The Informationist

Greece at a Crossroads: A Book Review (Sort of)

Like many people, I view travel as an excuse to read about the place I’m visiting. My personal preference, though, is to dig deeper than Fodor’s and Let’s Go! guides, and to try to take the pulse of my hosts and their country. Who are these people? What is this culture I’m sampling? What animates their thinking about society, about religion, about economics, about politics—not to mention about wine and food? How do they feel about America and about Americans? How do they see our role in the world—and how do they feel about having folks like me “check in” to their own world for a brief visit, only to return home as a self-style regional expert? Granted, such queries might not be for everyone, but they define my own approach to travel.

So it’s hardly coincidental that my entertainment/education in Greece last week included two very different recent books, Unholy Alliance: Greece and Serbia in the Nineties by Takis Michas (Texas A&M Press, 2002), and North of Ithaka by Eleni N. Gage (St. Martin’s Pres, 2005). At first glance, these books have little in common beyond their facile classification as “of Greek interest.” At a deeper level, though, they tell different parts of an important story, a story that I’ve been tracking for more than two decades. Read together, these books provide critical insights into how a traditional society copes with the strains of transitioning to a global information age.

Of course, few readers are likely to approach either of these books with my own overriding passion in understanding this transition—and it’s unlikely that either author meant to feed my analysis. Each book deserves a standalone review, shorn of my own peculiar analytic framework. My quick assessment is that both books are worth reading—though those seeking light reading appropriate for a Greek beach this summer will prefer Gage to Michas. Of greater significance, though, North of Ithaka is a wonderfully optimistic book; readers can hardly help loving Greece and the Greeks by its end. Unholy Alliance is anything but optimistic; it tells the tale of a xenophobic ethnonationalist state blind to the suffering of all save its own and its kin. Few readers are likely to finish Unholy Alliance without a diminished opinion of Greek society.

In some sense, Unholy Alliance is the more “important” book. It is certainly the weightier of the two. Michas, a respected Greek journalist, tells the shocking story of overwhelming Greek support for Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and the worst of their atrocities during Yugoslavia’s post-Cold War dissolution. His criticism is both blistering and all-encompassing. He sees every important Greek institution—both major political parties, the Greek Orthodox Church, the press, the business community, and above all popular public opinion—as active cheerleaders in Europe’s worst ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust. His reporting is comprehensive, and his conclusions disturbing. At the height of Milosevic’s barbarity, he reports that more Greeks held a favorable view of Serbia than of any other country, and suggests that Milosevic could have won a national election in Greece at any time in the 1990s. His analysis begins with Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” framework, notes that Greece is the only EU country from “Orthodox,” rather than “Western” civilization, and then traces the significance of those civilizational roots into the nature of modern Greek nationalism, the entanglement of the Church in Greek domestic and foreign politics, and the absence of a tradition valuing individual rights. The picture that he paints for Greece’s future as part of “Europe,” not to mention of the future of the Balkans, is bleak. He concludes without a specific prescription, perhaps to signify that not all problems have easy resolutions. But proper diagnosis must precede prescriptive treatment, and Unholy Alliance is a powerful diagnosis of a dark and often ignored chapter in recent European history. Interested readers might consider pairing it with Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War (Random House, 1998), an excellent view of the same tragic events told from the perspective of the ultimate American insider.

