090107 PS Greece during the Cold War (1947 - 1990) (2015W)

The Greek civil war (1944-1949) was a prelude to the Cold War divisions. Albeit nominally a liberal democracy, the postwar regime was based on a formal state of exception against the vanquished of the civil war, the Communist Party and the members of the procommunist EAM (National Liberation Front) resistance. The Truman doctrine was a direct reaction to the challenge of the Greek conflict and inaugurated a long period of intense US intervention in Greek politics. Greece integrated the NATO together with Turkey in the early 1950s. In the years that followed, the society was thoroughly transformed by successive waves of modernization-westernization. During the first postwar decades, internal and outgoing immigration not only fuelled an industrial and economic development, but provoked also quick rural depopulation and rapid urban growth.
The first postwar generation which grew in the big cities met with the youth cultures of the roaring 1960s and produce new forms of social and political activism. Under pressure from the youth movements and a growing labor unrest the parliamentary was destabilized in the mid-1960s. A military coup by a colonels' junta (1967) imposed a dictatorship that did not fall before the Cyprus War in 1974, after having staged an abortive coup in the island and losing the war against the Turkish invasion that followed.
The restoration of the republican regime (Metapolitefsi) inaugurated a long period of political stability. Under the command of a moderate right-wing government which integrated much of the junta personnel and supporters, the country rejoined the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1980. The legalization of the Communist Party was followed in the early 1980s by the official recognition of the EAM Resistance organizations and veterans, by the first postwar socialist government. As the Cold War was drawing to an end, in Greece too, the old divisions of the civil war seemed to wither away. In the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a short-lived coalition government formed by the communists and the republican right-wing party of New Democracy voted, among others, a Law for the lifting of the consequences of the Civil War (1944-1949). By the early 1990s, the country signed the Treaty of Maastricht and seemed to enter the new historical period as a major peripheral player in the new geopolitical landscape.