Communism has not fared well in the history of international solidarity and human rights campaigns during the Cold War. International solidarity campaigns staged by communist parties and movements over international issues such as anti-colonialism, human rights and peace have mostly been considered a matter of ‘agitprop’ and ‘front organisations’.Footnote 1 These failed to have an impact in the West and were fatally discredited by their association with the Soviet Union.Footnote 2 Communism appears, then, as an antithesis of both the ‘radical internationalism’ of the new left and liberal human rights, which inspired transnational activism from the 1960s onwards. Such assumptions have contributed to the neglect of communist movements in accounts of the international solidarity movements that mobilised on behalf of democracy and human rights in the authoritarian regimes that ruled in Southern Europe until their collapse in the mid-1970s. This tendency to overlook communist campaigns has been reinforced by research that has stressed the contradictions and conflicts that marked the relations between Eastern European regimes and Spanish, Greek and Portuguese communists.Footnote 3 While neglecting the role of communism, relevant literature has by contrast cherished the connections between campaigns on behalf of democracy in Southern Europe and those on behalf of dissidents in Eastern Europe. It has been the story of Amnesty International, which was founded in the early 1960s to campaign on behalf of political prisoners in Portugal, Spain and Greece, and which quickly combined these campaigns with attention to human rights violations in Eastern Europe and the Third World.Footnote 4 Accounts of the protest and student movements of the 1960s, for their part, reveal how issues such as the Greek Colonels’ regime and the trials of oppositionists in Franco's Spain entered the agenda of the new left simultaneously with criticism of communism in Eastern Europe.Footnote 5 The collapse of what were dubbed ‘fascist’ regimes in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s, it has been argued, reinforced the belief in human rights and non-violent resistance among the European left and inspired support for Eastern European dissidents over the next decade.Footnote 6 A common identity also emerges in the trajectories and memories of the political movements in Southern and Eastern Europe that shaped the transition to democracy. Adam Michnik's discourse that the Polish opposition's objective was ‘similar to that of the resistance against Franco in Spain or against the “black colonels” in Greece’ was among a plethora of references to the Southern European resistance that appeared in campaigns on behalf of human rights in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 7
By and large such cross-references have fostered the idea of one common ‘anti-totalitarian’ struggle and a ‘return to Europe’ that linked opposition movements in Europe's East and South. In this anti-totalitarian narrative equating anti-fascism and anti-communism, Western Europe emerges as the ‘third way’ and as the main link between campaigns against Southern and Eastern dictatorships.Footnote 8 Cold War historians may well have established the ambiguous role and normalisation policies pursued by the governments of ‘democratic’ Europe towards the authoritarian regimes in East and South.Footnote 9 However, this contradiction is overshadowed by the role Western Europe has been given as a refuge and host for exiles and dissidents from both sides. It was from Western Europe that governments, social movements and party foundations contributed to the transition to democracy, and from where opposition movements in Eastern and Southern Europe drew solidarity, aid, and models for their struggle.Footnote 10 Yet we know relatively little about the European mobilisation on behalf of human rights and democracy in Southern Europe, and even less about how these movements connected to campaigns with an East–West orientation. This has especially been the case for what was the most iconic cause célèbre that knitted the struggles of Southern Europe into broader transnational campaigns on human rights and international solidarity cultures during the Cold War, namely campaigns on behalf of human rights and democracy in Greece over the 1960s and early 1970s.
Resistance against the Colonels’ regime that ruled Greece from 1967 until its fall in 1974 spawned a broad transnational protest culture, which spanned East and West and mobilised various social movements ranging from radical students and solidarity movements to human rights and peace NGOs. It also shaped public campaigns around iconic Greeks, such as Melina Mercouri, Maria Farantouri and Mikis Theodorakis. Even prior to the Colonels’ coup of April 1967 the plight of Greece provoked international campaigns in Europe. The violent suppression of left-wing opponents by US-backed governments that ruled the country following the defeat of the communists in the civil war in 1949, the ban of the Greek Communist Party (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas; KKE) and the country's role in NATO's military strategies inspired human rights and solidarity campaigns across Europe.Footnote 11 With a number of case studies on Amnesty International and new left groupings in the West as the most notable exceptions, these movements have so far remained outside the scope of historical work, which has mainly been focused on the reactions of governments and international politics.Footnote 12 While historians have established the importance of communism among the Greek left and research is beginning to investigate solidarity campaigns in Eastern Europe,Footnote 13 it remains unclear how European human rights activism over Greece related to East–West movements and other international issues at stake in the 1960s and early 1970s. How did European campaigns over Greece connect to movements on behalf of East–West détente, the Third World and Eastern European dissidents that mushroomed simultaneously in this period? What was the role of communism and Eastern Europe in international campaigns? Have dominant accounts performed a sleight of hand by neglecting the role of communist movements, and have they not duly emphasised the connections with campaigns on behalf of Eastern European dissidents?