So much for tragedy and despair. North of Ithaka is as delightful as Unholy Alliance is painful. Gage tells the tale of a Harvard-educated, New York yuppie, daughter of an immigrant father who returns to her ancestral village of Lia in the poor Greek region of Epiros, intent upon rebuilding the family home destroyed during Greece’s brutal Civil War. At that level, of course, the book’s précis sounds like little more than a promo for a reality TV series (though I would cast someone more substantive than Paris Hilton in the lead role). And the book has more than its share of made-for-TV moments, many focused upon the ubiquitous tension between tradition and contemporary sensitivities. Local tradition governing new construction, for example, requires the homeowner to sacrifice a rooster (preferably with a large coxcomb), bury its head in the foundation, and use the rest to feed the workers. Few New York condo boards would sanction—much less require—such an event. But what’s a girl to do? When in Lia, do as the Liotes: roosters 0, workers 1. The meshing of the traditional and the contemporary is more than mere comic relief; it provides the book’s overriding theme. Gage’s Greek-American adventure should touch the heart of any ethnic (or hyphenated) American—much as Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding did in the cinematic realm. Every American proud of his or her dual heritage is both blessed and tormented with the tension between family past and individual future. Gage’s overprotective aunts, intent upon finding her a nice Greek boy to marry, warding off the evil eye, and escaping their mother’s curse upon any family member to return to the scene of their family’s tragedy, could just as easily be Jewish, Italian, Chinese (or of myriad other nationalities). Gage does a marvelous job of sharing her observations, her thoughts, and her fears with those of us grappling with similar dual identities. She ends up where most of us eventually do—as an American, a “real” American, but a very special type of American. North of Ithaka is a must read for any contemporary ethnic American with a love of adventure and a curiosity about the treasures that may lie hidden in the closet known as “tradition.”

All of which brings me back to my own peculiar vantage point. What does all of this have to do with our transition to a global information age? The answer lies in understanding the key feature of that transition. As I have explained in detail in Digital Phoenix and elsewhere, globalization and information technology create choices and opportunities for people who previously had none. These new opportunities make many of them happier and richer. At the same time, though, they break the ties that long bound such people to their own traditions. This tension manifests itself differently in different realms, but it remains the critical feature of a world in transition. Individuals will always avail themselves of new opportunities for self-improvement. Traditionalists, fearing their loss of power, will always fight back using whatever weapons they can collect. Opposing forces will often move to extremes, as modernists may seek to obliterate all traces of traditions that they can no longer justify on rational grounds, and traditionalists move to denigrate or destroy anyone taking even a gingerly, exploratory step beyond familiar boundaries. (Lee Harris’s essay, , in the current issue of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, 131:3-31 (2005), provides a phenomenal description of this tension in the American culture wars now peaking around the issue of gay marriage).

My own writing has focused upon identifying these battles in the economic sphere—but I have made their broader political and social implications clear. I have also provided a definite prescription: Recognize these battles for what they are, find ways to preserve the parts of tradition that are not in direct conflict with individualism and modernity, and continue to empower and to enrich individuals. North of Ithaka and Unholy Alliance, taken together, tell the story of a society caught in mid-transition. Gage, the Greek-American, illustrates a successful personal struggle to integrate the best that tradition has to offer into a successful, sophisticated, American life. Michas relates how the more traditionalist components of Greek society fight the encroachment of “enlightenment values” by retreating into ethnonationalism in all of its barbaric glory.

A deeper understanding of this tension, and the ability to appreciate what it means for Greece to transition into the information age, requires a bit of background. Such background is not easy to acquire; numerous Greek friends have been surprised that I’ve been able to collect even a handful of English-language books on the subject. Few non-Greeks have paid much attention to Greece. Yet, I have come to believe that such an oversight is a mistake. In many ways, the Greek experience may be a unique harbinger of the transitions that the Arab world, and eventually Africa, will have to undergo. An understanding of tiny Greece may help the world devise strategies likely to maximize the prospects for successful transition in these much larger societies.

