Fifty years ago, on 12 July 1974, the military junta that had ruled Greece for the previous seven years collapsed.Unlike the case of Portugal, which was liberated from the Salazarist regime on 25 April of the same year, the anniversary of the fall of the Greek dictatorship is neither a national holiday, nor is it celebrated with a major public event. In Greece, what has been commemorated continuously since 1974, with a march from the Athens Polytechnic University to the American Embassy, is the so-called ‘Polytechnic uprising’,that is, the student occupation of this university buildings located in the city centre, and its bloody repression by the junta's army and police on 17 November 1973. For a large part of the Greek people who identify mainly as leftists, but also as centre-leftists or even as apolitical — especially among the younger generation — the symbolism of this annual event is clear: the revolt of the students of the Polytechnic is directly linked to the overthrow of the dictatorship that was imposed on the country by the United States. Do you consider this symbolism to be based on actual historical events?
KT My book The Greek Tragedy begins by saying that dictatorships do not fall from the sky, and that the question of the causes of the Greek dictatorship is extremely complex and cannot be answered in a one-sided way. Attributing the dictatorship to American intervention is both unfounded and misleading, and it ignores many of the factors which over decades made this particular anti-democratic aberration possible.
The dictatorship did not constitute a historical rupture. Rather, it was essentially a continuation of the post-civil war Greek state, itself a continuation of the civil war of 1946-1949, which in its turn is due to the direct and sometimes bloody confrontation between the right and the left during the Nazi occupation and immediately after the liberation. Greece is the only country in Europe in which there was a violent civil conflict immediately after the Second World War. This particular characteristic of Greek history is, in my opinion, the basis for the interpretation of the military dictatorship, which was not imposed on the country by the United States, regardless of the fact that the latter tolerated and cooperated with it.
But before we continue our discussion on whether the causes of the imposition of the dictatorship were exogenous, or endogenous as I believe, I would like to focus a little on the long-term political and social consequences of the civil war and the authoritarian post-civil war regime. Because of these developments, Greece was trapped in a system which could not follow the enormous changes that took place in Western Europe between 1945 and 1975, when most countries were experimenting with Keynesian/social-democratic policies in a process of ‘historic compromise’ between capital and labour, on the one hand, and between the value of freedom and the value of solidarity and justice, of its countries to build what I believe were the most humane forms of political regimes the world has ever known. It is a huge historical misfortune for Greece that in those years, due to the civil conflict and its post-civil war authoritarian regime, the country was unable to participate in the deeper processes that were creating better societies.
The irony of history is that when the conditions finally were created in Greece for the existence of this particular corporatist, if you like, social-democratic consensus, almost everywhere else it was collapsing because of the advent of neoliberalism. In other words, Greece’s social-democratic phase was out of step with those others that took place in Western Europe. Thus, the result of the civil war was that Greece was not integrated into the broader framework of political and social transformations which led to a series of significant social achievements in the areas of health care, pension system, education, etc., until their eventual failure. Greece had to try to do all this much later, against the tide of neoliberalism that was advancing in Europe and in the US.
VK What you just said concerns a crucial issue of the transformations in Greek society. The civil war was the result of extreme polarization and led to the creation of a society of winners and losers that did not allow for a strong social-democratic current to exist in Greece before the dictatorship. And it is characteristic that after the fall of the military junta, which happened during a period of crisis for European social democracy, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) stressed its socialist perspective but emphatically denied that it was a social-democratic party.
Let me add something in relation to the discrepancy you mentioned between Greece and Western Europe. This is obvious in terms of political developments. However, we should not ignore the fact that in Greece, from the early 1960s, there was a growth in living standards and, to a large extent, the creation of new economic strata, which came into contact with European consumer attitudes and adopted these for themselves. These strata were ‘Europeanised’ through consumerism. Let me also comment on the alleged American imposition of dictatorship in Greece. It is true that the Americans played a crucial role in post-war Greek political life. Based on the Truman Doctrine, they were involved in the civil war, strongly supporting the government forces and contributing decisively to the defeat of the Communists. With the Marshall Plan, the US strengthened the Greek economy and actively assisted the reconstruction of the Greek state, interfering at the same time in domestic political life. The American ambassador almost dictated policies to decision makers in a political system that was described as a ‘stunted democracy’, a system where the left was marginalised and the military was dominant. The view, however, that the dictatorship was imposed by the US is historically unsubstantiated. It is also true that Washington did not respond to the demands of the pro-American politicians of the right and centre within Greece to help them to overthrow the regime, instead providing this latter with political and economic support.
