Ever since he sacked his foreign minister a few months ago and took the post himself, Prime Minister Mitsotakis has been ricocheting double-time from capital to capital in the EC re-erecting flattened fences and making the biggest possible noise about Macedonia’s being Greek and nobody else’s. At first, most Europeans thought this odd or wrongheaded or maddening, and it is a considerable personal triumph on his part that Mr Mitsotakis lassoed leaders of state at the Lisbon Summit and got them to go along with the Greek point of view. In this, he certainly had the backing of the country, as well as a consistent foreign policy – a great advantage over the rest of the EC which has no discernable foreign policy at all.
It is much to his credit, too, that Greece has lately gained repute in the eyes of its allies and those with whom it is not so friendly, and this, certainly, is due in part to its solidarity. Having a majority of two in Parliament can hardly be called a mandate, but the government opposition has been mild lately; economic policies have been endorsed by all parties because there are no alternatives; and the country’s stability appears increasingly impressive as the threat of strife moves menacingly down through the Balkans. The result has been a noticeably warmer atmosphere of domestic confidence, and this is just what the country has long needed.
President Karamanlis always com-plains that people do not listen to him, but actually they do in a subliminal sort of way, and his repeated calls for political consensus seem to have taken root, though of course nobody wants to admit it.
Between scurryings to Lisbon and to Helsinki and most places in between, the Prime Minister stops in Athens long enough to give upbeat press conferences and make so many statements that his speech writers must be hard put keeping abreast of him and thinking up new and memorable ways of saying how well things are going.
Even the ever-youthful opposition leader Andreas Papandreou described the travels of the Prime Minister as “personal tours aimed at preventing the isolation of Greece from Europe.” At one time Andreas would have criticized this as a mark of bowing down to the West, of Greece surrendering its sovereignty, but not these days. He has always been a shrewd reader of his country’s mood and climate and knows well that the season for being NATO gadfly, socialist maverick, a go-it-alone, look-at-me adventurer is closed – and pulls in no votes. He has even distanced himself from the labor unions and guardedly endorsed that “conservatively inspired” Maastricht treaty.
Whatever the Danes may think, Greeks are mad for Maastricht. Admittedly, until last month, few had familiarized themselves with the text of that wordy agreement. According to a recent poll, over half the Greeks asked had never heard of Maastricht – the highest percentage in Europe – while those who had, were well informed and 79 percent of them were in favor of it -again, the highest percentage in Europe.
Late last month – at the last moment, as usual – while the treaty was being debated in Parliament, a massive dose of Maastricht was spooned out on TV, and Hellenes, being a quickly adapting lot, at the end of the week know almost as much about that quaint Dutch city on the River Maas as they did about Macedonia. It’s when things are neatly planned ahead of time here that they go awry, like the Metro.
In short, anything that ties Greece closer to the EC is now thought to be a Good Thing, especially as increased financial assistance to the poorer members is more likely the closer unity becomes a reality. All of a sudden, being just another white sheep grazing in the middle of the EC flock seems better than being a dark one out on the periphery where the wolves are likely to prowl.
What accounts for this quite basic change in the national mood is difficult to pinpoint. Ever since tax evasion stopped being the nation’s top favorite sport (at least officially), it has been replaced by psychoethnology, that endless, pseudoscientific game otherwise known as ‘why are we the way we are?’ As Socrates was unable to answer this, and nobody since, it is unlikely to be answered now. But a new sort of self-confidence seems to have emerged lately which has changed people’s view of things.
The uneasiness, noticeable for so long, that absorption into Europe would somehow undermine the character of the ethnos, the fear of appearing a flunky in relations with greater powers, the horror that the country is about to become a nation of waiters – and consequently that diplomatic ‘individuality’ must be displayed – have been found groundless, problems that seem to no longer apply.
The whole process of social liberalization that PASOK ten years ago briefly pursued, and then forgot, but which now has started up again, has had a tonic effect. When regulated shopping hours, for instance, were eased, people said shops would then never open (or never shut); when com-panies were privatized, the country would be gobbled up by foreign investors; when price controls were lifted, costs would soar. None of these things happened, of course. The whole parochial attitude that people will misbehave if freed of regulation – religiously fol-lowed by conservatives, socialists, liberals, dictators, etc. etc. since the War of Independence – has been perhaps the biggest block to social maturity.
By symbolizing union with a family of advanced societies, Maastricht has come to mean something like, “Let’s leave the playroom and join the grownups.” Mr Yiannaros of the Left Coalition may have been exaggerating when he said a few days ago, “Ratification of the treaty is a starting point for the modernization of Greek society” – but not by much.
