There she is in the picture on the tin of Nounou condensed milk in her cute little cap and her modest blouse and skirt with a bunch of white tulips in her arms. See the pretty windmill and the canal? Lo! a happy skiff is sailing by. “Moo!” say the two Holsteins on the right (or are they Guernseys?). Now look carefully at the girl’s demure expression. Isn’t she saying, “Read my lips?” Isn’t she whispering, “Buy Dutch!”
Of course she is! If the Dutch spread the charm on their products even more thickly than Van Gogh, there’s nothing wrong in that. But why, suddenly, should those strange Greeks at the other end of the continent be wildly boycotting their innocuous goods? How can a people reasonably fly into a passion over condensed milk or a slice of Gouda or Edam?
Understandably, the Hague last month was rather put out by this costly shunning of its wares, and implied it might consider retaliating by discouraging the Dutch from visiting Greece this coming summer. In turn, the govern¬ment in Athens, economically harassed, was embarrassed and tried to explain that it could not be held responsi¬ble for the phenomenon that had broken out among the people quite spontaneously.
The contretemps was clear. The Dutch saw. the matter economically. The Greeks saw it politically. Hence the rub. The EC is no longer just an economic market of exchange; it is becoming a political union with all the awkward psychological complications that entails. If Greece seems hard to swallow amongst the Twelve now, further expansion to the East may prove fatally indigestible in the future. The terrible truth is that it’s all muddled up with Macedonia. The facts probably got garbled, but it was leaked in Athens last month that after a text, following the meeting of EC foreign ministers in Lisbon, was approved, Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van der Broek, when no one else was looking, added ‘Yugoslav Macedonia’ to a sensi¬tive spot in the statement.
The heat which the Macedonia-Skopje issue has generated in Greece in the last few years, and in the last few months in particular, would be as hard to explain as it is foolish to ignore, for it is by no means an isolated phenomenon. It has nothing to do with minorities of themselves. There are few ethnic Greeks in southern Yugoslavia and there are no Macedonians anywhere. Hence it bears no resemblance with Ireland, or the Basque country or the Alto Adige. It is a case of national self-respect, historical integrity and ethnic identity. It’s not about winning independence; it’s about keeping it -against threat.
It’s too bad the poor little Dutch girl got caught in this crossfire, but it’s a big, bad world and she should have known better. It was not only the Netherlands, however, but Italy, that especially aroused Greek contempt. So easily does nationalism turn to prejudice that the happy land of Arri-vederci Roma, Sophia Loren and those adorable oversized dolls from Brindisi seaside boutiques became over night the odious realm of Ohi Day, the Mafia, Mussolini and Mare Nostrum.
Local passion in this case was aroused by Mr Flaminio Piccoli, presi-dent of the Italian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and a big shot in the Christian Democratic Party. Writing in II Popolo, he has recommended that Greek Macedonia be detached from the rest of the country and made into an autonomous region with Thessaloni-ki as its capital.
“Only the surface of Macedonia is inhabited by Greece,” he declared, thus implying that the whole region rightly belongs to some subterranean proto-Slavic Nibelungen.
Archaeology, unfortunately, is not Signor Piccoli’s strong point, and he fell quickly into a pit of his own making, since even the average Greek has be-come an authority on Macedonian antiquity ever since Mr Manolis Androni-kos made his spectacular finds in Vergina. Little wonder that he was personally decorated with the Order of the Phoenix last month by the President and has become a sort of folk hero. With incessant exhibitions of Macedo-nian art here and abroad, rows of books devoted to the subject, floods of pamphlets, and now a 100-drachma coin showing Alexander the Great and the star of Vergina, there isn’t an inti-mate spot in Macedonia, above ground or below, that all Greeks don’t know, love and cherish.
In fact, Mr Piccoli has been politely asked to check under the surface of Sicily and southern Italy, while he’s at it, where many Greek remains will be found, although no one has yet seriously demanded autonomy for these regions.
This sudden eruption of Greek nationalist passion should be seen in the context of uneasy geographical areas. If western Europe has solved these problems, so much the better. But as the Balkans, let alone the former USSR, unravel, the ethnic pas-sions they excite are decidedly worth pondering.
Wise old Sir Isaiah Berlin, who has often written on nationalism, recently said in an interview that it passionately reasserts itself with the collapse of empires. And this as true of the Soviet empire as it is of the humbler federation of Yugoslavia.
“Sooner or later, the backlash comes with irrepressible force. People tire of being spat upon, ordered about by a superior nation, a superior class, or a superior anyone.”
Macedonia has only been free of the imperial Ottoman yoke for 80 years. Greece treasures that freedom; it wishes its neighbors well within the context of their own ethnic identities, while at the same time encouraging federation as a mean of economic viabililty. It’s a bit contradictory, but it’s just like life.
Meanwhile, all the infant girls and boys in Greece are clamoring for their Nounou, so the little Dutch girl has been reinstated in the nation’s supermarkets – and may her shelf life be short!
