PhD

This blogger has now completed and submitted his thesis to the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I am hoping to be able to upload much more material on the subject of the thesis soon.

LSE Symposium

Here's a link to the LSE Symposium programme.

I'll be presenting on the second day, Friday 26th June:
Session II, Panel 1 - History II: The Enosis & the Greek Junta
Room: U110, Tower 1, London School of Economics and Political Science.

See you there.

4th HO PhD Symposium on Contemporary Greece and Cyprus

This blogger will have the pleasure to present a paper on 'British foreign policy towards the Greek junta, 1967-1974' at the 4th PhD symposium to take place 25-26 June under the aegis of the Hellenic Observatory of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I had given a paper also at the 2nd PhD symposium back in 2005 (see panel and read paper here).
It was a wonderful experience and I am delighted to be a part of it once again this year.

CCBH conference

There's now been a change as regards the CCBH conference to take place in late June.
This blogger will present a paper on 'British foreign policy towards the Greek junta, 1970-1974', concentrating thus on the Conservative government's relations with the military regime in Athens.

Dr Effie Pedaliu will speak on the Wilson (Labour) government's policy towards the Greek Colonels, that is the period covering the years 1967-1970.
See also her well researched and well written article on 'Human Rights ans Foreign Policy: Wilson and the Greek Dictators: 1967-1970' that appeared in Diplomacy & Statecraft.

Both papers will be presented on the same panel of the said conference, on the 25th of June 2009.

You can find the programme here.

The Greek Riots: A Political and Historical Analysis

The Greek Riots: A Political and Historical Analysis
Talk by

Stathis Kalyvas, Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, Yale University.

Posted using ShareThis

Thesis abstract

I have now added a tentative thesis abstract to the number of links located on the right hand side.
You can get a taste of my PhD thesis by looking at it here.

New book

A new book on Greek politics after the Civil War has come out in Greek.
It is a very well-written and thoroughly researched endeavour to analyse the major actors and events that shaped postwar Greece.

The book, which is written by an established Greek researcher (Sotiris Rizas) who has published extensively on a variety of topics including Britain, the US and Cyprus, is entitled 'Greek politics after the Civil War: parliamentarism and dictatorship' (translation mine), and thus also covers the period of the Greek junta, 1967-1974.

More info (in Greek) here.

CCBH Annual Conference

This blogger will be presenting a paper on 'British foreign policy towards the Greek junta, 1967-1974' at the Centre for Contemporary British History (CCBH) 2009 Conference entitled: 'Britain and the End of the Cold War', to take place 22-25 June at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

More detailed information will follow.

House of Commons gaffe

Gordon Brown's slip of the tongue during PM questions, in which he said his government had 'saved the world', is reminiscent of a similar gaffe another British minister had made during the seven years of the junta's reign.

More specifically, the time was June 1973 and, while debating the British recognition of the Papadopoulos republican government, foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home responded to a relevant question by James Callaghan.
Douglas-Home later in the same session asked to correct his slip of the tongue as he had picked up a phrase of Callaghan referring to the Colonels:

'I think I said he rightly called it "the illegal regime in Greece"'.

The statement was caught by opposition circles in London, with the European-Atlantic Action Committee on Greece publishing a rather mordant bulletin to comment on Whitehall's policy towards the Colonels:

'The indecent haste with which the British government recognised the newly declared Greek Republic on 13th June was a gratuitous favour to Papadopoulos and was rightly the subject of critical questioning in the House of Commons by the Opposition's Shadow Foreign Secretary. That the government felt some embarrasment over the decision was indicated by a revealing 'slip of tongue' made by Sir Alec Douglas-Home in referring to the Greek regime as "illegal"'.

Greek riots

Major rioting erupted in Athens and other big cities in Greece after the fatal shooting of a teenager by police two days ago.

Foreign press talks about clashes on an unprecedented scale, at least for the last twenty years in this country.
A protest was held even outside the Greek embassy in London (see photo below).

On this terrible occasion, the 1973 Athens polytechnic uprising is mentioned as the starting point of major rioting in Greece (see Times article on those events).

This article by Malcolm Brabant published on BBC's website explains the link between the two events:

'The polytechnic is the symbol of modern rebellion.

On 17 November 1973, tanks of the then six-year-old military dictatorship burst through the iron railings to suppress a student uprising against the colonels.

The exact casualty figure is still unknown to this day but it is believed that around 40 people were killed.

The sacrifice of the polytechnic was so significant that the post-junta architects of Greece's new constitution drafted the right of asylum, which bans the authorities from entering the grounds of schools and universities.

That is why places of learning are the springboards for the current wave of violence and it also explains why many of the riots are in university towns.

Students and pupils have effectively been given carte blanche to carry on protesting, because their professors have declared a three-day strike.

'Out of control'

Although many of today's protestors were not born when the polytechnic gates were crushed by the tanks, the lesson of the students' martyrdom is a key component of every Greek child's school democracy curriculum.

If Greece had already appeared difficult to govern, it will now be out of control Nikos Konstandaras, managing editor of Kathimerini newspaper

The latent Greek contempt for the police, which has now erupted so volcanically, has its roots in the dictatorship, when the police were regarded as the colonels' enforcers and traitors to the people.'

For a sober analysis of the December 2008 events see Professor Kalyvas' presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center.