“Italy is a precarious republic founded on mistakes”. So wrote Andrea Camilleri, one of his country’s more sceptical commentators, in 2007. Much the same could be said of Greece, which became a republic in 1974, following abolition of the monarchy. Precarious? In terms of economics, social cohesion and even its borders, Greece is unsafe. Mistakes? In modern times, the greatest mistake Greece made was to decide that its future lay in westernisation and turning its back on its eastern character.
The 1980 statement by the then prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, “We belong to the West”, reflects the mindset which has kowtowed to Europe and America, believing that modernisation (meaning westernisation) was the only possible route for Greece.
Yet Greece belongs more to the rest of the Balkans than it does to the sense of what “Europe” means. Its history, geography and culture are qualitatively different. It was this difference that westernisation has sought to change.
I have been shocked, as a visiting lecturer at the Ionian University, to find a disturbing absence of teaching about the world beyond Greece
A deeply conservative society since independence has virtually excluded the left from political thought, but it has also created an educational system where students are largely taught by rote: catalogues of facts rather than lateral thinking. This gap between facts and ideas cripples imagination and creativity. Parents who want their children to flourish are obliged to send them, after school hours, to a “frontisterio” (a posh name for “crammer”) where a broader education is available.
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This continues into university. I have been shocked, as a visiting lecturer at the Ionian University, to find a disturbing absence of teaching about the world beyond Greece: music postgraduates had no awareness of Sibelius; students of foreign languages had not been introduced to Kafka or Yeats.
When thinking outside the box is not encouraged, the best option for young people with imagination, initiative and hope is to get outside the box that is Greece. Hence emigration of young minds is one of Greece’s big problems, as is the increasing gap between rich and poor. Furthermore, we accept chicanery and deceit at every level, like Camilleri’s Italians.
In his 2014 book The 13th Labour of Hercules, Yannis Palaiologos described clientelism as “an acid corroding everything in Greek life, leaving the country in the hands of well-connected mediocrities”. This is supported today by Aristides Hatzis, professor of law at Athens University, who sees the intersections of the Greek state (which he calls “the joints of power”) as inherently geared to “the erosion of the rule of law”, leading to dysfunctional institutions and, ultimately, a dysfunctional civil society.
Long-term disputes with Turkey over respective marine rights and ownership of some Aegean Islands have brought the two countries to the brink of open hostilities on several occasions
Not only is the Greek economy precarious — depending on mass tourism for more than 20 per cent of GDP and with massive unpaid taxes by the super-rich – but its borders also remain negotiable. Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, and Crete, its largest island (home to prime minister Kyriakos Mistotakis), only became part of the Greek state as a result of warfare in 1913, and the Dodecanese islands only joined in 1947, as a consequence of the second World War.
Long-term disputes with Turkey over respective marine rights and ownership of some Aegean Islands have brought the two countries to the brink of open hostilities on several occasions. Today, the borders of Greece (and by definition of the EU itself) are a source of anxiety in respect of refugees from Turkey. These borders are porous. How could they be otherwise?
Most recently, the diplomatic fracas over the naming of the former Yugoslav province of Macedonia betrays a division in Greek national sentiment. On Greece’s northern border, the new state actually abuts on to the Greek province also called Macedonia. An Ulster situation if ever there was one.
Balkan history is replete with such border confusions, fragmented identities and cultural diversity, and precarious borders are to be found in Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey, with Greece involved in disputes in all cases.
A Greek diplomat accosted me in Dublin with the undiplomatic question: ‘Why do you hate my country?’
And yet, despite the disparities and the anomalies, it remains a very beautiful country and I don’t mean its physical beauty — which is constantly eroded by greedy, often illegal, building — but beautiful in its people, who live their lives almost regardless of the top-heavy bureaucracy, nepotism and clientelism.
A Greek diplomat accosted me in Dublin with the undiplomatic question: “Why do you hate my country?” I replied: “How could I possibly hate the country where I live?” The diplomat thought I was merely an occasional visitor to Greece and wrote these Letters cosily in a Dublin suburb. Quite the opposite.
My village neighbours are, for the most part, innately intelligent, argumentative, industrious and honest. Last year the village came the closest ever to being devastated by forest fire. The villagers’ response to this potentially lethal catastrophe demonstrated a particular aspect of “Greekness”: fortitude and resilience. Apart from the professional firefighters, it was the young volunteers who personified this spirit of engagement with fate. A pity they don’t get to use it in everyday life.