΚΚΕ Ιnterior was never popular among Greek Communists; however after Alexis Tsipras became the head of the Left Coalition [SYNASPISMOS], the successor of KKE Interior, the party gradually witnessed a considerable rise in electoral support.
- 9.
For example, according to a statement that was made by Barack Obama in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during the first weeks of Tsipras’ government in office “You cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression. At some point there has to be a growth strategy in order for them to pay off their debts to eliminate some of their deficits” (Ackerman 2015).
- 10.
When the future historian will wonder why Angela Merkel proposed a GREXIT to Antonis Samaras but opposed Schäuble’s proposal to Varoufakis, they must keep in mind the following. When Alexis Tsipras visited Berlin in mid-March 2015, the Greek Premier said to the German Chancellor that he wanted to solve the name dispute with the then FYROM. Obviously, Angela Merkel was more than enthusiastic with the eagerness of Alexis Tsipras to go where no other Greek Premier ever wanted to go. As Viktoria Dendrinou and Eleni Varvitsioti (2019: 102) argue about Merkel’s wish to find someone in Greece who would work for the resolution of the diplomatic deadlock between Athens and Skopje: “It turned out that this issue … was very important to Merkel herself. She used to pose it to all her Greek interlocutors over the years. She mentioned it to Antonis Samaras every single time they met, usually via her foreign affairs advisor, who stressed how important its resolution was to Berlin. Knowing Samaras’ tough stance on the subject, Merkel would add: ‘It’s like we’ve already discussed this, and I’ve already heard your answer’. And then they would move on to other subjects, without even broaching the topic. With Tsipras , however, things were different: she felt that here was someone, finally, who could play a key role in resolving the longstanding issue in the Balkan region.” Therefore, it was quite normal for Merkel not to be in favor with a possible GREXIT during Tsipras’ presence in Maximos Mansion.
- 11.
In case analysts want to understand the Greek collective identity in depth, then it is vital to consider the following. According to a strong, ideological ultraromantic tendency in the nucleus of the Greek community, a glorified defeat is preferable to mere survival. For this reason, specific historical events are frequently presented as examples of pure heroism, as they stand against any form of weakling abdication: Thermopylae where in 480 BCE 300 Spartans fought bravely thousands of Persians, the Kougi Monastery in 1803 where one monk and a handful of elders chose to commit suicide by blowing themselves up together when numerous Ottoman soldiers entered the monastery in order to kill them, and the Zalogos [1803] or the Stoumpanoi [1822] incidents where women decided to commit suicide together with their children by jumping off the cliff in order to escape from the Ottoman irregulars who were pursuing them. These acts of pure heroism by those who were involved in those situations that were blended with extreme fear and desperation have taken a gigantic dimension in the Greek collective consciousness. For a modern state that has more defeats and bankruptcies to remember than victories, the ideal of a glorified defeat can easily function not only as a source of extracting pride from the past, but also as a pretext, in order to cover the failures of the state through an excessive bravado, that considers sacrifice as much more appropriate, more masculine (in a still predominantly patriarchal society) than victory or compromise itself. Moreover, one of the two national holidays is that of 28th of October where the Greeks celebrate the nation’s entrance to the WWII against Italy in 1940. The celebration refers to the heroic performance of the Greek army against the numerous and much more well-equipped Italian forces, eventually leading to the capitulation of the state after Nazi’s Germany entrance in the war in April 1941 in order to assist the retreated Italian army. Instead of choosing as a national holiday the end of WWII where Greece was among the victorious forces that units of the Free Greek Army fought bravely in the fronts of North Africa or in Italy; or the end of the Balkan War, 1912–1913, where Greece emerged as the main victorious power in South-Eastern Europe; or the end of WWI where Greece was among the Entente’s victorious powers, the official state chose to celebrate a day that led eventually to a glorified defeat and to the beginning of the Axis occupation. As I am constantly repeating to my students when my lectures go beyond IR Theory, we as a nation have to learn how to conduct wins instead of achieving glorious defeats. We have to learn and efficiently implement Henry Russel Sanders’ moto “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” After all, if Spartans wanted to be gloriously defeated by the Persian army they would have chosen to stand side by side in an open field instead of carefully choosing a narrow passage which denied the Persian army to fully use its numerical advantage. Spartans were defeated searching for victory in an extremely unbalanced battle instead of going to Thermopylae searching for a glorious death as the populist proselytizers in nowadays Greece are arguing.
- 12.
- 13.
For a detailed analysis of the agreement that had been achieved between Greece and the Troika, see the monograph that was published from the European Stability Mechanism (2019: 37–38).
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Litsas, S.N. (2020). The Greek Crisis of 2015: A European Drama and an American Deus Ex Machina. In: US Foreign Policy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36895-1_4
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