To answer these questions, this article first looks at the ways in which communist-led campaigns, and the Greek exiles connected to them, rallied around ‘amnesty’ for political prisoners and exiles and aimed to bring these campaigns into anti-colonial and peace movements in the early 1960s. Second, it focuses on the broadening mobilisation following the coup of April 1967, when communist campaigns contributed to the rise of human rights campaigns against ‘fascism’ in Greece, and were able to include social democrats and human rights groups in Western Europe. The third section analyses the ways in which the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 became connected to campaigns over Greece, though it widened rather than narrowed the distance between campaigns over democracy in Southern Europe and those on behalf of dissidents in Eastern Europe. The fourth section focuses on the integration of Greece into campaigns on behalf of security and cooperation in Europe in the early 1970s. It shows not only how the Third World, rather than Eastern or Western Europe, served as a model for international protest campaigns against the military junta in Greece, but also how campaigns on behalf of democracy in Greece allowed East and West to come together.
‘Amnesty’ for Greece in the 1960s: Western European Communism against the Cold War
In March 1963 delegations from all over Western Europe gathered at the Palais d'Orsay in Paris for an international conference on ‘amnesty for political prisoners and exiles and for the respect of human rights in Greece’.Footnote 14 The initiative aimed to intensify campaigns on behalf of the approximately 1,200 political prisoners that had been sentenced for their involvement in the Greek communist resistance, the civil war or left-wing opposition activities against the anti-communist and US-backed Greek governments.Footnote 15 The event was organised by an international assortment of activists and lawyers, coordinated by the Paris-headquartered International Federation of the Rights of Men (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l'Homme; FIDH). Initially founded in 1922, this human rights organisation was re-established at the initiative of French activists who had been involved in the interwar Popular Front and the resistance during the Second World War. It united national leagues in campaigns and staged missions on behalf of political prisoners and refugees across the globe.Footnote 16 The French communist André Leroy, together with other members of the French section of the FIDH, played a key role in the organisation, but the initiative on behalf of Greece resonated across Europe.Footnote 17 In the months leading up to the conference local committees in various countries were motivated by the Karamanlis government's refusal to allow the return of Greek exiles who had found refuge in Eastern Europe after the end of the civil war and had been deprived of their Greek citizenship, as well as by the continued imprisonment of political prisoners.Footnote 18 In the United Kingdom the initiative found support among parliamentarians, clerics and prominent academics, including Bertrand Russell.Footnote 19 In Italy an international conference staged in December 1962 by a number of journals gathered representatives of all political tendencies in favour of restoring democracy in Greece.Footnote 20 In preparation for the conference, in February–March 1963 a delegation composed of the British Labour MP Laurie Pavitt, the Italian lawyer Romeo Ferrucci and the Swedish lawyer Hans Göran Franck travelled to Athens. There they met with members of the opposition party United Democratic Left (Eniaia Dimokratiki; EDA), which was a legal political expression of the outlawed KKE. They gathered information about the fate of political prisoners, the falsification of the elections of 1961 and the repression of what they dubbed a ‘police state’.Footnote 21 Eventually, about 200 people attended the Paris meeting in 1963, including delegations from Belgium, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal and Finland. The gathering featured the prominent presence of the anti-German Second World War resistance hero Manolis Glezos – who had been sentenced by a military court due to allegations of communist espionage and had been released in December 1962. Glezos had been an icon of communist solidarity campaigns since the 1940s.Footnote 22
Indeed, international campaigns on behalf of political prisoners or persecuted communists, or ‘crypto-communists’ in Greece, were certainly not new in the 1960s: the execution of the resistance fighter and communist civil war leader Nikos Belogiannis in 1952 and the plight of many other oppositionists had inspired solidarity committees and demonstrations in East and West throughout the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 23 Yet in Western Europe the impact of these campaigns had been rather limited due to their association with the Soviet camp. Eastern Europe hosted the major headquarters of the banned Greek Communist Party and exile organisations and had received tens of thousands of Greek refugees after the end of the civil war.Footnote 24 The loyalty of the majority of Greek exiles towards the regimes – as exemplified by their support of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 – made them an unlikely partner for the new left groupings that staged internationally focused campaigns with an orientation towards the Third World and peace in the West. Moreover, in the late 1950s, the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ – involving a restoration of diplomatic relations of state socialist regimes with Greece –, as well as de-Stalinisation, pushed the issue of Greece towards the bottom of the agenda in Eastern Europe as well, and even ushered in a conflict between the Stalinist leadership of the KKE and the Soviet leadership.Footnote 25
