Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (120 page)

What was still more striking, and would have gladdened the shade of Lloyd George, was that poor, battered Greece at last merged itself with that culture too. Eleftherios Venizelos’s democratic Greece, an intended major beneficiary of Versailles, had in fact gained little, though for her the Great War had lasted an entire decade, 1912–22. Its wartime Chief of Staff, General John Metaxas, attempted a
putsch
as early as 1923 and finally succeeded in setting up a dictatorship in 1936. He promised to ‘discipline’ the Greek people, replace Greek individualism with
ernst
, ‘the serious German spirit’; he was ‘the First Peasant’, ‘the First Worker’, the ‘National Father’. All the same it was Metaxas who defeated the Italians in 1940 (he died early in 1941), and it was the army, rather than any other institution, which emerged with the most honour from Greece’s long war and post-war agony. Churchill’s famous telegram to General Scobie may have saved Greece for the West, but Communist resistance survived in the north. Not until the summer of 1949 did Metaxas’s old chief of staff, Field-Marshal Papagos, establish the government’s authority over the whole country. For Greece, the
Second World War, too, lasted an entire decade. The civil war killed 80,000 Greeks, sent 20,000 to prison (including 5,000 executions or life-sentences), turned 700,000 into refugees and forced 10 per cent of the population to change home.
¹⁰⁵

There had been sixteen transitory governments between 1946 and 1952, but in the 1952 elections Papagos, who had created a ‘national’ party on the lines of de Gaulle’s
RPF
, won an overwhelming victory and began eleven years of right-wing rule. When he died in 1955, Constantine Karamanlis took over his party, winning the 1958 and 1961 elections. This was the only kind of democratic ‘normalcy’ the army would accept. When George Papandreou, who had reconstructed the old Venizelos Centre-Left coalition, ousted Karamanlis in 1963 and drove him into exile, a period of confusion followed, terminating in an army
putsch
, under a group of middle-ranking officers led by Colonel George Papadopoulos.

As in Spain, the army considered itself more of a national institution than any of the parties. They were run by hereditary castes of the middle and upper classes, who operated a spoils system. The army, by contrast, claimed it was run on merit, most of its officers being recruited from the peasantry. It was closer to the Church, too; its hatred of professional politicians was widely shared. The Papadopoulos regime echoed Metaxas, with its accent on ‘discipline’ and ‘Helleno–Christian civilization’.’ It produced a new, authoritarian constitution in 1968 and in 1973 ended Greece’s always unsatisfactory monarchy. It aroused little opposition among workers and peasants; not much enthusiasm either. It imprisoned and occasionally tortured its middle-class enemies. It might have survived indefinitely, but Papadopoulos lost the confidence of his colleagues, was deposed, and the junta then dabbled clumsily in Cyprus politics, provoking the Turkish invasion of 1974. Defeated, it dissolved in chaos. Karamanlis was summoned from his Paris exile. He won an overwhelming electoral victory (219 seats out of 300) and so was able to push through in 1975 a constitution with a strong executive on Gaullist lines – yet another example of the extraordinary impact de Gaulle had on the Europe of the 1960s and 1970s. This resilient framework produced some confidence that the next electoral victory of the Papandreou clan, which duly occurred in 1981 on a socialist platform, would not introduce another cycle of constitutional instability.

What mattered to most Greeks was not the political ballet, or indeed the very exercise of professional politics, but the fact that in 1952 Papagos had introduced a long era of social and economic progress. This continued, at roughly the same pace, under Karamanlis, under the military, and then under Karamanlis again. It illustrated
one of the lessons which emerge from a study of modern times. Political activities rarely promoted economic well-being, though they might, if intense and protracted enough, undermine it. The most useful function of government was to hold the ring, within which individuals could advance their own interests, benefiting the communal one in the process. The improvement in the fortunes of ordinary Greeks in the three decades 1950–80 was by far the most substantial in the country’s history.
¹⁰⁶
This was reflected in the one reliable index of popular approval: movement. Men and women are most sincere when they vote not with their ballot-papers but with their feet. Greeks had emigrated since the eighth century
BC
. During the 1970s, of 13 million Greeks, 4 million lived abroad, 3 million of them permanently. Emigration reached a peak of 117,167 in 1965, but that appears to have been the turning-point. During the later years of the military regime, the emigration rate fell fast, except to the United States, and more and more overseas Greeks began returning home. By 1974, for the first time since statistics were compiled in 1850, the number of Greeks joining the home economy was greater than those leaving it for work abroad. By 1979, when emigration had dropped below 20,000, remittances from abroad ($1.2 billion) had fallen behind tourism ($1.7 billion) and shipping ($1.5 billion) as Greece’s prime source of income. Indeed during the 1970s, the Greek economy’s growth-rates, averaging 5–6 per cent, with only 2 per cent unemployment, were much superior to those of Western Europe.
¹⁰⁷
By the early 1980s, Greece was quickly approaching West European living-standards, and that was an added reason to suppose her new political and social stability might be lasting.

The process whereby, over thirty-five years, some 300 million people in Europe west and south of the Iron Curtain achieved relative affluence within a democratic framework and under the rule of law was one of the most striking in the whole of history. It might be termed unexpected, too, since it followed hard upon two attempts at continental suicide which had come close to success. Yet there was a paradox in this new stability and prosperity. In the early 1980s, three-and-a-half decades after the end of the war, democratic Europe, despite its accruing wealth, was still dependent for its security not merely on the guarantees of transatlantic America but on the continuing physical presence of American forces. This was anomalous. The history of America in the 1960s and 1970s suggested it was also dangerous.