Now, regarding the commemoration of the fall of the dictatorship, I want to remind you that there is an annual official celebration of the ‘restoration of democracy’, i.e. the handover of power from the military to the right-wing politician, and former prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, who had been living in Paris since 1963, and the formation of the first post-dictatorial government of ‘National Unity’, on 24 July 1974.
Yes, but there is no mass commemoration of this day with rallies and demonstrations, as is done in Portugal to honour the Carnation Revolution.
VK That’s true. What happens every year on 24 July is that the President of the Greek Republic organises a reception in the gardens of the presidential palace, inviting mainly the political, economic and cultural elites, including the leaders of the parties in Parliament. Since a certain moment this has also integrated a number of people who resisted the military junta. In contrast, the anniversary of the suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising is a commemoration that has been established from below and relies heavily on popular participation. The first celebration in 1974 was organised by the Senate of the Athens Polytechnic University and the student organisations. The Greek state began to officially commemorate the Polytechnic uprising after PASOK came to power in 1981, when 17 November was established as a school holiday.
It is indeed remarkable that, for over fifty years, a march has been taking place that ends at the embassy of the country’s strongest NATO ally. It is an event of collective protest, whose meaning is constantly renewed, each time incorporating the popular reaction to events of the Greek and international conjuncture, such as, for example, the opposition to the bombing of Yugoslavia, to the Iraq War, to the Troika during the period of the implementation of its austerity programmes, etc. In November 2023, the central slogans in the march were against Israel's brutal attack on the Gaza Strip. So, despite the 24 July official anniversary, it is the Polytechnic uprising that has become a metonym for the fall of the junta and symbolises the restoration of democracy.
But did the Polytechnic uprising actually contribute to the fall of the military regime? Nicos Poulantzas, in his classic book La crise des dictatures — Portugal, Grèce, Espagne (Paris, Maspero, 1975), writes that it was not the dominant reason for the collapse of the dictatorship, but that its role was essential.
KT There is no doubt about that. However, we must point out that the Polytechnic revolt, regardless of its mass dimensions and the heroism of those who participated in it, essentially failed in its objective, such as it gradually developed during the occupation, namely the overthrow of the junta. Instead, its immediate consequence was the imposition of an even harsher military regime by another mem- ber of the junta, Dimitrios Ioannidis. His dictatorship planned and supported the coup that overthrew the President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, which led to Turkey's invasion of the island on 20 July 1974 and the occupation of its northern part, which continues to this day and has in fact partitioned Cyprus.
Subsequent developments were dramatic. On the one hand, the Greek junta, but apparently also the Greek Cypriot puppet government it had installed there, proved incapable of countering the Turkish invasion. On the other hand, the general conscription declared in Greece was a complete organisational failure, but also a potential danger for the regime, since both the conscripts and most of the citizens no longer hid their opposition to the dictatorship. The fact that the popular factor now entered the historical stage is, in my opinion, the most important of the many reasons responsible for the collapse of the military regime.
VK Another possible reason contributing to the destabilisation and the collapse of the dictatorship was the impact of the 1973 global oil crisis on the Greek economy. Inflation, for example, rose from 2.5 percent in 1968 to 15.5 percent in 1973, and to about 40 percent in early 1974.
KT Yes, the economic crisis also played an important role in the fall of the junta, although in my opinion less so than the developments in Cyprus. But let me return to the Polytechnic uprising and point out that perhaps its most important contribution was that it put a definite end to the prevailing ‘muteness’ in the country, i.e. the passive tolerance of the military regime by the people, with very few exceptions. Before the uprising, there was also the occupation of the Law School in February 1973, that was also violently suppressed by the police. That was an unexpectedly massive and dynamic student protest, but not a revolt, and more importantly it didn’t have any human victims.
Had it not been for the Polytechnic Uprising, the regime's reform experiment might have succeeded and possibly the transition to democracy in Greece might have resembled that in Spain, i.e. it might have been the product of a long process of compromise with the dictatorial regime.