At the beginning of the 1960s, however, the violations of human rights and limited democracy in Greece sparked broader support and sustained campaigns in Western Europe, in which communist movements were able to include social democrats, Christian activists and human rights NGOs. In the wake of the 1963 conference in Paris an international network coordinated local committees towards humanitarian relief for the political prisoners and their families. It also coordinated human rights campaigning at the level of international bodies, including the Red Cross and the UN Human Rights committee.Footnote 26 Strikingly, there also emerged a common identity with campaigns on behalf of Spanish and Portuguese oppositionists, which simultaneously rallied around ‘amnesty’ for political prisoners.Footnote 27 Amnesty International – the British NGO founded by Peter Benenson – was only one of many initiatives for amnesty for political prisoners in Southern Europe that emerged in Western Europe in the early 1960s.Footnote 28 It is tempting to see the rise of these human rights campaigns as a corollary of the rise of the new left – which emerged out of disenchantment with communism in the East and Social Democracy in the West and which has been generally considered to be the harbinger of the international solidarity cultures that marked the 1960s. In his speech to the 1963 Paris conference, the Swedish lawyer Hans Göran Franck – who would go on to found a Swedish section of Amnesty International the following year – linked, for instance, the human rights violations in Greece with repression in the East – most notably in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.Footnote 29 However, the amnesty campaign on behalf of the Greek prisoners – much like those on Spain and Portugal – was supported by the Soviet Union and other communist governments, whose solidarity declarations were read during the Paris conference.Footnote 30 Campaigns were to a large degree dependent on information drawn from Greek exile organisations based in Budapest, East Berlin, Prague and Bucharest.Footnote 31 Criticism of Eastern European regimes would be at odds with the demands for a re-legalisation of the Greek Communist Party. These demands were formulated with references to articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights – especially concerning freedom of thinking and expression.Footnote 32 Moreover, Western European communist parties in general, and the French Communist Party specifically, continued to play a leading role in campaigns on behalf of amnesty in Southern Europe in the first half of the 1960s. Indeed, the growth of human rights campaigns over Greece (and by extension also over Portugal and Spain) at the beginning of the 1960s, as well as their expanding links with the anti-nuclear and peace movements, reveal how ‘amnesty’ became a metaphor for calls to end the Cold War, hold back divisive anti-communist rhetoric and encourage growing East–West cooperation. ‘Amnesty’ campaigns over Greece focused on a common European struggle against fascism that blurred the established dynamics of the Cold War: they drew attention back to ‘Europe’ at a moment when decolonisation was shifting the epicentre of the East–West conflict to the Third World. This message fitted not only the Soviet policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and efforts of Western Europe's communist parties towards more internal unity and cooperation with the broader leftFootnote 33 but also appealed to non-communist progressives. For many of them, cooperation with communist peace movements became an attractive way to affirm a ‘non-aligned’ Western European identity.Footnote 34
These campaigns on behalf of democracy and human rights in Greece were not an abstract human rights struggle but rather became embedded in the peace and disarmament movements of the 1960s. They inspired massive demonstrations in the early 1960s, galvanised by the fear of a nuclear confrontation that could result from East–West crises such as those in Berlin and Cuba. Greece played a symbolic role in this issue, due to the installation of new NATO military bases on its soil in the early 1960s. Following a 1953 agreement on the installation of military bases between the Papagos government and the United States, the Greek left staged a succession of campaigns that combined protest against the ‘militarisation’ policies pursued by the US-backed Greek government with calls for détente and disarmament.Footnote 35 In the 1960s it was increasingly able to project this struggle abroad, supported by the World Peace Council – the international coordinating body of communist peace movements – and other international communist and non-communist peace organisations. During the World Congress of Peace and Disarmament in Moscow in 1962, twenty-eight Greek figures – including the former athlete and charismatic independent parliamentarian Grigoris Lambrakis – launched an appeal in which they linked the return of freedom, independence and prosperity in Greece with peace in Europe.Footnote 36 In Oxford, Lambrakis established contact with the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace, a group which aimed to create a ‘non-aligned’ peace movement.Footnote 37 Some months later, during Easter 1963, Lambrakis attended the Aldermaston March in the United Kingdom – and drew international attention to the plight of Greece by laying a wreath at the statue of Lord Byron and hosting international delegations for a peace march from Marathon to Athens in April 1963.Footnote 38 Because the Karamanlis government suppressed the peace march and refused to allow foreign delegations, Lambrakis defiantly continued the march alone, widening the attention of international peace movements towards Greece. His murder in May 1963 garnered even more attention.Footnote 39 Lambrakis developed into a martyr of peace and dissent against the Cold War in the West and became celebrated as an advocate of a peace movement that would be independent of both Cold War camps.Footnote 40 However, communist peace movements also instrumentalised his death: Lambrakis became at the same time a symbol of peace and anti-fascism in the East.Footnote 41 The World Peace Council named a medal after him that was awarded to ‘all who fight for liberation and peace’.Footnote 42
