This book investigates Greece’s place in the new international order that emerged with the Cold War. It examines how Greece navigated the post-war conditions of international relations after becoming part of the Western half of the bipolar divide created by the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The focus is on how successive Greek governments negotiated national interests while at the same time remaining highly dependent on American support in such crucial fields as security, economics, and politics. And it presents Greece not merely as a passive Cold War client, but as an actor whose foreign policy choices were shaped by a complex and ambivalent mix of external dependence, domestic politics, nationalism, and lingering colonial legacies. Its approach is interdisciplinary, combining diplomatic history, foreign policy analysis, and political sociology.
The author proposes a novel approach to this complex web of potential dilemmas by employing critical international relations theory (Critical IR theory) as his analytical framework, because Critical IR theory allows international relations to be explained by examining how different components of the world system (i.e. states, international organizations, transnational movements, etc.) interact with the system as a whole (p. 9).
The main concepts employed by the author are ‘dependent nationalism’ and ‘dual foreign policy’, which enables him to position his analysis between the dominant strands of the existing historiography on post–Civil War Greece, while simultaneously bridging a divide that, according to him, need not exist. This, he argues, is because ‘dependent nationalism’ constitutes a methodological approach grounded in an open-ended dialectical relationship between state power and socioeconomic forces (p. 4). In order to clarify his stance and refine his methodological position, the author revisits debates that emerged within the ‘dependency school’ in the social sciences and history from the 1970s onward. It is from this basis and in opposition to deterministic dependency models that he develops his open-ended approach. For the same purpose, he engages in an extensive discussion of the substantial existing historiography on Greece’s first decade of the Cold War.
Empirically, the book draws on a wide range of scholarly literature and published primary sources, such as Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) and the archives of Constantine Karamanlis. It also relies on unpublished archival material.
Chronologically, the book traces Greece’s foreign policy trajectory during the Cold War, beginning with the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and the implementation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, when the United States decided to provide Greece (and Turkey) with economic and military aid in order to bolster the national government against the communist partisans. Its main focus is on the period from 1952 to 1955, when Greece under a pro-Western majority government began to support the nationalist movement for ‘Enosis’ (union) between Greece and Cyprus, thereby demanding the end of British colonial rule on the island. In this way, Kazamias argues, by adopting a ‘dual foreign policy’, i.e. a combination of dependence on Western powers and the simultaneous pursuit of nationalist and expansionist objectives (Enosis), the Greek government brought Greece into direct conflict with its closest allies (the United States, Britain and Turkey) and triggered the first major crisis within NATO since its founding, illustrating the deep tensions between alliance loyalty and national ambition.
The book’s principal merit lies in its methodological approach, which offers a fresh reading of a period that has already been the subject of numerous studies over recent decades. In this respect, its contribution is of considerable value. It demonstrates how ‘dependent nationalism’ and ‘dual foreign policy’ generated structural failures: on the one hand Greece was unable to free itself from foreign intervention, particularly by the United States, and on the other it failed to resolve regional disputes peacefully, most notably the Cyprus issue. This was so, K. states, because ‘The adherence of the Papagos government to a foreign policy combining loyalty to NATO with a firm support of Enosis not only failed to achieve its self-assigned objectives but ended up weakening Greece’s position in the Cold War and the prospects of Cypriot self-determination.’ The same policy, he goes on, also had a damaging impact on Greece’s relations with Turkey and the tripartite alliance with Yugoslavia in the Balkan Pact (p. 211). The same is true, he states, in the realm of ‘low politics’, where ‘dependent nationalism’ miscarried with regard to the post-war Greek dream of rapid industrialization, concluding that ‘from a macro-historical perspective, the combination of dependence and nationalism after the Civil War bequeathed Greece all the foreign and economic policy problems that continue to bedevil it today: a dependent and uneasy relationship with the United States and NATO, an unsolved Cyprus question, ongoing rivalry with Turkey, and a chronic failure to modernize economically and converge with its OECD partners.’ (p. 211)
A further merit is that K.’s approach encourages the reader to revisit other critical turning points to test new interpretations of this period. Moreover, it provides a framework for situating the Greek case within a broader Cold War context and for comparing how other states confronted similar dilemmas during the same period. One such example is his discussion of General Eisenhower’s 31 January 1951 letter to President Harry Truman, where he stresses the importance of ‘both sides of Western Europe’, the North Sea and the Mediterranean in defence of the West (p. 45).
Overall, Greece and the Cold War makes a substantial contribution to Cold War historiography and to the study of small-state behaviour within alliance systems. It questions the validity of binary narratives of dominance and subordination while at the same time it highlights the enduring legacy of historical structures in post-war international politics such as colonial power, showing how dependence and agency coexisted in mutually constitutive ways. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of NATO history, dependency theory, and the foreign policies of peripheral states during the Cold War, and it provides a valuable framework for comparative analysis beyond the Greek case.
