Backdoor Colonialism Or Anchor of Modernity? a Short History of Ideas About European Integration Within the Greek Left

Chapter 8 Backdoor Colonialism or Anchor of Modernity? A Short History of Ideas about European Integration within the Greek Left

Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni

During the eurozone crisis, commentators have often portrayed Greece as a traditionally ‘supremely Europhile’ country that turned Eurosceptic due to the EU’s crisis-time policies.1 This is not correct. In January 1981, Greece became a member of the European Economic Community (eec) in a climate marked by the ferocious opposition to the country’s eec accession by the centre-left opposition leader, Andreas Papandreou, who characterised the accession agreement as a ‘monument of national subjugation’.2 To the vision of the then Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis that ‘Greece belongs to the West’, Papan- dreou responded: ‘Greece belongs to the Greeks’. Papandreou won the October 1981 national election with an astounding 48.1 percent of the vote. At the same time, it is true that Greece also has a strongly Europhile con- stituency, whose influence has fluctuated significantly during the four decades of the country’s EU membership. Fast forward fifteen years since Andreas Papandreou’s remarks, and Greece’s new Prime Minister in 1996, who led the same party as Papandreou, was describing Greece’s accession to Economic and Monetary Union (emu) as a central aim of his government’s programme. Con- trary to Andreas Papandreou’s portrayal of Greece’s participation in the project of European integration as something that had resulted in a loss of national sovereignty, Costas Simitis painted a picture of Greece’s membership in emu as a condition sine qua non for projecting the country’s influence in the economic and political domains: ‘The nucleus of emu will be a new centre for decision-making (…) The dilemma is perfectly clear. Let us have the bravery to look at it square in the eye: Do we or do we not want to be able to define the fortune of our country, the future of our children, our own historical continuity?’3

1 Costas Douzinas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Cambridge: UK, Polity, 2013), p. 1. 2 Campaign speech of Andreas Papandreou in Ioannina, as reported in the newspaper Eleftherotipia, 28 September 1981, p. 15. 3 Costas Simitis, For the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Parliamentary Team, speech delivered in 1996, available at the online archive of the Constantinos Simitis

It has recently become increasingly common to argue that the politics of European countries can no longer be understood solely through the prism of the traditional left-right cleavage: a second pro-/ anti-globalisation cleavage has also emerged, bringing about momentous change in European party sys- tems. Hooghe and Marks call this second cleavage the ‘transnational cleavage’, and trace its origins in ‘a series of major reforms in the early 1990s that diminished the cost of international trade and migration’, such as the Maas- tricht Treaty.4 The recent eurozone and migration crises, it is argued, can be seen as a critical juncture that is rendering the transnational cleavage the dom- inant one in European politics.5 In fact, in Greece this ‘second cleavage’ has exerted a major influence in national politics since at least the late 1970s, when Greece signed the Accession Agreement with the eec6 – and in its more gen- eral form of a division between politicians with a pro- or anti-Western orienta- tion, it has surely existed for far longer. This chapter explores the historical roots of Euroscepticism and Europhilia within the Greek left from the late 1970s to 2015. Eurosceptic discourse has traditionally been more common within the Greek left than the Greek right. Con- trary to Hooghe and Marks’s argument that it is due to the “distributional fram- ing of the euro crisis” that contemporary Southern European Euroscepticism is expressed by the far left rather than the radical right,7 the link between Euro sceptic and left-wing political discourses actually has a far longer historical pedi gree in Greece, the nature of which is analysed in the chapter. At the same time, as shown by the juxtaposition of the statements of Andreas Papandreou and Costas Simitis about European integration, the question of Europe has been highly divisive for the Greek left for many decades. Greece was also governed by left-wing parties during key moments for the history of its relationship with the EU, from the first years of eec membership, to emu accession, and to the dra- matic standoff with the EU following Syriza’s rise to power in 2015. For all these reasons, studying the history of ideas about the EU within the Greek left is par- ticularly interesting. The analysis in this chapter relies on material drawn from

Foundation, identifier A1S5_OikPol_F2T12, http://repository.costas-simitis.gr/sf-repository/ handle/11649/11168?locale=en, p. 7. 4 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, ‘Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage’, Journal of European Public Policy, 1 (2018), p. 113. 5 Hooghe and Marks, ‘Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises’, p. 116. 6 The eec was one of the central issues discussed in the 1981 election campaign. According to a magazine article at the time: ‘Before we entered in the eec, the eec entered in Greece and became a political reference point, a programme, an ideology, a slogan, a way of life, a way of production and consumption, an advertisement, a big idea. There was never a problem that dominated as much our thought, our perception, our daily life’. Makis Cavouriaris, ‘eec: the conversation that we never had’, Politis, 27 (1979), p. 2. 7 Hooghe and Marks, ‘Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises’, p. 125.