Next to peace there was another and less obvious issue that inspired campaigns over Greece: decolonisation and anti-colonial movements in the Third World. Indeed, attention to repression in Greece – much like resistance against Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal – piggybacked on anti-colonialism in Europe.Footnote 43 Western European campaigners drew parallels between the plight of Greece and the Third World in terms of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘backwardness’ and spoke about colonisation in Greece by referring to the involvement of the US government and multinationals.Footnote 44 This also provided ammunition to oppose the Karamanlis government’s treaty of association with the EEC in 1961, which was seen as a further step towards the colonisation by West German, and notably US, capital. Not only communist movements but also other observers showcased the poverty and underdevelopment of Greece to illustrate the nefarious impact of Marshall Aid and NATO. They compared it to the plight of the Third World and contrasted it with the degree of development and living standards in the country's socialist neighbours, such as Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.Footnote 45 It was a message that blamed not so much Western Europe as the United States: Greece became a propaganda symbol used to dramatise the argument that not only Greece, but by extension Western Europe, had lost its independence to become a US colony. It became an interface to construct a common identity between Western Europe and its former colonies as victim of US imperialism. This link with the Third World was strengthened by the Greek opposition, which identified with Cuba, Algeria, the murdered Congolese resistance leader Patrice Lumumba and protest against the Vietnam War.Footnote 46 The major bulletins of the Greek exile opposition published in Budapest, Bucharest, Prague and East Berlin and spread among Western European campaigners stimulated this anti-colonial reading. They stressed their solidarity with Third World causes and denounced the anti-Third World policies of the Greek government, which reportedly sent troops to Vietnam and blockaded Cuba.Footnote 47 These efforts to tie in with the broader peace and anti-colonial movements could not, however, alter the fact that campaigns over Greece were overshadowed by more iconic causes in the Third World, most notably the Vietnam War. The electoral victories and the coming to power of the Centre Union Party, led by Georgios Papandreou, in 1963 and 1964 deepened internal polarisation among Greek exiles, while the gradual release of political prisoners limited the appeal of campaigns over Greece by the mid-1960s. Still, communist parties in France, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom continued their campaigns on behalf of Greece by portraying the fate of Greek communist prisoners and the illegality of communist parties in Southern Europe and West Germany as a symbol of the antithesis between human rights and anti-communism.Footnote 48
The Colonels’ Coup of 1967: ‘Patakistan’ and ‘Europe's Vietnam’
On 21 April 1967 a group of right-wing Greek army officers led by Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos staged a coup in Greece to prevent a potential leftist victory in the approaching May elections that had been called by King Constantine. This so-called ‘colonels’ regime’ launched harshly repressive policies as part of its project to save Greek democracy from communism: it declared a state of emergency, made all political parties illegal and imprisoned thousands of opponents.Footnote 49 Abroad, the news of the colonels’ coup immediately sparked a groundswell of protests and inspired local and international solidarity campaigns in defence of ‘democracy’ in Greece. In Western Europe trade union movements, as well as political parties of the left and centre, condemned the repression of the opposition and the deportations to ‘concentration camps’. Campaigns focused on the international isolation of the regime, advocating the country's removal from the Council of Europe, NATO and the European Economic Community – as well as calling for a boycott of tourism to Greece. Partly, this mobilisation drew on the networks that had been formed in previous campaigns. Communist parties and associated peace and solidarity groups were quick to start a series of campaigns on behalf of the victims of the repression. The international movement for a general amnesty for Greek political prisoners and exiles had, in cooperation with the French Communist Party, staged a conference in Paris to protest the lenient sentences given to Lambraki's murderers just days before the coup, and now launched campaigns against the junta.Footnote 50 In the United Kingdom, the League for Democracy in Greece, established during the Greek civil war and close to the British Communist Party, became central in British campaigns against the coup, while the Belgian solidarity committee, established in 1967, drew on a Belgian Aid Committee for a Democratic Greece that had been founded in the late 1940s to provide relief for children during the civil war.Footnote 51
Moreover, a broad range of new groups also expressed solidarity with Greece. The Greek crisis resonated powerfully among the student contestation and ‘new left’ movements of the 1960s, due to the alleged US involvement in the Greek coup and the ambiguous and sometimes openly supportive policy pursued by some Western European governments. In France, students were for instance keen to equate Charles De Gaulle with the Greek general Stylianos Pattakos – together with Papadopoulos one of the main leaders of the new regime.Footnote 52 Inspired by the foundation of a unitary liberation movement called the Patriotic Anti-dictatorship Front (Patriotiko Antidiktatoriko Metopo; PAM) in Greece and the thousands of people who took to the streets for the funeral of the former prime minister Georgios Papandreou in November 1968, Rudi Dutschke and other radical leftist youth leaders projected their hopes on the outbreak of an armed guerrilla after the example of Vietnam, and touted Greece as ‘Europe's Vietnam’.Footnote 53 Campaigns benefited from the presence of Greek students and migrants, who became integrated in a network of new exile structures that were set up after 1967. Following the coup, outlawed opposition parties and exiles restructured themselves in Western Europe and started to play a prominent role in campaigns – along with the existing exile organisations in Eastern Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany became a particular hotspot for many leftist opposition members to reorganise and hosted various political exile organisations, such as the Socialist Democratic Union and the Centre Union Party. This