Brezhnev and his colleagues could not have wished for more. Not only were the political divisions of post-war Europe now officially and publicly accepted, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the GDR and other satellite regimes officially conceded; the Western powers had for the first time foresworn all ‘armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State’. To be sure, the chances that NATO or the US would ever actually invade the Soviet Bloc had long since been negligible: indeed, the
only
country that had actually engaged in such armed intervention since 1948 was the Soviet Union itself . . . twice.
But it was an illustration of Moscow’s endemic insecurity that these clauses in the Helsinki agreements, together with Principle IV affirming that ‘the participating States will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating States’, were accorded such significance. Between the agreements with West Germany, and the Helsinki Accords’ retrospective confirmation and acceptance of Potsdam, the Soviet Union had finally achieved its objectives and could rest easy. In return, as it seemed, the Western participants in the Conference had sought and obtained little more than unobjectionable
pro forma
clauses: social, cultural and economic cooperation and exchanges, good faith collaboration to address outstanding and future disagreements, etc, etc.
But also included in the so-called ‘third basket’ of Helsinki principles was a list of the rights not just of states, but of persons and peoples, grouped under Principles VII (‘Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’) and VIII (‘Equal rights and self-determination of peoples’). Most of the political leaders who signed off on these clauses paid them little attention—on both sides of the Iron Curtain it was generally assumed that they were diplomatic window dressing, a sop to domestic opinion, and in any case unenforceable: under Principles IV and VI, outsiders could not interfere in the internal affairs of signatory states. As one embittered Czech intellectual remarked at the time, Helsinki was in practice a re-run of
Cuius Regio, Eius Religio
: within their borders, rulers were once again licensed to treat their citizens as they wished.
It did not work out that way. Most of the 1975 Helsinki principles and protocols merely gift-wrapped existing international arrangements. But Principle VII not only committed the signatory states to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.’ It also enjoined all thirty-five states to ‘promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms’, and to ‘recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience’.
From this wordy and, as it seemed, toothless checklist of rights and obligations was born the Helsinki Rights movement. Within a year of getting their long-awaited international conference agreement, Soviet leaders were faced with a growing and ultimately uncontrollable flowering of circles, clubs, networks, charters and individuals, all demanding ‘merely’ that their governments stick to the letter of that same agreement, that—as enjoined by the Final Act—they ‘fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field’. Brezhnev had been right to count upon Henry Kissinger and his hard-headed successors to take seriously the non-intervention clauses at Helsinki; but it had never occurred to him (nor indeed to Kissinger) that others might take no less seriously the more utopian paragraphs that followed.
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In the short run the Soviet authorities and their colleagues in eastern Europe could certainly suppress easily enough any voices raised on behalf of individual or collective rights: in 1977 the leaders of a Ukrainian ‘Helsinki Rights’ group were arrested and sentenced to terms ranging from three to fifteen years. But the very emphasis that Communist leaders had placed upon ‘Helsinki’ as the source of their regimes’ international legitimacy would now come to haunt them: by invoking Moscow’s own recent commitments, critics (at home and abroad) could now bring public pressure to bear on the Soviet regimes. Against this sort of opposition, violent repression was not just ineffective but, to the extent that it was public knowledge, self-defeating. Hoist by the petard of their own cynicism, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal.
XVI
A Time of Transition
‘In retrospect our biggest single mistake was to have allowed the elections
to go ahead. Our downfall can be traced from there’.
Brigadier Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho
‘Spain is the problem, Europe is the solution’.
Ortega y Gasset
‘Europe is not just about material results, it is about spirit. Europe is a state
of mind’.
Jacques Delors
In Northern Europe, domestic and international change was played out against the ever-present backdrop of these Great Power dealings and the East-West division of the continent. But in Mediterranean Europe local concerns dominated. Until the early Seventies, Spain, Portugal and Greece were peripheral to Europe in more than just a geographical sense. Despite being ‘Western’ in their Cold War allegiance (Portugal and Greece were members of NATO), all three countries stood otherwise quite apart. Their economies—heavily dependent upon the remittances of a surplus rural workforce employed abroad, and a growing tourist trade—resembled those of other countries on Europe’s southern perimeter: Yugoslavia, or Turkey. The standard of living in southern Spain and most of Portugal and Greece was comparable to that of Eastern Europe and parts of the developing world.
All three countries were governed in the early 1970s by authoritarian rulers of a species more familiar in Latin America than Western Europe; the political transformations of the post-war decades seemed largely to have passed them by. In Portugal—ruled by António Salazar from 1932 to 1970—and Spain, where General Franco had staged his military coup in 1936 and ruled unchallenged from 1939 to his death in 1975, hierarchies of authority from another era were frozen into place. In Greece, a military cabal had overthrown king and parliament in 1967; thence-forward, the country was governed by a junta of colonels. The spectre of their unstable past hovered oppressively across the unpromising future prospects of all three countries.
The recent history of Greece, like that of Spain, was heavily back-shadowed by civil war. In the post-World War Two years, the Communist KKE terrorized villages under its control, leaving a legacy of fear and associating the radical Left in many Greek memories with repression and atrocity. After the Communists abandoned the struggle, in October 1949, it was the Left’s turn to suffer sustained repression. Wartime partisans (including many who had fought against the Germans in earlier years) were forced into foreign exile for decades to come. Those who remained, together with their children and even their grandchildren, were forbidden public sector employment until well into the seventies. At the notorious prison on the island of Makronisos, Communists were detained at length and treated with notorious brutality.
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But the political divisions of Greece, however tidily they appeared to fold into Cold War categories, were always dominated by distinctive local concerns. In March 1949, at the height of the Tito-Stalin struggle, the slavishly pro-Moscow KKE issued a radio announcement (from Bucharest) endorsing demands for an independent Macedonia. By encouraging the territorial fragmentation of Yugoslavia this was intended to weaken Tito, but it had no such effect. Instead it undercut for a generation the
domestic
credibility of Greek Communism, by suggesting that a Communist victory would result in autonomy for the Macedonian north, with its Slav and Albanian minorities, and thence to the break up of the Greek state.
If this mattered so much, it was because Greek nationalism was peculiarly insecure, even by regional standards. Permanently on the
qui vive
for conflict with their former imperial masters in Turkey, in a state of war with Albania since 1940 (a circumstance left un-remedied until 1985), and unwilling to concede even the fact of a large Slav community abutting their frontiers with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Greece’s conservative post-war politicians emphatically opted for order and stability over democracy or post-war reconciliation. Conflating old Greek concerns with new international divisions the Greek king, his army and his ministers presented themselves to the West as the most reliable allies in an unstable region.
They were well compensated for their loyalty.
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In February 1947, the Treaty of Paris obliged Italy to cede the Dodecanese islands to Athens. Greece was a major beneficiary of American aid, both following the pronouncement of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ and under the Marshall Plan. The country was admitted to NATO in 1952 and the Greek armed forces were the happy recipients of copious practical assistance with planning and matériel. Indeed, the role of the army was to prove crucial. The British had originally hoped to bequeath to liberated Greece a properly non-political army and modern police force; but in the circumstances of time and place, this proved impossible. Instead, the Greek army emerged from eight years of war as uncompromisingly anti-Communist, royalist and undemocratic, its allegiance to NATO and to its American colleagues considerably firmer than any commitment to the political institutions or laws of its own state.
Indeed—and much like the traditional Spanish officer corps in this respect—Greek officers saw
themselves
, rather than the ephemeral constitutional documents they were sworn to defend, as the guardians of the nation and its integrity. The army was active from the outset in post-war Greek political life: in the national elections of the early Fifties, the victorious ‘Greek Rally’ Party was led by Marshal Alexandros Papagos, commander of the government forces in the Civil War. Until 1963 the military were happy enough to give their support to Constantine Karamanlis, who led the re-named Greek Rally party (now the National Radical Union) to election victories in 1956, 1958 and again in 1961—though he was suspected after the last and greatest of these successes of widespread electoral fraud.
Karamanlis was not himself ideologically anti-Communist nor even especially close to the armed forces. But it is not irrelevant that he was born in Greek Macedonia and was profoundly anti-Slav. Of peasant background and Orthodox faith, he was instinctively provincial, nationalist and conservative—a fitting representative of his country and a safe pair of hands in the eyes of American diplomats and Greek officers alike, evincing no desire to enforce civilian oversight of the military or investigate too closely the growing rumors of anti-parliamentary political networks and conspiracies in high places. Under Karamanlis, Greece remained stable, if economically stagnant and more than a little corrupt.
But in May 1963 a left-wing parliamentarian, Dr. Grigoris Lambrakis, was assaulted in Thessaloniki while speaking at a peace rally. His death five days later created a political martyr for the Left and the nascent peace movement in Greece, while the authorities’ studied failure to investigate the murky background to Lambrakis’ assassination gave rise to widespread suspicion.
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Six months later Karamanlis narrowly lost the elections to George Papandreou’s Center Union, a centrist party backed by the country’s growing urban middle class. The following year, at a fresh round of elections, Papandreou’s party and its allies did better still, winning an absolute majority of the votes cast and increasing their share from 42 percent to 52.7 percent.
The new parliamentary majority demanded an investigation into the rigging of the 1961 elections, and tensions began to mount between parliament and the young King Constantine. The king’s conservative political sympathies were public knowledge, and he was under increasing pressure from the Right to dismiss Papandreou, who was eventually maneuvered into resigning. He was succeeded by a series of interim prime ministers, none of whom could form a stable parliamentary majority. Relations between parliament and court were strained still further when a group of liberal-leaning army officers was accused of plotting with George Papandreou’s son Andreas. In March 1967, twenty one of them were court-martialed.
Parliamentary government in Greece had by now ceased to function in all but name. Conservatives and army officers warned darkly of growing ‘Communist’ influence in the country at large. The king would not work with the majority Center Union, which he accused of depending on the votes of the far Left, while the opposition National Radical Union refused to back successive efforts to install ‘caretaker’ governments. Finally, in April 1967, the National Radical Union itself formed a minority government just long enough for the King to dissolve the parliament and call for new elections.
Popular frustration at the parliamentary stalemate, and a widespread feeling that the king had played an unacceptably partisan role, suggested that the forthcoming elections would produce a further swing to the Left. Proferring just this excuse—the ‘Communist threat’ insistently invoked in Greece since 1949—and pointing to the undoubted inadequacies of Greece’s democratic institutions and the incompetence of its political class, a group of officers working inside the army’s long-established right-wing networks seized power on April 21st.
Led by Colonel George Papadopoulos, they poured tanks and paratroopers into the streets of Athens and other Greek cities, arrested politicians, journalists, trade unionists and other public figures, seized control of all the usual strong points and declared themselves the saviors of the nation: ‘democracy’, as they explained, would be ‘placed in a sling’. King Constantine passively, if unenthusiastically, assented and swore the conspirators into office. Eight months later, after a half-hearted attempt at a ‘counter-coup’, Constantine and his family fled to Rome, un-mourned. The junta appointed a regent and Papadopoulos was named prime minister.