VK The blow inflicted on the military regime by the Polytechnic uprising was very heavy. After the blood that was shed there, it was very difficult to support the position that the dictatorial regime was non-violent, as its supporters at home and abroad claimed. Moreover, the dynamic confrontation with the junta's repressive forces, both by the occupiers and by a large number of people who were demonstrating in the streets around the Polytechnic, had a positive effect on the morale of those resisting the dictatorship. As historian Leonidas Kallivretakis writes in his recently published book1, those who participated in the uprising — despite its objective failure, the brutal repression, and the arrests, imprisonment and torture that some of them suffered — felt that through their actions they had regained a part of their self-esteem by breaking the silence that had largely pre- vailed in Greece since the coup.
KT The student uprising was a turning point in the history of the dictatorship, mainly because it was bloodily repressed. Let us recall another major act of resistance, that of the failed attempted assassination in 1968 of the strongman of the dictatorship, Georgios Papadopoulos, by Alexandros Panagoulis, a clandestine socialist militant and deserter soldier. After being arrested, Panagoulis suffered horrible torture, he was tried and sentenced to death but was not executed due to the reaction of the international public opinion. Since in this case no blood was shed, the post-coup eroization of Panagoulis did not take on a dimension in the popular consciousness similar to that of the Polytechnic uprising.
Here, I would also like to add that the ‘muteness’ to which I referred earlier did not only apply to the years of the dictatorship; it was dominant throughout the post-civil war period, which was marked by the authoritarianism of the right-wing state. Even the big dynamic demonstrations and the clashes with the police that had taken place in 1965 during the so-called ‘July events’, when the Palace ousted the centrist Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, were short-lived and, with the exception of the death by tear gas of the left-wing student activist Sotiris Petroulas, had no fatalities.
In this sense, the 1973 Polytechnic uprising was the first major post-civil war mass mobilisation in Greece with many victims. As we know, anniversaries and the symbolic recognition of events are always done retrospectively in the context of changing circumstances. For this reason, despite its objective failure, it acquired a strong symbolic significance for the overthrow of the dictatorship, something that could not have happened with the landing at Elliniko airport, on the 24 July 1974, of the plane that carried Karamanlis from Paris to Greece, and his swearing in as Prime Minister a few hours later before the President of the dictatorial regime, General Faidon Gizikis. In this context, it is indicative that the founder and leader of the resistance organisation Panhellenic Liberation Front (PAK) and later longtime Prime Minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou, initially called the transfer of power from the military to Karamanlis a ‘simple change of NATO guard’.
HG: So far you have mentioned a few factors behind the overthrow of the military dictatorship: the Polytechnic uprising, the economic crisis, and especially the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Did the actions of the resistance, mainly in Greece, but also abroad, play any role?
VK It is obvious that the role of the resistance organisations was important, although their activity inside the country was not extensive. More specifically, in the first years after the coup, resistance groups were few in number, with their activities limited to a relatively small number of sporadic operations (the publication and circulation in close circles of illegal leaflets, the distribution of fliers, the automatic opening of banners or tape recorders conveying anti-junta messages in the streets of central Athens or university auditoriums, the planting of low-power explosive devices on symbolic targets, i.e. on Truman’s statue, with the precaution of avoiding human casualties, etc.). Although limited and relatively ‘mild’, these acts of resistance created small pockets of hope within the country for the overthrow of the junta, and at the same time sent a message abroad that the Greek people did not accept the dictatorship, a very important element for the international isolation of the regime. Most of these organisations were dismantled relatively easily and their members were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, or exiled.
From 1972, there emerged a mass and highly dynamic student movement against the dictatorship. In many later interpretations, the role that left-wing activists involved in illegal political parties or resistance organisations played in the movement’s development and in its high points, such as the Polytechnic uprising, is frequently downplayed. I am not at all sure of this way of portraying things. Obviously, there were elements of autonomy in the student movement, but I doubt whether it could have acquired mass proportions, sustainability and effectiveness without the presence therein of young activists of the organised political left.
In any case, when discussing the importance of resistance, we should not forget that participation in it was a great laboratory for the elaboration of new ideas and the establishment of new mindsets. As those who suffered the regime's persecution were not only leftists and communists, but also people of the centre and even of the right, including royalist military officers, the rift created by the civil war was largely healed. In this direction, an effort was made for the central organisation and coordination of the various resistance organisations, which unfortunately was not successful. An exception was the creation, in January 1971 in London, of the ‘National Resistance Council’ by five organisations (the Eurocommunist-influenced Panhellenic Liberation Front, PAM, the left-wing socialist Democratic Defence, and the small conservative resistance organisations Free Greeks and Defenders of Freedom), which, however, did not develop any significant activity. The Panhellenic Liberation Front (PAK) of Andreas Papandreou and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) did not want any contact, much less joint actions, with right-wing resistance groups, while the same was true of the Trotskyist or Maoist and other revolutionary left-wing groups.