A thumbnail sketch of Twentieth Century Greek politics makes the country sound more like a Latin American banana republic than a part of the EU 15. Four oversized personalities tower over most of the century: Elefthireos Venizelos (Prime Minister on-and-off from 1910 to 1933); Ioannis Metaxas (Prime Minster 1936-41, including the critical period between the beginning of WW II and the Nazi occupation); Constantine Karamanlis (Prime Minister on-and-off from 1955-63 and from 1974-80); and Andreas Papandreou (Prime Minister 1981-89 and 1993-96). Most of the remaining years were periods of war, instability, weak coalition governments of limited duration, military occupation, or military dictatorship. The Communists, who lost the post-WW II Civil War, remain unfortunately strong and active even today. Their strength motivated the victorious Nationalists to take extreme security measures disturbingly dismissive of civil liberties. While many of these measures may have been necessary and justifiable under the circumstances, some of the pettier ones (e.g., denying drivers licenses to accused Communists) likely did little more than generate continued ill will.

Unreconstructed leftism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Westernism all hit peaks unmatched elsewhere in non-Communist Europe, and remain potent forces in the contemporary political environment. For most of the forty years between the Civil War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Greece’s Socialists were the most leftist major party in non-Communist Europe. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, Greece’s Conservatives (including both those of the republican variety and those in the 1967-74 military junta), maintained Europe’s worst civil liberties record outside the Communist bloc. The country developed an oversized public sector, a sclerotic statist economy, a patronage system rewarding crony capitalism, and a well-developed reputation for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption. It also became Europe’s soft underbelly, with weak security and an intolerable tolerance (often verging upon glamorization) of the world’s worst terrorists, from its own homegrown Communists to Abdullah Ocalan and Abu Nidal.

By the end of the Cold War, however, the leftists were clearly ascendant. Papandreou’s long reign entrenched these troubling attitudes among the Greek intelligentsia. Readers interests in grasping the full absurdity of these views might consult an earlier important work on Greece, Tangled Webs: The U.S. in Greece, 1947-1967by Yiannis P. Roubatis (Pella, 1987). Roubatis, subsequently an official spokesman for the Papandreou government, blames virtually all of Greece’s post-WW II problems on the CIA. He barely seems to appreciate that it was only the British and the Americans that kept Greece from the iron curtain with which Stalin surrounded its neighbors, and harps repeatedly on a CIA assessment from the early 1950s recognizing that Turkey was a more important strategic asset than Greece (a factual assertion that, though understandably troubling to Greece, is hard to dispute). He essentially justifies Greece’s shocking anti-Americanism almost entirely on the subsequent U.S. embrace of Turkey, and on the Johnson Administration’s decision to recognize, and thus implicitly to legitimate, the 1967 military coup by a group of Colonels (a coup that many Greeks continue to insist that the U.S. orchestrated, despite a total absence of factual support). Such thinking continues to animate large parts of the Greek left; over the past few years, Mikis Theodorakis, perhaps Greece’s best-known musician, has blamed the world’s troubles on both the Americans and the Jews (increasingly indistinguishable in anti-Western propaganda, a I have described elsewhere). And as Michas reports, Bill Clinton’s visit to Greece led to street protests in which many Greeks could see no difference among Clinton, Tony Blair, and Hitler. Americans who believe that European anti-Americanism is simply a reaction to George W. Bush, take note.

The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era for Greece—though not an era quite as new as some might have hoped. The New Democracy Party’s Constantinos Mitsotakis (Prime Minister 1990-93) and PASOK’s Costas Simitis (Prime Minister 1996-2003) “normalized” Greek politics; for the first time in modern Greek history, the parties eclipsed the personalities of their leaders. The 2004 election, perhaps for the first time, felt like a normal European election, with issues that might have felt familiar to those comfortable with Tory/Labor or Christian Democrat/Social Democrat races. Money flowed into the country from Brussels, and modernized large parts of the infrastructure. EU directives forced even Socialist governments to eliminate some of the public sector’s worst excesses, and to open the economy to foreign competition.