was to a large extent rooted in the presence of about two hundred thousand Greek migrant workers, which stimulated the German Federation of Trade Unions (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund; DGB) to adopt a high profile. On May Day 1967 Greek and Spanish migrant workers led some tens of thousands trade unionists in protest marches against the junta, with slogans that related the events in Greece to Nazism and compared the plight of the Greek population with the martyrdom of German citizens under Hitler.Footnote 54 Prior to 1967, social democratic interest in Greece had been limited, as the Greek social democratic movement was weakened under the restrictions of the Greek government, and domestic opposition was – just like its Portuguese and Spanish counterparts – believed to be dominated by communists. After 1967 social democratic parties declared their support for the Greek opposition in overthrowing the dictatorship, participated in campaigns to release ‘Marxist’ prisoners and sent parliamentarians to protest in front of Greek embassies.Footnote 55 The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) lodged complaints against the Greek junta at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and appealed to the EEC and the Council of Europe to cut off relations with Greece. In part this strong reaction was prompted by embarrassment due to its Greek affiliate having collaborated with the junta, but anti-communism was also invoked. The Socialist International and notably West German social democrats developed close ties with the exiled leadership of the Centre Union Party and the Socialist Democratic Union. Both were keen to stress their non-communist profile by criticising the Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes for continuing their relations with Greece and their lack of concrete solidarity.Footnote 56 Such an East–West dimension was also evident in the declarations of the Socialist International president Bruno Pittermann. He presented the strong social democratic condemnation of the fascist regime in Greece and its inhumane repression of ‘communist beasts’ as a corollary of campaigns on behalf of human rights in the one-party states of Eastern Europe.Footnote 57
Rather than bringing West and East into opposition, however, the crisis in Greece allowed both to come together. It was not with Eastern Europe but with the Third World that the Greek junta became associated. In their speeches, social democratic trade unions and politicians proclaimed that the coup had transformed Greece into a ‘South American banana republic’ and an ‘African development country’.Footnote 58 This interpretation was a dominant narrative in the European leftist media, which labelled post-1967 Greece in terms that came close to Michel Tatu's description of Greece as ‘Patakistan’.Footnote 59 Greek exiles also supported this link with the Third World. During his visit to London in November 1967, KKE secretary general Kostas Koligiannis connected the plight of Greece to US military involvement in the Middle East and most notably in Cyprus.Footnote 60 More importantly, solidarity with Greece became an issue for cooperation between social democrats and communist movements in common campaigns against fascism. At the level of the ILO, the ICFTU together with the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions and the communist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) lodged complaints against the Greek regime.Footnote 61 At an international conference on solidarity with Greece in November 1967 in the French town of Epinay-sur-Seine, socialist and communist delegates from the United States, Canada, Australia, the Scandinavian countries and Western Europe gathered side by side with anti-dictatorship committees set up by Greek exiles. They staged campaigns to exclude the junta from the Council of Europe and the Common Market.Footnote 62 The conference was welcomed by the social democratic mayor and communist vice mayor of the town. It led to the publication of declarations by released political prisoners who compared the deportations to concentrations camps in Greece to the deportation of Jews during the German occupation. The conference also launched the idea of a worldwide campaign that would unite East and West against the fascist junta.Footnote 63 In many countries national solidarity committees united communists, social democrats and Christian democrats. Even the British Labour Party became more open to cooperation with the previously proscribed communist-linked League for Democracy in Greece in campaigns against the Greek regime.Footnote 64
East–West contacts played a critical role in campaigns. Communist movements and governments in Eastern Europe staged campaigns over Greece at the national and international level – and could benefit from the presence of Greek exile organisations in Prague, Budapest, East Berlin and Bucharest. Czechoslovak and Polish members took the initiative at the level of the Inter-Parliamentary Union to condemn the new regime.Footnote 65 In November 1967 a Soviet Committee for Solidarity with Greek Democrats was established in Moscow, next to similar committees in other Eastern European countries.Footnote 66 In January 1968 the Belgian communist activist Isabelle Blume – president of the World Peace Council – headed a delegation to Greece. She inquired about imprisoned members of the Greek peace movement, established contacts with Amnesty International and held a meeting with general Pattakos to advocate the release of prisoners.Footnote 67 The campaign achieved the liberation of forty-nine female and thirty-seven male prisoners.Footnote 68 The trial of the Greek ‘freedom singer’ Mikis Theodorakis in Athens prompted demonstrations and campaigns by peace committees in countries such as Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia.Footnote 69 From an Eastern European perspective, however, solidarity with a cause that contested the East–West division which placed Greece in the Western Bloc was a touchy issue against the backdrop of the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ pursued by Eastern European regimes. However, communist campaigns over Greece were not so much a matter of ‘shaming the West’, but above all about presenting both communism and Europe as victims of the Greek crisis.