Difficulties of cooperation and coordination, even among the left-wing resistance organisations alone, existed also outside Greece. Coexistence was easier for the Greek student associations of various countries, the members of which — almost exclusively belonging to the left or the centre left — despite their ideological and strategic differences, participated in common campaigns, public events and demonstrations against the junta.
At this point I would like to point out that Nicos Poulantzas in his aforementioned book places great emphasis on the structural causes of the fall of dictatorship: the emergence of class alliances, and the internal contradictions of the military regime which from a certain moment onwards, in combination with the intervention of the popular factor, led to its collapse. Particularly on the question of class alliances, distinguishing the bourgeoisie into the endogenous and the compradorial, Poulantzas considers that the former had an important role in the fall of the dictatorship, arguing that it led a ‘conjunctural and tactical’ convergence with the working class and the broader popular masses, sharing with them the goal of replacing the dictatorship with a democratic regime, that would also make possible Greece's entry into the European Economic Community. What do you think of this argument?
KT The internal contradictions of the junta obviously played a big role in its collapse, and these emerged mainly during the process of the so-called ’liberalisation’ which I imagine we will talk about later. Regarding Poulantzas's view, however, I would like to note that in general I consider his class analysis of Greek society as schematic, based on conceptual categories that were in force in Europe, for example, in Germany and France, where there existed homogeneous classes which were reproduced over time, each with its own internal logic.
However, his attempt to interpret the Greek class structure and class alliances generally and particularly during the dictatorship, as well as his effort to stress their importance in the overthrow of the dictatorship, is fraught with difficulties. His interpretative tools are inadequate because of the class specificities of Greece, which he never examined in detail. Besides, it was only at some exceptional points in this book that Poulantzas dealt somewhat more systematically with the social situation of Greece, albeit ignoring some of its peculiarities existing as early as the nineteenth century: the excessive power of the state and thus the very important role of civil servants, its clientelistic relations, and its class ’polyvalence’2 , i.e. the fact that so many people participated in the production process in many ways: they were at the same time civil servants, small businessmen, farmers, etc. The specific complex structure of Greek society made it difficult to reduce it to the crystallised class categories that were in force in developed Europe, which Louis Althusser and other serious analysts of that time were studying.
I come back to the issue of the transition of Greece from dictatorship to democracy, that we all know was not the same as that of Portugal and Spain. What were its distinguishing features?
VK Here, I must again refer to the Polytechnic uprising, and its crucial role in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. The student uprising halted the so-called ‘liberalisation’ process that dictator Papadopoulos had sought with the amnesty granted to imprisoned or exiled opponents of the dictatorship in 1973, and the formation of a political government headed by Spyros Markezinis, a controversial conservative politician, who in the last period before the coup was the head of the small Progressive Party that cooperated with Karamanlis’ right-wing National Radical Union (ERE). This ‘liberalisation’ attempt encountered the opposition of both the ‘hardliners’ within the junta, and the politicians of the previous democratic regime who rightly considered it a mere façade. On the other hand, some social classes and strata, but also a part of the anti-dictatorship illegal political forces, viewed this 'liberalisation' with great reservation, but not with outright hostility.
The Ioannidis junta that came after the suppression of the Polytechnic uprising destroyed any hope that had been invested in the reformation of the dictatorship by the ‘endogenous’ bourgeoisie, according to Poulantzas terminology, which was expressed mainly through the influential Federation of Greek Industialists (SEV). We do not know how this process of ‘normalisation’ of the dictatorship would have developed and whether it would have led to the establishment of some kind of democratic regime; I am very sceptical about this scenario, but it is clear that the Polytechnic put an end to it.
KT The question is what reasons lay behind the ‘liberalisation’ process. In my opinion, Papadopoulos and his close associates, out of their own will, but also because of American and European pressure, felt at some point that they had to find a way for the transition to an authoritarian democratic regime similar to that of post-civil war Greece. The process of pseudo-democratisation attempted with the formation of the Markezinis government brought to the surface the internal contradictions of the regime, which until then had not been visible. The Polytechnic uprising, despite its repression, showed that ’liberalisation’ was an impossible solution.