The biggest changes, however, came when the Balkans became free. For more than four decades, Greece had been an island—a poor enclave of the rich world surrounded by closed, impoverished states. All of a sudden, the closed states opened. Greece suddenly found itself the richest country in a region of young republics mostly trying to find their own way into the rich countries club. Greece had to cope with the opening of Albania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavian province of Macedonia along its northern border, and Serbia, Bosnia, and Romania just over the horizon. As we all know by now, the birth or rebirth of these nations was hardly painless. Fifteen years ago, though, much of the Balkan crisis lay in the future. Greece could have chosen one of two roles. Would it become the bastion of Westernism, the “Captain of the Balkans” intent upon ushering its new neighbors into the peace and prosperity of the global economy? Or would it revert to its Balkan roots and exacerbate the problems that would inevitably arise?

Michas provides the answer to that question. Greece failed miserably. Despite near universal agreement among Greeks that the country should be the Balkan captain, it exhibited virtually no positive leadership. The Greeks, like many other national groups, have long resented the precise contours of their country. Modern Greece is only a small part of what was, until rather recently, a Greek world stretching from the Adriatic to the Transcaucasus, and from Northern Egypt through Syria to the shores of the Black Sea. Greece learned to live with its easternmost national border many decades ago (though it still rankles), paid surprisingly little heed to the Nasserite exile of Egypt’s coastal Greeks followed by similar exiles across the Arab world, and relinquished it hope for enosis, or unification, with Cyprus following the Colonels’ disastrous bungling in the early 1970s. But the 1990s seemed to raise an unsettled issue: the Greek Republic’s northern border is further south than most Greeks believe it should be.

Michas and Gage both addressed aspects of this dilemma. To Gage, the issue arose in grappling with the artificial division of Epiros, the poor Greek province from which her family came and to which she returned, from Northern Epiros, now a part of Albania. When the European powers fixed the Greek/Albanian border in the 1920s, they simply split the province; Gage describes a negotiation between a local priest and a German official, in which the German agreed to keep Lia in Greece in exchange for a church artifact. She also describes a side trip across the border that she took with her visiting uncle and aunt upon learning that her uncle had been among the many Greeks who fled south across the border after the region’s division. She relates these stories, however, as history and as tragedy, rather than as a political claim. She intimates nowhere that Greece retains residual claims on Albanian territory; her main complaint with the Albanians is that they deny many basic rights to the large ethnic Greek community living within its borders.

Michas, on the other hand, explores the political dimension of the problem. He relates numerous discussions between Greek officials and Milosevic suggesting either the division of the young Macedonian republic or (what amounts to the same thing) the establishment of a territorially contiguous Greek-Serbian federation. He also details the ways that Greece tried to destabilize its new northern neighbor rather than let it use the name “Macedonia.” The crux of this dispute—easy for an outsider to mock but of critical importance to people on both sides of the border—lies in the history of the name. Greece claims that, as the true heir of Alexander the Great and his father, Phillip of Macedon, Greece deserves sole custody of the names, symbols, and glory of Macedonian history; the Greek province of Macedonia stands as testimony to this claim. Throughout the region’s long history since the days of Alexander, however, numerous non-Greek people, including those of Slavic, Albanian, and Bulgarian descent, have come to live in the area. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, they inherited the Macedonian name from the former Yugoslav Republic—and chose to keep it. This issue inflamed passions across Greece, and it continues to do so to this day. And while Michas does exhibit some sensitivity to this cause, he also wonder how a civilized country could prefer to strangle a poor, landlocked neighbor in a chokehold likely to cause anarchy and a refugee crisis, rather than to find some way to share historical claims—and even to take pride in the Greek heritage of its neighbor. (As someone whose people are still suffering from the Romans’ decision to obliterate the name “Judea” from the map in favor of a “Palestine” spun from whole cloth, I might caution my Greek friends to abolish geographic names with care).