Communist campaigns emphasised the connection between Greece and the Third World, both in imagined and real terms. Delegations of Greek exile organisations became prominent guests at international meetings of Third World solidarity and most notably of anti-Vietnam War campaigns staged by international organisations such as the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the WFTU. During the 1968 World Youth Festival in Sofia, Greek delegates were brought together with Vietnamese representatives.Footnote 70 In Eastern Europe protest demonstrations against what were dubbed the ‘black colonels’ were explicitly modelled upon the example of anti-Vietnam War campaigns. In East Germany, for instance, the tours of the Theodorakis ensemble and those of South Vietnamese artists were interlinked.Footnote 71 The connection between the Vietnam War and Greece was not limited to communist campaigns but also became pronounced in broader networks that protested against the Colonels’ regime. Melina Mercouri and other icons of the Greek resistance spoke passionately about the US-backed junta in terms of a ‘colonisation’ of Greece, and during the Russell Tribunal against the Vietnam War, Jean-Paul Sartre compared the rural and underdeveloped situation in Greece with Vietnam.Footnote 72 In international communist campaigns, Greece served to empower the argument that the plight of the Third World paralleled the economic and political decline of Western Europe. This message tied in with growing anti-Americanism in Western Europe and was similar to that of the bestseller Le Défi Américain by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber – who would in 1970 be heralded as the liberator of Mikis Theodorakis. Financed by East Germany, Greek artists such as Melina Mercouri and the Theodorakis Ensemble created a transnational protest culture. Greek exiles crossed the borders of the Iron Curtain and travelled from East Berlin and Prague to London, Brussels and Geneva.Footnote 73 In Geneva, the WFTU and Eastern European diplomats participated in human rights campaigns together with Western socialists, trade unionists and solidarity groups.Footnote 74
The focus on the Third World could not, however, conceal internal tensions and contradictions within communist campaigns on behalf of Greece. Western European communist parties and their delegations to international conferences quickly became aware of the limits of Soviet support: they noted how Soviet diplomats took a low profile in discussions about Greece at international conferences and how Sergei Smirnov – president of the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with the Greek Democrats – ‘barely open[ed] his mouth’ during encounters.Footnote 75 They were struck by the absence of representatives from Eastern European countries beyond East Germany, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union in the international campaigns they staged, and were also concerned by contacts between the new regime in Athens and Moscow.Footnote 76 The most fierce criticism, however, emerged from Greek exiles. In October and November 1967 the exiled Centre Union Party, endorsed by communists and other oppositionists united in the Patriotic Anti-Dictatorial Front inside Greece, attacked the Soviet and Eastern European regimes for continuing diplomatic and economic relationship with the regime in Athens.Footnote 77 These debates about Soviet foreign policy added to longstanding intra-party tensions about ideology and strategy within the KKE, which were exacerbated by blame-laying for the 1967 coup and the arrival of new exiles. Following a meeting of the Central Committee in Budapest in February 1968, KKE witnessed a split between an ‘exterior’ section loyal to Moscow and a reformist ‘interior’ party, which headquartered in East Berlin and Bucharest respectively.Footnote 78 This polarisation translated itself in campaigns against the Greek junta. The French Communist Party, for instance, leant towards the KKE Exterior, whereas Spanish, Italian, Yugoslav, Rumanian and Swedish communists supported the Interior. In June 1968 an international conference in Geneva organised by the Greek anti-dictatorship committees was overshadowed by these interior Greek tensions and led some Western European solidarity groups to shift focus to ‘humanitarian’ aid through the International Red Cross and independent relief funds.Footnote 79 This was less a criticism of communism than the search to overcome internal Greek divisions, however, and humanitarian campaigns remained dependent on information drawn from Eastern European exile committees.Footnote 80 Debates about the relationship with Eastern Europe would reach their zenith in August 1968, when the Warsaw Pact crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the cause of Eastern European dissidents made its entry in campaigns over Greece.
From Prague 1968 back to Athens 1967?
The Prague crisis of August 1968 made a deep impact on the Greek opposition and anti-junta campaigners in Europe. Against the backdrop of the split in the Greek Communist Party, the Warsaw Pact intervention offered factions a means to legitimise themselves. Whereas the KKE Exterior, headed by Kostas Koligiannis, celebrated the Warsaw Pact intervention as the start of the ‘liberation of Greece’, the KKE Interior, as well as Greek social-democratic exiles in the West, were quick to identify with the Czechoslovak opposition.Footnote 81 They published solidarity declarations on behalf of the Czechoslovak victims reportedly coming from Greek prisons and started to tout their country as the ‘Czechoslovakia of the West’.Footnote 82 The Prague crisis not only projected these divergent Greek reactions into international headlines but also had a disruptive impact on international campaigns.Footnote 83 It undermined the activities of the Greek anti-dictatorship committees and many solidarity groups, which had since 1967 engaged in common campaigns against fascism and relied on contacts with Greek exile organisations located in Eastern Europe.Footnote 84 What made the impact of the Prague crisis even deeper was the fact that Czechoslovakia had hosted an important share of Greek refugees after the end of the Greek civil war, estimated at approximately 13,000 in the early 1950s.Footnote 85 Some of them sympathised with the Dubček reforms and were now subject to repression by the authorities.Footnote 86 One of the most famous of them was the historian Ilios Yannakakis – who, as a member of the Communist Party, found refuge in Czechoslovakia after the civil war, fled the country after the events of 1968 and eventually settled in Paris, where he became a vocal intellectual troubadour of anti-communism and anti-totalitarian campaigns on behalf of dissidents from Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries.Footnote 87 In other countries the events of 1968 also inspired campaigns that welded together the Prague and Greek crises. In Belgium, for instance, socialist politicians and activists who condemned the Prague invasion withdrew their collaboration with the communist-led Greece solidarity committee and began linking resistance against the Greek regime to solidarity with dissidents in Eastern Europe.Footnote 88 Greece and Eastern European dissidents were also brought together in campaigns by Amnesty International and by the international writers’ association PEN, which organised a Defence Committee for Soviet and Greek writers in Prison.Footnote 89