I recall that in the context of the pseudo-democratic transition, the junta held a referendum on 29 July 1973 to approve the abolition of the monarchy which Papadopoulos had declared two months earlier, and his election as President of the Republic for eight years, i.e. until 1981. As I was in Athens at that time, and having voted No in the referendum, I remember very well that at least half of my interlocutors viewed the process of ‘liberalisation’ positively and accused me of being dogmatic in my opposition to it.
Had it not been for the Polytechnic, the Markezinis experiment might have succeeded and possibly the transition to democracy in Greece might have resembled that in Spain, i.e. it might have been the product of a long process of compromise with the dictatorial regime.
Let's talk a little bit more about the military. In the early years of the dictatorship, especially after King Constantine's failed attempt to overthrow the junta of the colonels in December 1967, it seems that there were no serious frictions within the army. The only exception was the movement of some democratic officers of the Navy in May 1973, which, if I remember correctly from what we learned afterwards, was being prepared since 1969. This resistance effort to overthrow the junta was betrayed from within, with its protagonists being arrested and heavily tortured, and the destroyer warship Velos under the democratic Admiral Nikos Pappas abandoning the NATO exercise in which it was participating and taking refuge in the Italian port of Fiumicino.
KT When we talk about the army, we do not mean the conscripts, who are part of the people, but the professional career officers. These mostly right-wing and anticommunist officers, especially the high-ranking ones, did not as a whole identify themselves with the junta of the colonels who took power in April 1967, but were slowly integrated into the dictatorial regime. Some existing internal frictions and antagonisms were not openly manifested, nor did they pose a danger to the regime, with the exception of the period of ‘liberalisation’, and after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
VK In Greece, and in the Greek historiography of the period 1967-1974, there was for many years an interpretative schema that treated the dictatorship as a homogenous regime. This is not true; within it, and especially within the army, there were groupings and fractures. Of course, it is clear that from 1968 onwards Papadopoulos was the leading figure who could bridge divisions. But, with ‘liberalisation’ this balance broke down and other centres of power emerged, dominated by that of Ioannidis who overthrew Papadopoulos and imposed his own dictatorship. However, as we said before, after the invasion of Cyprus, the situation changed, the contradictions within the army increased, and under the threat of total collapse the heads of the three military branches — the Army, the Navy, and the Airforce — imposed on the new regime the handover of power to Karamanlis, with Ioannidis unable to react.
As Konstantinos said, right from the start not all military officers had a friendly attitude towards the dictatorship, although they did not express their opposition publicly. Especially in the Navy there was a significant number of officers who viewed the junta with distrust, not to say hostility. Here, allow me to say that we should never forget those heroic few resistance organisations made up of military men, who when arrested were subjected to horrific torture by the junta’s repressive apparatus, which could not forgive them for their ‘betrayal’.
At one point in his book, Poulantzas writes that in Greece the exit from the dictatorship was from the ‘right’, while in Portugal it was from the ‘left’. Do you agree with this view?
VK I am tempted to repeat what Tsoukalas said earlier about Poulantzas's class analysis: his approach regarding the difference in the transition to democracy between Greece and Portugal is schematic. If one compares the way in which the regime change occurred at a certain point in time, one will find that there are indeed differences between what happened in the two countries. And it is true that while in Portugal the dictatorship was overthrown by a military revolution in which the role of the left was important, what happened in Greece, as we have already said, was the handover of power from the military to an old right-wing politician, who was Greece’s prime minister during the period 1955-1963, and after the fall of the dictatorship governed the country for the next seven years.
But what is important to me, and what has not been studied as much as it should be, is the gradual popular disinvestment in the dictatorial regime, a situation that cannot be described either as conservative or 'right-wing'. This started as early as in 1971, with the mobilisations in Megara, a rural town of the Western Attica region, against the expropriation of land for industrial use from the business groups of the Greek ‘oligarchs’ Onassis, Niarchos and Andreades, while in the same year the funeral of the Nobel laureate poet George Seferis, was turned into an anti-dictatorship demonstration with the participation
Especially as far as the various forces of the radical transformational left is concerned, there are no longer any national roads to whatever socialism they used to envision. This is the huge difference between the present situation and that of the past.
of thousands of people. From then onwards it became clear that the way the people saw the junta started changing — they were no longer so afraid of it. The analysis of this process is a historical question that has not yet been fully addressed.
