By the same author ORGANISATION AND BUREAUCRACY: AN ANALYSIS OF MODERN THEORIES

MODERN GREECE

By the same author ORGANISATION AND BUREAUCRACY: AN ANALYSIS OF MODERN THEORIES

MODERN GREECE Facets of Underdevelopment NICOS P. MOUZEUS

Nicos P. Mouzelis 1978 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-0-333-22615-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mouzelis, Nicos Panayiotou Modern Greece 1. Social classes - Greece, Modern 2. Greece, Modern - Social conditions I. Title 309.1'495'07 HN470.Z9S6 ISBN 978-1-349-03511-3 ISBN 978-1-349-03509-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03509-0 Typeset by SANTYPE INTERNATIONAL LTD (COLDTYPE DIVISION) Salisbury, Wiltshire This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction IX x1 PART I THE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF GREEK CAPITALISM: AN OVERALL VIEW 3 1 The Ottoman Period 3 2 The Greek War of Independence 12 3 1830-80: Underdevelopment in a Pre-Capitalist Context 14 4 1880-1922: The Transition Period 17 5 1922-60: Capitalist Dominance and Underdevelopment 22 6 The Post-1960 Period 27 7 Conclusion 28 PART II THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 2 THE DEBATE ON THE NEO-MARXIST APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT 1 The Neo-Marxist Position 2 Substantive Criticism of the Neo-Marxist School 3 The Methodological Critique 33 33 36 41

vi Contents 3 THE RELEVANCE OF THE CONCEPT OF CLASS TO THE STUDY OF MODERN GREEK SOCIETY 56 1 Functionalism and the Social Stratification Approach 57 2 Class and the Marxist Alternative 60 3 Conclusions 68 Postscript: Empiricist Fallacies in the Greek Social Sciences 70 4 CAPITALISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE 74 1 Peasants and Capitalism 75 2 Capitalism and Greek Agriculture 77 3 Critique 79 PART III CLASS STRUCTURE AND POLITICS 5 GREEK AND BULGARIAN PEASANTS: ASPECTS OF THEIR SOCIO-POLITICAL SITUATION DURING THE INTER-WAR PERIOD 89 1 Capitalist Penetration 90 2 The Historical Development of the Greek and Bulgarian Bourgeoisie 93 3 Rural-Urban Links 96 4 Conclusion 102 6 CLASS STRUCTURE AND THE ROLE OF THE MILITARY IN GREECE: AN INTERPRETATION 105 1 Historical Background 105 2 The Inter-War Period 107 3 Army and Mass Politics: Post-Civil War Developments 111 4 Conclusion 114 7 CAPITALISM AND DICTATORSHIP IN POST-WAR GREECE 1 The Post-War State 2 Post-War Capital Accumulation 3 Political Denouement 4 The Debate on the Rise and Fall of the Dictatorship 115 116 118 125 131

Contents vu 8 ON GREEK FORMALISM: POLITICAL AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT 134 1 Examples of Greek Formalism 134 2 A Tentative Explanation 137 3 The Autochthonous Oligarchy and the Importation of Parliamentary Institutions 141 4 The Diaspora Bourgeoisie and the Over-inflated Character of Greek Society 144 5 Cultural Underdevelopment and the Ancient Greek Heritage 145 6 Conclusion 147 CONCLUSION: CATCHING UP WITH THE WEST: NED-EVOLUTIONIST IDEOLOGIES AND PROBLEMS OF GREEK DEVELOPMENT 149 Notes 155 Index 213

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following persons who, either through reading parts of the manuscript or through discussing various problems with me, have greatly helped my work: Mike Attalides, Anthony Barnett, Richard J. Crampton, George Grimpas, George Dertilis, Nikiphoros Diamandouros, Jane Dimaki, Nicos Garganas, Rousos Kouudouros, Victor Papacosmas, Spilios Papaspiliopoulos, Leslie Sklair, Melina Serafetinidi, Constantine Tsoukalas, Thanos Veremis, Costas Vergopoulos, Tasos Yiannitsis, and Yanis Yianoulopoulos. I would also like to mention here a number of unpublished Ph.D. theses which I found particularly helpful in my work. Among these, Melina Serafetinidi's work (The Breakdown of Parliamentary Institutions in Greece, unfinished Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics) played an important role in shaping some of my ideas on the structural basis of the 1967 coup (Chapter 7); Thanos Veremis' thesis (The Greek Army in Politics, Ph.D., Trinity College, Oxford, 1974) provided much basic information for my analysis of political developments during the inter-war period (Chapter 6); the following works were very useful for the elaboration of specific points in various parts of this book: George Dertilis, Social Change and Military Intervention in politics: Greece 1881-1928, Ph.D., University of Sheffield, 1976; Nikiphoros Diamandouros, Political Modernization, Social Conflict and Cultural Cleavage in the formation and the Modern Greek State 1871-1878, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1972; Victor Papacosmas, The Greek Military Revolt of 1909, Ph.D., Indiana University, 1970; Constantine Tsoukalas, Dependance et Reproduction: le role de l'appareil scolaire dans une formation trans-territoriale, Ph.D., Sorbonne, 1976. Finally I must express my gratitude to Ellen Sutton for her invaluable editorial and secretarial help, and to Doriana Collins for her translation of some Bulgarian texts. N.P.M. February 1977 ix