EIGHTEEN
America’s Suicide Attempt

The Eisenhower years were the culmination of the American paramountcy. A wall of collective security was completed around the perimeter of the Communist bloc. Behind its ramparts, first America, then Western Europe, enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. So both the diplomatic and economic lessons of the inter-war period had been learnt. Or so it was thought. It was Twenties prosperity over again, but less frenetic and more secure, with a far wider social spread and on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fifties was the decade of affluence, a word popularized by the fashionable economist J.K.Galbraith in his 1958 best-seller,
The Affluent Society.
The book attacked the old ‘conventional wisdom’. In doing so it created a new one. Galbraith and his school argued that the days of shortage were over. The world was abundant in resources. The advanced economies had mastered the difficulty of producing goods. The economic problem was solved. What remained was a political one: distributing them equitably. The state should play a creative role by employing ‘private affluence’ to end ‘public squalor’ and cure dangerous imbalances in wealth not only within nations but between them. Eisenhower did not share this optimism. He thought the American economy could easily be wrecked by excessive spending on arms or welfare, let alone both together. Indeed it was notable that, unlike the Twenties, it was not the Right but the Left who now believed that prosperity would go on for ever and who turned the Sixties into the decade of illusion.

By 1960 Eisenhower was the oldest man ever to occupy the White House. He appeared comatose. The cry was for activism, to ‘get America moving again’. America was presented as falling behind not only in welfare provision but in military strength. There was talk of a ‘missile gap’.
¹
The Republican candidate in the 1960 election, Vice-President Richard Nixon, was young (forty-seven) but associated with the Administration’s immobility and, as a hard-line Californian, detested by the dominant East Coast media-liberals. The
Democrat, John Kennedy, was younger still (forty-three), rich and handsome. His strength lay in public relations and in an efficient and ruthless political machine, run by his brother Robert. These won him the election; that is, if he did win it legally. Of nearly 69 million votes cast, Kennedy had a margin of only 120,000, and this was clouded by rival interpretations of the vote in Alabama. Kennedy had a majority of 84 in the electoral college, which was what mattered. But here again irregularities in Texas and, still more, in Illinois by the notorious Daley machine, cast doubt on the validity of the Kennedy victory. Nixon did not challenge the result because he thought it would damage the presidency, and so America.
²
Such restraint earned him no credit. Kennedy’s contempt for Nixon emerged in his post-election comment in 1960: ‘He went out the way he came in – no class.’
³

Kennedy had ‘class’. He was the first president since Roosevelt who had never had to earn his living. Like FDR, he turned Washington into a city of hope; that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment. His wife Jackie was a society beauty with a taste for high culture. With such a glamorous couple in the White House, some spoke of Kennedy’s Washington as ‘the new Camelot’. Others were less impressed. The Kennedy invasion, one visiting statesman observed, was ‘like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian town’. The first beneficiary of the new regime was the ‘military-industrial complex’, as the distrustful Eisenhower had branded it. Spending both on conventional and nuclear forces increased sharply. In some ways Kennedy and his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, proved the most enthusiastic of the Cold Warriors, though not the most skilful. Kennedy gave a universalist twist to America’s overseas obligations which was entirely new. The classical American attitude had been defined by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821. ‘Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled,’ he promised, ‘there will be America’s heart, her benedictions and her prayers.’ But, he added, ‘she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’
⁴
Under Truman and Eisenhower, the doctrine had been modified, for ‘her own’ could be extended to include allies whose survival was vital to American self-interest.

Kennedy went further. He was conscious that the old-style Cold War, which Stalin waged by pushing forward his frontiers from a central base, was no longer the only one. Stalin’s successors had introduced a war of movement, in which America’s defensive barriers could be overlept. Nikita Khrushchev actually defined the
new policy, in reality a policy as old as Lenin which Russia now had the resources to push vigorously, in a speech of 6 January 1961, shortly before Kennedy took over. The Communist victory, Khrushchev said, would not take place through nuclear war, which would destroy humanity, nor through conventional war, which might soon become nuclear, but through ‘national liberation wars’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the ‘centres of revolutionary struggle against imperialism’. Since ‘Communists are revolutionaries’, they would ‘take advantage’ of these ‘new opportunities’. Kennedy interpreted this as a kind of declaration of war, and he used his Inaugural Address to take up the challenge. He declared the time to be an ‘hour of maximum danger’ for freedom. His generation had been given the role of defending it. ‘I do not shrink from this responsibility,’ he said, ‘I welcome it.’ America would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.’
⁵
That was an extraordinary guarantee; a blank cheque tossed at the world’s feet.

Kennedy made this expansive gesture because he and his advisers believed that America could successfully compete with Soviet Russia for the allegience of the poorer peoples by promoting the emergence of liberal, democratic regimes to serve them. A variety of devices advanced this new ‘action diplomacy’: the Peace Corps of young US volunteers to serve abroad, the Green Berets for more forceful activities, termed ‘counter-insurgency’, campaigns for winning ‘hearts and minds’, the ‘Alliance for progress’ for Latin America; increased economic and military aid almost everywhere.
⁶
But this was to ignore the central lesson of the British Empire, that the best any possessing power can hope to settle for is stability, however imperfect. To promote dynamism is to invite chaos. In the end, a possessing power always had to defend its system by force, or watch it disintegrate, as Britain had done. America had now created a new, post-colonial system, as Kennedy’s Inaugural acknowledged. But it was still a possessing one, dependent on stability for its well-being. America’s resources were far greater than Britain’s had been. But they were still limited. The art, therefore, lay in selecting those positions which must be defended and could only be defended by force, and devising workable alternatives for the others. Therein lay the weakness of Kennedy’s universalism.