REPORTS OF the riots throughout Greece in December, and further disturbances last month, have concentrated on two contributory factors: the weaknesses of the education system and the social and economic gaps between the haves and the have-nots.
But this is only part of the story. Behind these factors is the growing cynicism and disillusion of citizens at the corruption and arrogance among politicians of all parties. Most commentators – and the security forces themselves – have used the terms “terrorist” and “anarchist” to describe the political ideologies fuelling this disquiet.
Anarchy in this context means the destruction not just of the existing democratic structures, but of the concept that politics are necessary. In their own extreme, anarchists are the polar opposite of the military dictators who ruled 1967-74 – the junta of colonels.
They question whether the modern Greek state is actually viable – whether it represents the aspirations and experience of the Greek people, which are seldom articulated in public.
In many senses, Greece is a country in dismay, and not just because of the violence and the worldwide financial crisis. Frustration with current social and financial circumstances is of course a major contributor to civic disruption. Riots are the violent face of discontent. But they can be the expression of a much older and more deep-seated unrest, rooted in the way a relatively new country can emerge.
Greeks, since independence in 1831, have lived under the burden of history in hopes of cohesion and a unity of vision and purpose which seems to elude them. In 1453, Constantinople, the symbol and centre of the Hellenic world, fell to the Turks.
Since then, the idea of Greece has been homeless and lacking direction, an idea without a form, an ambition without a reality, a focus around a black hole in history.
But the Megali Idea (grand plan) devised in the 1880s gave Greeks a populist notion of retrieving “the glory that was Greece”. Huge territorial advances significantly shifted Greece’s borders, so much so that in the aftermath of the first World War, it seemed militarily possible to invade Turkey and eventually repossess Constantinople (Istanbul).
It was a disaster and led in 1922 to the destruction of the largely Greek city of Smyrna (today, Izmir), the hub of its beloved hinterland, Anatolia, and the expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey.
In the folk memory and in the political memory, Greece is still coming to terms with that disaster. It is also still trying to understand the return of adults who, as children, were exported to eastern bloc countries by the communists during the civil war (1946-49).
And it is also trying to cope with the presence of thousands of so called Pontine Greeks – refugees from former Russian territories in the Black Sea area, now mostly living in sub-standard housing in Athens: Greek but for the most part not speaking Greek, the victims and the agents of drugs and prostitution.
The civil war is the most tangible and relentless reminder of the failure of the modern Greek state. Some countries experience a civil war immediately after the shock of freedom: Finland in 1919, Ireland in 1922. In Greece, the civil war took much longer to happen, partly because after independence, the new state remained the plaything of the major powers, right up to and after the second World War.
The civil war, between communists and the right, was partly ideological, partly due to the rival economic strategies which developed in the 1930s to deal with the civil divisions in the aftermath of the Anatolian catastrophe, which had already resulted in two periods of dictatorship.
Anatolia precipitated the crises of the 1930s and 40s, and the civil war, unmentioned and unmentionable in most arenas, is still precipitating today’s unrest, while the aftermath of Yugoslavia (especially the as yet unresolved problem of Macedonia) is a continuing problem on Greece’s borders.
Not all is black. Within the space of a few years, Greece had won the European football championships and the Eurovision Song Contest (matters of huge national pride), had opened a new international airport with a rail link (something Dublin cannot boast) and had successfully staged the Olympic Games.
It had a Hellenic Tiger tugging at the economy, making it, after Ireland, the most successful in Europe. But the economic success led politicians to see a way of making Athens the financial hub of the fast developing Balkan states: where the Megali Idea was an impossible dream in territorial terms, Greece’s superiority in economic leadership could embrace Bulgaria, Romania and even Turkey in a Balkan mini-empire.
But this is completely at variance with the horizons and experience of the majority of Greek people, 20 per cent of whom live below the poverty line, and it disturbs a deep resonance within the collective memory. History is a cruel mistress. A Greek is someone who, as novelist Vangelis Hatziyannidis puts it, “spends more time planning the past than he does planning the future”.
Of course it is essential to be free of the past. Over 20 years ago, an editorial in the Sunday Tribune remonstrated that the then apparent fixation with the question of Irish identity was getting in the way of progress: worrying about “who we are” was less important than the business of “who we will be”.
The same might be said today of the Greek debate. Greece, like many emerging societies, is trying to come to terms with the transition from a rural economy and culture to an urban cosmopolitanism and the resulting change in demography.
Café society is vibrant, and volatile. It is where young people debate the transition, and discuss the pain of that transition, with the past always forbiddingly looking over their shoulder. It is this fissure between old and new, traditional and modern, that lies at the root of unrest and fuels the riots.
Tradition represents authentic Greekness. In a country where Eleftheria (freedom), Areti (virtue) and Alethia (truth) are common first names, alongside iconic names from classical times such as Aristotle, Pericles, Demeter, Antigone and Alkestis, roots are not easily torn up.
Fifty years ago, parliamentary exchanges between the then principal political figures, George Papandreou and Constantine Karamanlis, dominated debate in Greece.
Today, their descendants, lacklustre George Papandreou (leader of the opposition party, Pasok, and grandson to his same-name grandfather) and the obstinate Costas Karamanlis, prime minister (leader of New Democracy, the party founded by his uncle, Constantine Karamanlis), gesture at one another in polite, meaningless phrases that deceive no one. Plus ça change.
Like so many present-day Irish politicians, there are dynasties at the centre of Greek politics. But you don’t have to be a cute hoor to succeed in Greece.
If you aren’t born into the professional classes, no amount of cuteness will help. And that, in itself, has alienated most of the have-nots. Dynastic doesn’t work any more.
The fact that neither New Democracy nor Pasok has an answer, and the additional fact that smaller parties on both left and right are unwilling or unable to enter political dialogue with the major players, suggests that current political rivalries are relatively unimportant compared to the problem of giving Greece a new sense of purpose that is linked, but not shackled, to the past.
Richard Pine, formerly of Dublin, is director emeritus of the Durrell School of Corfu, where he lives.