KT Certainly, there were differences between the processes of transition to democracy in the two countries. Regarding Poulantzas's view of a ‘left exit’ in Portugal, we must point out that the period during which the revolutionary left forces had a significant influence on Portuguese political life was very short. Thereafter, and especially after the 1975 Constituent Assembly elections, the political and socio-economic developments in this country did not differ in their main characteristics from those in Greece, and later in Spain.
My final question is if what happened during the dictatorship and the way of the transition to democracy had an impact on the subsequent political and social developments in Greece.
KT I believe that the last twenty years or so mark a break with the past and with the expectations that the Left had during the dictatorship and the first years of the Metapolitefsi i.e. the period after its fall.3 But this does not only apply to the case of Greece. For decades now it has been almost impossible for any national state to pursue an autonomous policy. So-called ‘globalisation’ has led to an osmosis between political and economic powers, to a global rearrangement of class- es and class divisions. The end result is the captivity of all political powers to an exogenously imposed binding system, within which it is almost completely impossible for any government to implement a heterodox economic and social policy.
Especially as far as the various forces of the radical transformational left is concerned, there are no longer any national roads to whatever socialism they used to envision. This is, in my opinion, the huge difference between the present situation and that of the past. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was the possibility of choosing national paths, if not towards socialism, at least towards some kind of ‘progress’ and less inequalities, something that after a certain point in time became impossible because decisions are taken in a chaotic ‘elsewhere’. Thus, since many years it has been increasingly difficult for a political force, especially of the left, to choose not only its appropriate tactics but, more importantly, its strategy.
Let's take the example of the ‘first time left’ in Greece, i.e. the Syriza-led government under Alexis Tsipras that was formed after the January 2015 elections. The big problem was that it could not implement its relatively moderate programme on the basis of which it was voted by the Greek people, due to the intense pressure of the Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) to comply with the ‘bailout programme’ that had been agreed with the previous government. As is well known, Tsipras finally succumbed to these pressures under the blackmail that otherwise Greece would have been expelled from the Eurozone.
Any government, be it more or less left-wing, is now obliged not to move on the basis of its own principles and political choices, but within strict constraints imposed by the markets or international organisations. This situation has made any ideological and political identity of left-wing parties extremely fragile, since they cannot be both subversive and compromising. It is true that I am describing the current situation somewhat schematically, but I believe that this is the basic antinomy of the global left, beyond the Greek case itself.
We live in a world where everything is going from bad to worse, where inequality has reached levels never before seen in human history, where millions of people are dying of hunger, where the climate crisis is an existential threat. Despite this, all left-wing options have fallen into disrepute, or at the very least are not credible. This is because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, convincingly to theoretically reconcile the will for subversion and justice with the need to implement only those policies that comply with external factors.
We are faced with an impasse, especially on the fundamental issue of the ecological crisis, that cannot be broken unless there is a complete overthrow of the current system, which is not possible because people all over the world are tied to the chariot of a production and consumption model that leads to constant competition between individuals and states. With today's extreme subjectivism and extreme individualism, how can there be a global change of attitudes, how can there be a global intervention towards more humane societies? It seems almost impossible.
May I then conclude that, because of what has been going on globally for many decades, the period of the dictatorship and the way out of it is not linked to the subsequent political and social developments in Greece?
VK There are discontinuities in Greek history from 1974 until today. The Metapolitefsi is a concept that encompasses different moments in time, so it is not possible to connect what happened fifty years ago with subsequent developments, and even more so with contemporary reality. Many years have passed between the fall of the junta and the present day, for one to be able to make direct deductions.
The discussion of the effects of the Poulantzian ‘crisis of dictatorships’ on the societies of Portugal, Greece and Spain concerns only the period up to the 1990s. In Greece, the rise to power of PASOK in the 1980s, but also the corresponding rise in the same period of other socialist political forces in Southern Europe, was, one might say, the completion of a political cycle that had opened after the war. The fall of the Wall in 1989 and the gradual shift towards globalisation belong to another era. Gradually in Greece, as well as in Portugal and Spain, the working-class and popular gains of the period after the fall of the dictatorships were cut back, and recently all three countries experienced a severe financial and economic crisis.