One of the most important links between Greece and Czechoslovakia was drawn by the Greek socialist exile Andreas Papandreou, who upon his release from Greece tried to bring the Greek ‘patriotic’ opposition together beyond ideological and party cleavages in the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleytherotiko Kinima; PAK). He ultimately developed into one of the international figureheads of anti-junta opposition.Footnote 90 Headquartered in Stockholm and funded by the Swedish social democrats, PAK developed into one of the most active opposition movements in the West, cooperating with PAM and enlisting icons of the Greek resistance in Europe, such as Melina Mercouri and Mikis Theodorakis.Footnote 91 In the first half of 1968 Papandreou had reached out to exiles of KKE-Interior – an alliance that sparked scepticism among Greek and Western European social democrats and fuelled attacks by apologists of the junta.Footnote 92 From this perspective, the Prague crisis came at an opportune moment to secure social democratic support for Papandreou's endeavour towards a ‘new socialism’ and ‘third way’ for Greece. During the events of August 1968 Papandreou found himself at the meeting of the Socialist International in Copenhagen, where he immediately sympathised with the victims of the Warsaw Pact invasion and drew extensive links between the events in Prague and Greece.Footnote 93 Over the next months Papandreou continued to align himself in the media and other publications with the Czechoslovak opposition.Footnote 94 He compared the crushing of Dubček's reforms to the ‘abortion’ of the growing democratisation and national sovereignty in Greece after the electoral victory of his father's Centre Union Party by the Greek monarchy and by the 1967 coup.Footnote 95 Accordingly, the common roots of both crises were found in superpower involvement resulting from the Cold War, which hampered national self-determination, empowered military and secret services and created what Papandreou dubbed a ‘cumulative totalitarianism’. By this he meant that ‘a victory of totalitarianism in the West [i.e. Greece 1967] had the tendency to create a similar development in the East’.Footnote 96
Despite such connections the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 widened rather than narrowed the distance between campaigns over Greece and those on behalf of human rights in Eastern Europe. For one thing, it showed the strength of the alliance with the Soviet camp and the predominance of anti-Americanism among important parts of the Greek opposition. In Paris, Antonis Brillakis, a leading member of the newly formed KKE Interior and PAM, which allied to Papandreou's PAK, regretted the invasion of the Warsaw Pact.Footnote 97 This, however, did not imply solidarity with the Czechoslovak opposition.Footnote 98 In addition to stressing the Greek left's continued friendship with the Soviet camp, Brillakis’ public declarations were explicitly spurred by fear that the events in Prague might provide ammunition for a further intensification of anti-communist repression by the junta. Papandreou, for his part, instrumentalised the Prague crisis to call for more sanctions aimed to isolate Greece internationally but was strikingly mild on criticism of the Soviet Union, and even called for a normalisation policy towards Eastern Europe.Footnote 99 Indeed, the lesson that the majority of the Greek opposition drew from the Prague crisis was anything but conducive to staging solidarity with East European dissidents. By contrast, it emphasised the need for East–West détente to solve the Greek crisis. Although a number of social democratic Greek exiles saw in the opprobrium drawn from the Prague crisis an opportunity to profile Western European social democracy as the main alternative for transition in Greece, the events in Prague above all shaped a sense of urgency around the need for East–West cooperation, among both Western European social movements and Greek oppositionists.Footnote 100 Greek oppositionists overwhelmingly drew inspiration from the apparently more successful models of solidarity and revolution in the Third World.Footnote 101 Campaigns over Greece became – similar to those on behalf of Portugal and Spain – increasingly intertwined with and modelled upon those in the Third World. After the Prague Spring Papandreou's PAK and other Greek exile organisations in both the West and East appeared in public fora together with representatives of the South-Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the African National Congress (ANC), and were keen to profess their solidarity with national liberation movements across the Third World.Footnote 102 As the next section will reveal, this connection with both the Third World and East–West détente stimulated not only international campaigns on behalf of Greece in the first half of the 1970s but also a stronger Eastern European interest in the cause of Greece and the further integration of campaigns in East–West networks.
The Failure of an Anti-Totalitarian Struggle in the 1970s
Critically, the Prague crisis strengthened communist interest in human rights campaigns over Greece. Partly, this was because human rights violations in Greece became a tool to direct attention away from controversies surrounding the suppression of the Prague Spring. Symbolically, Czechoslovak delegates from the Prague headquartered WFTU submitted to the ILO complaints about the trade union situation and human rights in Greece.Footnote 103 Additionally, representatives of the Greek Communist Party were given the floor at public commemorative events in Czechoslovakia. Their paeans to ‘the fraternal internationalist assistance which the five socialist countries extended to the Communist Party and working people of Czechoslovakia in order to maintain socialist gains against an overt counter-revolutionary offensive of anti-socialist elements backed by international imperialist reaction’ were published in international propaganda, and were an attempt to undermine efforts to link together the issues of Greece with the plight of Eastern European dissidents.Footnote 104 Yet, what mattered the most from an international perspective was the potential to integrate campaigns over human rights in Greece into campaigns over East–West cooperation. After 1968 communist peace movements became key venues for international campaigns against human rights violations in Greece.Footnote 105 In July 1969 the World Peace Council staged a large-scale international conference of solidarity with Greece in Helsinki – in cooperation with the Central Council of the anti-dictatorship committees in East Berlin and the Central Committee of Greek Political Refugees in Budapest.Footnote 106 The event attracted delegations from seventy-five anti-dictatorship committees as well as representatives from socialist and communist