“The best way to think of it is to think of Greece as a teenager,” he told me. “Many Greeks view the state with a combination of a sense of entitlement, mistrust, and dislike similar to that of teenagers vis-à-vis their parents. They expect to be funded without contributing. They often act irresponsibly without care about consequences and expect to be bailed out by the state—but that only increases their sense of dependency, which only increases their feeling of dislike for the state. And of course, they refuse to grow up. But like every teenager, they will.”
The reason Kalyvas’s explanation appealed to me, I later realized, was because it recalled the language of modernization theory, whose intellectual proponents thought of postcolonial nations as rebellious adolescents. According to Nils Gilman, the image of foreign nations as “‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout the literature on modernization.” At the time of my interview with Kalyvas I hadn’t known anything about modernization theory. But I hadn’t needed to. Mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, a million television news broadcasts, likely even most of my college history courses all used the same language of the maturity and immaturity of nations. That rhetoric was not only condescending, but a kind of Trojan horse: it implied progress and hope—You, young Greece, may be a miserable mess now, but you, too, will grow up one day to be just like us—and so seemed somewhat harmless. But in the process weren’t all foreign countries condemned to failure so that the United States could remain the ideal? These countries would be selected as candidates in need of endless salvation by the United States—and, by extension, me, one of its foreign journalists asking that patronizing question, “What-ever in the devil went wrong here, guys?”
But Greeks don’t let journalists and their superficial questions off so easily. Almost every Greek person of whom I asked that question did not begin in 2008; they did not even begin in the twenty-first century. They started with one of two dates: 1946 or 1949.
“So what happened here?” I would say.
“Look, in 1946…” they would begin.
“Papandreou handed out pension plans by giving one to everybody who fought in the 1946 to 1949 civil war,” one said.
“What civil war?” I asked.
Even if they started with Greece’s early years in the European Union, their statements inevitably led back to this much earlier history. This shared history was one of the few things that united them: the conservative academic and the Communist apparatchik, the shoe salesman and the novelist, my friend Iason and the random guy I spoke to on the street. My interviewees kept referring to “the junta” and “the intervention,” and something called “Polytechnic,” all of which I gathered, with a slowly building dread, had something to do with the United States. Greece’s economic system might have been poorly managed by the Greeks, but this system had emerged in response to political events that had been equally devastating.
“The intervention, as you know…”
“You know, because of the U.S. intervention in Greece…”
“Didn’t you know the first U.S. intervention of the post–Cold War period was in Greece?”
In Greece?
As I sat with them, not knowing about these things—about my own country—I felt as if a physical separation lay between us, as if I inhabited an entirely other universe. I had been charged with writing about them, for a magazine thousands of people would read, and yet whatever I wrote would to Greeks inevitably be read as if the magazine had dispatched an alien from another planet. Spiridou has seen a connection between the financial crisis and the refugee crisis, as if it was the dominant political structure of the world that was responsible for Greece’s catastrophes. If a crisis of this magnitude could happen, could it possibly be only a few years old? Didn’t it in fact mean that the entire economic architecture of the world was somehow faulty? And wasn’t it to some degree our architecture? Wasn’t this the American Century?
*
THE AMERICANS’ AFFECTION for fascism in the 1930s fell disproportionately on the small country of Greece. (The Americans at that time also supported Mussolini.) The threat of Bolshevism overshadowed any American concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the right-wing military dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, but at the heart of American policy was a belief that the Greeks could not govern themselves. The American ambassador in Greece at the time, Lincoln MacVeagh, said he supported Metaxas because the Greeks possessed immature political institutions. A Foreign Affairs magazine article in 1936 argued that the Greek problem was a problem of “national character”; yet another writer at the time called this problem a “disinclination to obey a leader and the concomitant tendency to split up into cliques and groups.” Those crazy Greeks, indeed.
American concern for Greece’s “democracy” was minimal. When MacVeagh returned to America, he called the unpopular and often sinister dictator Metaxas the “savior of the country.” And yet, “Greece is still Greece,” he wrote, “slowly modernizing out of its backward depths … and inveterately disobedient and individualistic whenever immediate and constant pressure is not applied.” The supposed Bolshevik threat may have served as the United States’ practical, strategic reason for backing a right-wing dictatorship, but it would be the Americans’ deep belief in the Greeks’ backwardness that excused that dictatorship’s violence—and eventually the Americans’ violence, as well.
One of the less famous examples of Nazi horror during World War II was its occupation of Athens. During their three-year occupation of the country, the Nazis wreaked havoc on Greek society, subjecting the population to starvation, torture, imprisonment, and death, and forever rending the bonds among the Greek people. Inevitably, the terror gave way to an insurgency by Greek rebels who were, to varying degrees, leftists and Communists. When the war ended, those who organized the leftist resistance continued fighting with the royalist Greek army that had tolerated, and at times collaborated with, the Nazis. It was, as the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, put it, a fratricide. The Greek Civil War was also one of the first battles of the Cold War.