Once again, then, Gage shows us a Greece capable of synthesizing traditional concerns and modern necessities; Michas reports on a Greece mired in ancient tribal conflicts. But Michas’s analysis identifies an even greater concern than his reporting. He dedicates a full third of his book to assessing why Greece performed so poorly in the first true test of its leadership potential. His conclusions are disconcerting; they explain why the Greek-American Gage can see such great potential for the future while the Greeks of Greece itself remain so bound to the worst aspects of its past. They also provide perhaps a better clue about the lines dividing “old Europe” from “new Europe,” and by extension the “old Middle East” from the “new Middle East,” or the “old world” from the “new world” than did Donald Rumsfeld’s derisive comments of a few years ago.

In the old world, people focus on the righteousness of their cause, and pay little heed to those that they trample while fighting towards ultimate and inevitable victory. Little room exists for differences of opinion. Tolerance and compromise are tools of oppression—necessarily an imposition of the “wrong” on those who know the “right.” Rules and governance are weapons that the strong, or in some cases the majority, use to impose their will upon the weak or the minority.

The new world is about empowerment, opportunity, and choice. Tolerance and compromise are tools of education. Competition between views of the “right” leads to feedback and synthesis. Every culture, every belief system, every set of values contributes to building a stronger whole. As in nature, diversity breeds strength, whereas incest would breed only deformity. Rules and governance exist to ensure that choices are meaningful, that opportunities are widespread, and that “cheating” to leverage temporary advantages into permanent dominance is punished.

The old world and new world are not geographic regions; they are states of mind, though they do arise in different measures in different parts of the (geographic) world. Those possessing both states of mind exist in every society, and within every movement. They define the difference between those who work for a cause and disagree respectfully with their opponents, and those who kill for the same cause while denigrating and demonizing their opponents. The tension between these worlds is precisely the tension now coming to a head as increasing parts of the world transition to the information age. Gage and Michas show us how they are playing themselves out in Greece, arguably the single most westernized nation outside the boundaries of Huntington’s Western civilization.

The prequel to North of Ithaka, Eleni by Nicholas Gage (Random House, 1983), sets the stage for both stories. Nick Gage, né Gatzoyiannis, Eleni Gage’s father, tells the true story of his family—a family of simple traditional villagers whose attempts to tend their goats in peace are repeatedly thwarted, and ultimately destroyed, by geopolitical ideologues. His mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, worked heroically to keep young Nicholas and his four older sisters safe throughout the horrible years of Nazi occupation and Communist insurgency. But as the Civil War dragged on and the Communists became increasingly desperate, their initial attempts to curry favor among the villagers disappeared. They became increasingly authoritarian and brutal. They kidnapped children and sent them into “safe” Communist havens beyond Greece’s borders to brainwash them into becoming loyal comrades. They drafted young men and women alike, and assigned those unfit for combat to work details. They claimed the Gatzoyiannis house—Lia’s largest, thanks to the remittances of a father in Worcester, MA, cut off from his family by the long years of war—as their headquarters. They turned its basement into a jail, and crammed in more “prisoners” than could possibly fit. One night, Eleni Gatzoyiannis helped her children flee to safety. She herself was unable to join them. She stayed in Lia, and quickly became a prisoner of the Communists, incarcerated in her own basement. Her captors beat and tortured her, but even that was not enough. Finally, when the Communists realized that their cause was lost, they included Eleni in a prisoner march, led their captives to a ravine, and shot them in cold blood. With the family gone, the house eventually fell into ruins—awaiting Eleni Gage’s efforts five decades and two books later.

