The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974 ed. by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974 ed. by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos Kostis Kornetis (bio) Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, eds., The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021. Pp. 398. 7 illustrations. Hardback $145.00. Fifty years is the usual landmark for a full reconsideration of historical phenomena. This anniversary of the coup d’état of 21 April 1967 inspired a conference in Sacramento in April 2017, gathering together various generations of researchers who have studied the Greek military regime. The present volume, seamlessly assembled and edited by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos (both researchers with a long record of scholarly engagement with facets of Greek authoritarianism), is the fruit of that endeavor and an indispensable contribution to the growing field of studies on the Greek dictatorship. The volume is ambitious insofar as it brings together diverse approaches, which are customarily kept separate [as in the case of the edited volumes by Sourlas (2016) and Klapsis et al (2020)]: these range from cultural history and the history of education to economic and hard-core diplomatic and political history. The main body of the book is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to the historical and ideological background of the junta, with the army as its institutional driving force. This part includes a chapter by the late André Gerolymatos on the longue durée history of army interventions in [End Page 141] Greece. It provides a useful background to the subject matter even though it ends right at the point at which one would expect an analysis of the years 1967–1974 and hence lacks particular originality. Katerina Lagos’s contribution offers a much-needed overview of the junta’s ideological outlook and its borrowings from previous regimes (especially the Metaxas regime, an antecedent which Lagos has researched in depth) in terms of its own vocabulary and adoption of catchall Greco-Christian slogans. The second part of the book is dedicated to domestic affairs, and forms the core of the volume by virtue of its originality, as these chapters tackle hitherto understudied facets of the regime. It begins with Andreas Kakridis’s excellent contribution on the colonels’ economics, which demonstrates how the regime relied heavily on pre-existing personnel and institutions since it lacked its own body of experts on economic and public policy: “Most of the regime’s supposedly new economists were hardly new at all” (79), and at times the dictatorship even relied on work done in 1959 by Andreas Papandreou’s Centre for Planning and Economic Research. Kakridis also convincingly shows that the regime never managed to legitimize its arbitrary and violent rule and policies through economic growth, despite the common view that the colonels managed to “buy off” political dissent and thus secure popular acquiescence. In fact, Kakridis contends, the explosion in popular discontent in 1973 had little to do with the difficulties encountered by the regime’s economic policies. In the following chapter, Nicholas Kalogerakos also focuses on economic issues but he shifts our attention to a little-explored topic—namely, US foreign investment in Greece during the period. He argues that, despite the Greek dictators’ over-eagerness to attract foreign investment, American business elites and foreign investors were often left disappointed and frustrated. Kalogerakos correctly points out that this was frequently due to the latter’s lack of understanding of both the regime’s complexities and of the power relations between Greek government services, banks, and other public entities. The regime’s educational policies, meanwhile, are the focus of Othon Anastasakis’s astute analysis. Anastasakis aptly identifies the swift turnover of education ministers as “typical of the Greek military regime’s undecided and vacillating ‘experimentation’ with education” (141). He draws the valid conclusion that the regime’s wavering between “[the] reactionary, the repressive, the ideological, the pseudoliberal and the pseudotechnocratic policies” (142) was representative of its general outlook. Foteini Dimirouli’s elegantly written chapter ventures to unpack the uninterrupted popularity of Cavafy’s poetry during the junta years. She takes a fresh look at the misreadings and “brazen domestication” of some of the poet’s...