Introduction This collection of essays is an attempt to assess various theories concerning the development problems of third-world countries, by examining their relevance and utility for the analysis of a concrete case study - that of Greece. I started working on these articles several years ago when I embarked on a long-term and as yet unfinished project of studying peasant movements in Greece and Bulgaria during the inter-war period. Examination of the Greek inter-war society soon showed that to understand it properly a more comprehensive view of the development of the modern Greek economy and polity was needed. I also felt that, notwithstanding the relative scarcity of serious economic-historical research on modern Greece, the application of sociological theory to such material as did exist already could (even without systematic groundwork on primary sources) shed some new light on the country's historical development and could provide guidelines for a fresh look at some crucial problems of the Greek social formation. Also, focusing on a country which, in a variety of ways, had experienced for centuries the disrupting effects of Western imperialism would be a useful way of investigating in concrete terms the various theories on underdevelopment - theories which occupy a prominent place in today's sociological literature. The present volume, which lays the foundations for a more intensive study of Greek and Bulgarian inter-war social structures, is the result of an attempt to get better acquainted with the historical development of the Greek class structure by using conceptual tools derived from the vivid debates on the problems which poor countries are now facing in their efforts to overcome their poverty and dependence. Part I of die book consists of a single chapter which gives an overall analysis of the development of Greek capitalism from the Ottoman period until today. This rather long chapter provides the connecting links xi

xii Introduction between the essays that follow. It spells out some basic themes which will be taken up and examined in greater detail in subsequent chapters; and more generally it provides for the non-greek reader an overall framework, with the help of which he can more easily locate specific problems and developments treated in the rest of the book. Part II has a predominantly theoretical orientation, in the sense that the main emphasis is on the conceptual framework~ and the ensuing problems of development theories. Here empirical materials from the Greek case are brought in to illustrate a number of theoretical points. Thus Chapter 2 is an attempt to depict the state of development literature today by focusing on the highly influential neo-marxist school, and the various criticisms recently formulated against its main theses. Chapter 3 assesses the social science literature on modern Greek development/underdevelopment in the context of a comparison between Marxist and functionalist analyses of class. Finally, Chapter 4, starting with a review of two important books by a Greek Marxist economist - one on the general relationship between capitalism and agriculture, the other on the development of Greek agriculture - assesses the relevance of Althusserian Marxism to the study of agricultural developments in Greece. The general theme which links Chapters 2, 3 and 4, and which constitutes the theoretical basis of the whole book, is that only a conceptual framework with class analysis at its centre can successfully deal with development problems; and that from this point of view the most influential paradigms in both non-marxist and Marxist social sciences today (i.e. Parsonian functionalism and Althusserian Marxism respectively) are highly inadequate guides for the study of the obstacles that most poor countries are facing in their efforts to overcome their economic backwardness. In Part III the focus shifts from the theoretical to a more empirical level of analysis. With the help of conceptual tools clarified in Part II, this section examines certain key problems which arise out of a closer look at the relationship between the historical trajectory of the Greek economy and its politico-ideological superstructure. Chapter 5 opens with a problem which is crucial for understanding the political structure of modern Greece and its decisive difference from that of her Balkan neighbours before the Second World War: the problem of why Greece, in striking contrast to Bulgaria and all other Balkan countries, did not develop an important peasant party during the inter-war period. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with another important problem area in the study of modern Greece, that of the role and position of the army within the Greek social formation, and the relation of the military to economic and political developments during the twentieth century. Specifically, Chapter 6, focusing more on the political superstructure, sets out to identify the major structural differences between pre-war and post-war

Introduction X111 military interventions in Greek politics - as well as to explain such differences in terms of the changing class structure. Given this general framework, Chapter 7 proposes a theory which links the rise and fall of the Greek junta to the post-war model of capital accumulation in Greece. Finally, Chapter 8 identifies, and tries to offer some tentative explanations of the excessive formalism which rules not only in political debates but in all spheres of Greek life. This leads back to the concept of underdevelopment (discussed in Chapter 2), and to a further assessment of its political and cultural dimensions. As these essays were written over a long period of time, they are not of a methodologically uniform character. For instance, the mode-ofproduction concept plays an important role in the more recently written essays on the development of Greek capitalism (Chapter 1) and on the Greek dictatorship (Chapter 7), whereas it does not in Chapter 5, which compares the Greek and Bulgarian peasantries. However, I believe that all chapters show a consistent attempt to place the concept of class at the centre of the analysis; and to do this in a way which avoids the treatment of classes as anthropomorphic entities doing and regulating all social issues - or, at the other extreme, as mere 'bearers of structures' or, even worse, statistical categories useful for a static study of social stratification. Some of the essays presented here have already been published (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7). In such cases the original text has been modified so as to avoid excessive overlapping and to ensure continuity and conceptual consistency. (It is for this latter reason also that many cross-references are given to indicate the major linkages between the essays.) However, so as not to destroy the self-containment of each essay, I have kept the above changes within reasonable limits, which means that in some cases I could not avoid repeating the same point more than once. Also, the notes have been arranged in such a way that the reader need not refer to previous chapters to find the title and other particulars of an author's work. Finally, in order to make the main exposition less cumbersome, extensive use has been made of notes at the back of the book (especially for Chapters 1 and 2), not only for bibliographical references but also for developing a variety of indirectly relevant points.