KT I fully agree with you — and I would like to also point out the obvious difficulty that any left-wing political formation now has in formulating a plan that is both applicable and not in stark contrast to what is in force globally. I have a great fear that the new political alliances and the new historic compromises that will perhaps emerge in many countries — in some of them they are already there — will be between neoliberalism and various nationalist aberrations. Although the two seem contradictory at first sight, they can nevertheless coexist, as can be seen from developments in Italy, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere. The far-right political forces have no objection to implementing and reproducing the neoliberal model, and the neoliberals are not reluctant to incorporating racist, nationalist agendas into their programmes.
Such alliances, then, such possible ‘historic compromises’ would be catastrophic, at least as long as there are no left forces that can reconstruct their identity and the consistency between their words and their deeds. However, since this does not seem likely to happen any time soon, the aforementioned compromises are in front of us, and for that reason I am terribly pessimistic.
As Konstantinos said, the cooperation between the traditional conservative right and the far right is now a reality in many European countries. Do you consider the implementation of such a scenario in Greece possible in the near future?
VK In Greece, at the moment, New Democracy, the centre-right neo- liberal party in power, is very strong, so it seems unlikely that it will cooperate with the far right.
KT Yes, but is it impossible that this can happen in the future?
VK Not at all, quite the opposite. Recently in the Parliament the government changed the composition of the independent Communications Safeguards Authority (ADAE) in order to avoid scrutiny of an illegal wiretapping scandal allegedly organised by the head of the Prime Minister's Office, relying on the votes of the far-right party Elliniki Lisi (Greek Solution). Although this alliance was opportunistic and not strategic, is indicative of the feasibility of future cooperation between the right and the far right on various critical issues, including the shrinking of democratic rights and individual freedoms.
KT Personally, I do not exclude the possibility that such a ‘historic compromise’ may happen in Greece in the future.
VK In my view, the real problem is not so much related to the direct cooperation between the right and the far right. It is linked to the fact that in Greece, as elsewhere, the conservative right-wing forces feel the need to adopt the far right’s agenda and implement far right policies on various issues such as, for example, on the need to keep migrants and refugees out of Europe even at the cost of their lives, believing that this will secure popular support.
In any case, the reference to the historic compromise between the neoliberal right and the far right brings me back to what I said before regarding the relationship between the dictatorship and the way out of it, as well as about and the subsequent political developments in Greece and the rupture of the 1990s. The current discourse of many representatives of the right questions the importance of the Metapolitefsi and especially the role of popular intervention in the overthrow of the junta, in line with the views of the far right on this issue. This discourse is completely at odds with what the flagship conservative newspaper Kathimerini, for example, wrote in the 1970s and 1980s on the same issues, and especially on the Polytechnic uprising. Back then, it was implausible to question the importance of these events because it was a recent experience. The fact that today this importance is being downgraded has less to do with their historical questioning than with the rapprochement between the right and the far right, even if this has not yet taken the form of a strategic alliance.
When the people of my generation were young, they had the memory of the struggles of Greek communism, its achievements, failures and mistakes during the early period after World War II and its defeat in the civil war. We were trying to draw conclusions and learn lessons from the past. Shouldn’t today's younger generation do the same with the period of the dictatorship, investigating the causes of both its imposition and its fall, and the way the left acted at that time?
KT I will answer your question with a quote from Hegel, that I like very much: The only lesson we can learn from history is that we cannot learn anything from history.
VK Personally, I believe in the necessity of memory. The dictatorship is a pivotal period for Greek history, but also for the history of the Left itself. Memory and especially knowledge of what happened is very useful, not only for historical reasons, but because it can help us to think and ask ourselves about the future course of the Greek Left.
Endnotes
1 To Polytechneio exo apo to Polytechneio. Oi afaneis protagonistes tis exegersis tou 1973 (published by Themelio, 2023) [translated title: The Polytechnic outside the Polytechnic. The invisible protagonists of the 1973 uprising]
2 Polyvalence (polystheneia, in Greek) is a term established by Konstantinos Tsoukalas in his book (Themelio, 1986) [State, Society, Labour], that identifies individuals in the Greek social formation who occupy more than one class position.
3 According to Vangelis Karamonolakis, the term Metapolitefsi, in its most precise sense, refers to the period from the fall of the dictatorship on 24 July 1974 until the end of 1975 when the basic institutional changes that marked the transition to a democratic polity took place, or at least until 1981, when the smooth rise to power of PASOK confirmed the stability of Greek democracy. However, from very early on, Metapolitefsi was a metonym of the very concept of democracy and, despite objections or discussions about its end, it is still used today to describe a single period from 1974 to the present.