The children’s escape and their mother’s execution ended a chapter in life of the Gatzoyiannis family. The children left Greece to rejoin their father in Worcester—a father whom young Nicholas had never before met. But as we have seen, the tensions that buffeted the Greek Civil War continued to fester long after the Gatzoyiannis family left Greece. They festered in the anti-American writings of Roubaitis and his intellectual kin—derived, no doubt, from the American decision to back the Nationalists against not only the Communists, but all those of the left. They festered across a Greek populace incapable of acknowledging either the barbarism of their Serbian friends or the suffering of the Bosnian and Kosovar “others,” as Michas described in painful detail. Perhaps above all, they festered in the mind of the maturing Nicholas, who flourished in his new surroundings and eventually became a crack investigative reporter. Roughly thirty years after leaving Lia as Nicholas Gatzoyiannis the peasant child, the worldly Nick Gage quit his job with the New York Times and returned to Greece, intent upon learning the details of his mother’s death and the destruction of his family’s traditional life.
Eleni is simultaneously engaging and painful. It is an important book to read, but hardly an easy read. More than that, though, it contains the seeds of the tension between the Greeks mired in the old world and those who made it to the new. In his final chapter, almost as an aside, Nick Gage notices that “the Greeks seemed to absorb the Calvinist work ethic with their first step on American soil.” More than two decades later, his daughter showed us that they absorbed more than simply a work ethic. In one of my favorite passages in North of Ithaka, Eleni Gage bonds with a tour group from New York. The members of this particular tour group, though, were the few, mostly elderly survivors of Greece’s Romaniote Jewish community, a community founded around the time of Jesus that flourished through the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires, celebrated independence along with its Orthodox neighbors, and met its demise when the Nazis set out to murder the very concept of European Jewry. Eleni writes:

I got an e-mail from one of the New York Romaniotes. “I just picked up my film and was thinking about what a wonderful trip we had, and how much I admire what you are doing in your village to honor your own family,” she wrote. “It reminds me of what Elie Wiesel said, ‘We me must remember the past, but we must not be prisoners of it.’” As I tried to turn a prison back into a home, I had at least one supporter. I thought about my visit to Ioannina’s kastro, how two mosques, one church, and one synagogue coexisted in a small, ancient place. When I was young and watching Saturday morning cartoons, I was so proud during the Schoolhouse Rock segment about “America’s melting pot” when a cartoon of a Greek immigrant with a handlebar mustache walked across the screen holding a sign that said “Yiasou!” Then Reagan abolished the law requiring a minute of educational programming for each minute of advertising on morning TV, I grew up, and the “melting pot” theory fell out of favor. It became more politically correct to describe America as a casserole, a combination of slightly mushy, somewhat soggy separate entities joined together into one delicious taste treat that can be reheated again and again. Epiros was also a casserole, just with different ingredients and sprinkled with a layer of feta. I had met so many different ethnic groups that were as native to Epiros as the Liotes around me. They weren’t always humble or cooperative or even tolerant of one another. But they had all been there, together, for eons.

That passage provides the key to the entire analysis, and points the way to the future. The American experience has demonstrated the incredible power of diversity, whether cast as melting pot or casserole. Too many of the Greeks who remained at home never had to confront that diversity. Takis Michas’s analysis, and in particular his blistering assessment of the Church’s role in promoting intolerance, insensitivity, and ethnocentric jingoism, shows a Greece mired dangerously in the old world, a threat to both itself and its neighbors. Eleni Gage’s behavior and her observations demonstrate what a Greek American can teach Greece.

Greek society, like the rest of the world, is facing the tensions inherent in the transition to an information age. Empowered Greeks will behave increasingly like Eleni Gage—they will adopt traditions selectively, and integrate them into a broader reality than their ancestors in villages like Lia could possibly have grasped. Traditional institutions like the Orthodox Church will fight back, trying to leverage its hold over national sentiment and identity to impede that empowerment—as Michas describes in ample detail. Who will win? The answer to that question may take another generation to unfold. But one thing is clear—if the new world cannot win in Greece, its prospects for victory in the Middle East and Africa are dim. Greece must transcend the dark, disturbing trends that Michas identifies. Its Greek-American sons and daughters provide its greatest source of hope. And someday, perhaps, such hope will spread, so that we can all read the story of a young Iraqi-American who returns home to recover a lost heritage in the peaceful village of Tikrit. Greece’s transition to the global information age is important. It deserves far more attention that it has received.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 07/12 at 06:55 PM in The Not-Quite-Yet Information Economy, Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders