Greece Under Military Rule

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - Region: Southeastern Europe, grade: 1.7, Bilgi University İstanbul, language: English, abstract: Diese Hausarbeit untersucht die Militärregimes in der Türkei und Griechenland. Dazu wird zunächst der historische Hintergrund aufgezeigt. Im Hauptteil wird der theoretische Rahmen dargestellt und auf der Grundlage dessen der eigentliche Vergleich angestellt. Die Analyse bezieht sich auf die Militärregimes, die in beiden Ländern durch einen coup d ́état ausgelöst wurden, wobei nur die aktuellsten Militärregimes betrachtet werden, mit anderen Worten die Militärjunta in Griechenland von 1967-74 and in der Türkei von 1980-83. Im darauf folgenden Teil wird die Rolle des Militärs in der Türkei und Griechenland heute bewertet. Es wird dargestellt, wie die Art und Weise wie das Militär wahrgenommen wird, sich verändert, und somit auch seine Rolle in der heutigen Gesellschaft in Hinblick auf seine Macht und seinen Einfluss.

Examines military interventions in Greece, Turkey, Thailand, and Egypt, and the military's role in authoritarian and democratic regimes

By the time of the unexpected military coup of 1967, the state and society of Greece had reached a specious political stability, one imposed under the tutelage of the right, the increasingly reactionary monarchy, and the American hegemony as expressed by the U.S. Embassy and the Pentagon. They dominated the armed forces and the Western-oriented elite, which agreed to the suppression of dissent from the marginalized and persecuted left. Although The Iron Strom appears to concentrate on the shocked and overwhelmed intelligentsia as it launched its counterattack with dissident publications, it is more accurately a large-scale study of Greek literary culture from the time of the Nazi Occupation, the Civil War (the final manifestation of the Greco-Greek War) unresolved since the founding of the state and the decades-long post war era. Since the Greek nation was part of the European community and NATO, the Greeks assumed that these provided them with rights and privileges that could not easily be negated and ignored. But it was the Junta, brutal toward the elite as well as the left, that showed them how meaningless these were and provided them with insights into how they should go about viewing their role as a vassal state and achieve a true stability.

Grækenlands historie med tyngde på perioden fra det "militære statskup" 21.4. 1967 gennemført ved hjælp af græske militære enheder, hvorved oberst Papadopoulos blev leder af "militærjuntaen". Om Cypern krisen og kong Konstatins mislykkede forsøg på at styrte juntaen samt juntaens besværligheder med de øvrige europæiske lande og Europarådet, landets indre forhold herunder den græske modstand mod juntaen anført af Papandreou

The long history of Anglo-Greek relations has deservedly attracted much attention. One of its most controversial -- yet least explored -- phases was that spanning the Greek Colonels' seven-year military junta, from 1967-74. Drawing on a corpus of diverse, original and largely primary material, Maragkou provides the first comprehensive analysis of British policy towards Greece during this tumultuous era. Not only does she contribute to the historiography of Anglo- Greek relations, but her book also serves as a case study of British foreign policy within the Cold War. And by demonstrating that national history can be best understood by analyzing the relationship between a nation state and factors beyond its control, the conclusions drawn can be applied beyond the strictly regional or the exclusively bi-lateral, as they also fit into a transnational paradigm. It was in the 1960s when what we now term 'globalization' was in full swing. Henceforward, no nation -- and no foreign office -- was an island: it was part of a whole, in which both state and non-state actors internationally played their part in the evolution of thinking on foreign affairs. Here is the key to understanding the tortuous history of Britain and the Greek Colonels -- one that has many echoes in our own time.