Abstract
Reviewed by: K. E. Fleming, New York University, USA
Kostas Kostis has produced an important, challenging and highly readable history of the evolution of the Greek state, perhaps the best one to have ever been written. The book has been through multiple editions and now at last is available in English. It is remarkable in its comprehensiveness – it travels from the Ottoman era down to the present day – but also and most satisfyingly it is remarkable in its willingness to make claims, pass judgements and face harsh realities. Jacob Moe’s superb translation from the original 2013 Greek into English retains the immediacy and precision of Kostis’ text and conveys its subtle yet direct nature.
Modern Greece has always suffered from inevitable teleological interpretations. After all, it is the only European country that formulaically seems to require the adjective ‘Modern’ before its very name – so ingrained is the idea that what ‘really’ matters is an earlier, ancient past from which today’s Greece has somehow been derived and degenerated. And even for those with an a priori interest in contemporary, rather than classical, Greece, the current shambolic state of Greece’s economy has only sharpened this teleological tendency, with histories of and commentaries upon the Greek economic ‘crisis’ constantly searching Greece’s history for an explanation for how things ended up as they have.
Kostis’ history is a welcome move away from this approach. Versed as the author is in the origins of Greece’s current economic situation – and Kostis is well-versed, indeed – he does not treat the unfolding of Greek history from the late eighteenth century as a preamble to that situation. Far from it. For the history with which the book is concerned is not primarily an economic one. Rather, as the very subtitle suggests, the text is focused on the ‘state’ as, in the author’s words, ‘a human community’. Most of the other best-known histories of Greece have focused not on state but on ‘nation’; in shifting the focus to ‘state,’ Kostis places his work on more clearly-defined methodological grounding, and makes it instantly comparative in scope. For how can we understand a state without reference to and comparison with other states?
This is a history of Greece by a trained economist and economic historian. Greece is often explained economically, and often by people who don’t have the credentials or training to make economic arguments. Strikingly, Kostis knows when they apply, and when they don’t. Thus he is able, for instance, to convincingly assert that, if anything, the economic dimensions of Greece’s history have been overstated. Of the Greek War of Independence he asserts that ‘[I]t must be understood as an eminently political event. Economistic arguments are unable to offer a satisfying explanation’ (74–5).
He also is able to reverse long-held truths about Greece’s first two centuries, demonstrating, for example, that Greece was no less ‘successful’ as a modern state over its first century of existence than were many of its contemporaries (among them the United States) to which it is often denigratingly compared. Kostis is refreshingly clear in his assessments and avoids ‘two handed’ (‘one the one hand this, but on the other hand that …’) arguments. Nor is he afraid to express clear views: ‘Much has been written about the origin of the military dictatorship, very little of which deserves to be taken seriously’ (356). Nor to be critical of Greece’s contemporary realities: Greece’s lagging rankings in innovation, ‘business sophistication’ and other economic indications ‘would be surmountable if the country possessed an effective political system – that is, a different system from the one currently in place’ (405). In a tragically apt and brilliantly succinct aside, Kostis describes Greece as ‘a democracy characterized by equality, in which everyone has rights, though few seem to have responsibilities, and even fewer seek to meet them’ (395).
Kostis has written a remarkable and brave history of Greece that is, at the same time, a trenchant and devastating commentary on its present. As he writes in his introduction, ‘The ‘Spoiled Children of History’ [of the title] are clearly the Greeks that consider themselves entitled to special treatment because their ancestors laid the foundations of Western civilization’. He warns that ‘Greece today continues … [to] cit[e] its past so as to avoid its future … More than ever, the country seems to be clinging to its past …’ (9). This is a courageous and wholly accurate description. If Greece is to change, the Greeks must understand this past in quite a different way. History’s Spoiled Children is a decisive step towards that understanding.