003. Has Greece Finally Regained Its Importance? | How Nations Think

Let me just go one step back and talk a bit about the Second World War, because I think this fits in quite neatly with what we were talking about before in terms of the emergence of the Greek state in the 1830s.

Here you had a small state in Europe that actually defeated the Italians militarily, forced Nazi Germany to invade it, and in a sense derailed the whole timetable that Adolf Hitler may have had about where the war in Europe was going and when the invasion of the Soviet Union would take place.

Here we have a, an again, an instance in which Greece is part and parcel of this balance of power game in Europe, but also, uh, standing up, uh, the sort of romantic notion of the small Greek state standing up to, to the sort of the, the large, uh, you know, the large, if you want, lion of Germany, which is, you know, roaring to, to, to, to, to invade it.

So you have this again in the second world period, the plucky Greek, the pl-plucky Greek, the plucky Greek state, uh, emerging as somebody who, uh, stood up to the invader, somebody who stood up to, um, you know, the authoritarian forces in Europe, even though it was itself a dictatorship in the run-up to the Second World War.

And so this image, again, blends the idea of, you know, the realities of international politics and war in the 1930s and '40s, and the sort of romantic element of, of Hellenism and Greekness defending some spirit of Europe, the idea that we have to defend certain values and so on and so forth.

Yes, the...

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

The end of the Second World War, the Greek Civil War, um, and the beginnings of the Cold War are pivotal in terms of Greek foreign policy for the next generation.

Because what you have is, uh, a moment in which the United States of America steps in to support the national forces in Greece, that is the government forces in their, in their struggle against the communist forces in the Greek Civil War.

The Civil War ends, and Greece is firmly lodged on the western side of the Iron Curtain.

Uh, and it's firmly lodged there, uh, for reasons which are entirely to do with Cold War politics and entirely to do with the fact that it was supported by the United States of America in defeating the communist forces, domestic communist forces in Greece, and found itself, uh, on the western side of the Cold War divide.

Strategically, though, Turkey was far more important than Greece.

Greece was important politically.

Greece was seen as a landmark case by the United States of America in terms of defeating communist forces.

And the victory, the American victory in Greece, as it was perceived, was seen as a, a harbinger, if you want, of what may come next in terms of fighting communist insurgencies everywhere in the world.

That we can take them on militarily and defeat them, and that's gonna be giving the Kremlin a bloody nose.

Strategically, though, Turkey was far more important.

It shared a long border with the Soviet Union.

It was located strategically with respect to the Middle East, to the Caucasus, and so on and so forth.

So despite the fact that it had been a neutral state during the Second World War, um, despite the fact that it lacked this sort of affinity with the Western world that was born out of both historical circumstance and also the romantic element of Hellenism, Turkey found itself in a position of being able to bargain with the USA, and found itself in a position where the Truman Doctrine, which everybody imagines to be something that President Truman announced to support Greece, was in fact a doctrine which supported Turkey and Greece.

And so you had now all of a sudden these two states which weren't yet rivals but had a difficult past at the beginning of the 20th century, now being on the front line, uh, in the war against the communist world as depicted in the Cold War world.

That this was part of the Iron Curtain, and that Greece and Turkey were lumped together in the struggle against, um, communism, uh, as perceived in Washington and other Western capitals.

So it was a little sort of, um, a, a, a slightly weird situation in which these two countries with different trajectories bound together territorially because of the Aegean Sea and the history of the great catastrophe, uh, now found themselves on the same side in a struggle which perhaps they didn't see the same way, and in which one side was much more strategically important than the other.