parties, human rights NGOs and communist and non-communist international organisations to stage common campaigns on behalf of political prisoners and the Greek opposition.Footnote 107 Some months later, in December 1969, communist peace movements and anti-dictatorship committees widely publicised an appeal for the release of Mikis Theodorakis. This was launched by the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with the Greek Democrats and supported by the composers Dimitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.Footnote 108 In 1970 the Soviet Union welcomed the recently released Theodorakis and his family under the glare of international media attention.Footnote 109 The activities of the Soviet committee dramatically increased from late 1968 onward. The committee strengthened its relations with national committees in the West to intensify East–West cooperation in international campaigns against the junta. It received, for instance, Hans Göran Franck, president of the Swedish Committee for Democracy in Greece, as well as a delegation of the French national solidarity committee.Footnote 110
Over the next months and years, Eastern European diplomacy – most notably of the Soviet Union and East Germany – sponsored a series of international meetings and conferences in Western European locales such as Modena, Stockholm and Paris to campaign on behalf of torture, political prisoners and human rights in Greece. Solidarity committees, Greek exiles and human rights groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain participated in the series.Footnote 111 It mobilised a number of iconic figures from West and East, including the French socialist leader François Mitterand the Polish musician Tadeusz Wojciech Maklakiewicz, and received ample media coverage. The Soviet committee issued a monthly bulletin in Russian, Greek, French, English and, from July 1972 onward, German. The bulletin was distributed among European solidarity groups and Greek anti-dictatorship committees, and it sponsored the release of documentary and feature films about the struggle of the Greek democrats.Footnote 112
These initiatives might seem paradoxical. As mentioned earlier Greek exiles diverged on Soviet support. East German intelligence was well aware of the public declarations of Mikis Theodorakis in April 1970, in which he distanced himself openly from the Soviet Union in the presence of French communists, François Mitterand and Melina Mercouri. He then appealed to both ‘Greek communism’ and the return of democracy and rights ‘like in the West’.Footnote 113 Critics of the Soviet Union found ammunition in the expanding diplomatic and commercial relations between Eastern European regimes and the Greek junta from 1969 onward.Footnote 114 In Western Europe, Greek exile groups criticised this Greek–Soviet détente – and it stimulated some of them to profile themselves as ‘eurocommunists’.Footnote 115 Whereas cooperation with countries such as Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, as well as Balkan détente, was for the Greek junta a means to challenge the threat of isolation in the West after its forced withdrawal from the Council of Europe, communist parties defended this Soviet policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ as a means of fostering the return to democracy in Southern Europe. Indeed, Greek and Portuguese communist parties touted Soviet détente towards the dictatorships as a critical means to realise transition, as it undermined the logics of the Cold War that legitimised ‘fascism’ in Southern Europe.Footnote 116 The issue of Greece also became part of a broader concern with the Mediterranean region, where the United States and NATO expanded and reorganised their military bases in the late 1960s in reaction to the Prague crisis and the instability and political changes in the Arab World. Developments such as the renewal of the Spanish–American agreement concerning the US naval base at Rota and the expansion of NATO naval bases across the Mediterranean shifted the epicentre of the Cold War to the region. Communist peace movements turned their attention from the Vietnam War to the need for stability in Southern Europe and the Middle East, which they presented ‘as a crucial element for European security’.Footnote 117
Greek, Spanish and Portuguese oppositionists made their entry in international public campaigns on European security and cooperation that international communist movements – mainly at the initiative of East Germany and the Soviet Union – launched from the late 1960s onward. These campaigns involved – along with Eastern European committees – non-communist peace movements from Western Europe.Footnote 118 The campaigns were headed by the Belgian canon and Pax Christi leader Raymond Goor and brought together representatives from peace movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain in large-scale conferences and public campaigns. They mobilised European ‘public opinion’ on pan-European concerns and themes, such as the Vietnam War, human rights, environmental issues and economic development. They also had to prepare the grounds for the 1973 intergovernmental conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would lead to the Helsinki Agreements.Footnote 119 During a first ‘World Public Opinion Conference on European Security and Cooperation’ in January 1972 in Brussels, and before an audience of representatives from twenty-seven countries, delegates of the two Greek communist parties, EDA, PAM and the Lambrakis Youth took the floor with the Spanish and Portuguese delegations. They declared the fascist regimes in Southern Europe to be obstacles for peace and security in the Mediterranean and argued for the participation of these countries in the Helsinki negotiations. This, they asserted, would help ‘undermine their anti-communist nature and force them to accept the principles [of Helsinki], and would reduce NATO assistance’.Footnote 120 Two months later, in March 1972, the French Communist Party and the Swedish activist Franck hosted an international conference for the abolition of the Greek dictatorship in Paris, with delegations drawn from France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Canada and Belgium, and also involving international organisations such as Amnesty International, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the World Peace Council.Footnote 121 Greek oppositionists, social democrats and communists also united behind the vision that the problem and solution of the plight of Greece were Cold War-related, and that ‘the existing division of blocs is strongly supporting the existing Fascist regimes in Spain, Greece and Portugal’.Footnote 122 In November 1972, and as a sequel to the Helsinki world conference of 1969, a second world conference of Greek anti-dictatorship committees convened in Brussels, attended by social democrats, Christian trade unionists and Eastern European peace committees.Footnote 123 The World Peace Council ‘Lambrakis’ medal was awarded to the East German Greece Solidarity Committee and the Prague-headquartered International Organisation of Journalists for their role in campaigning on behalf of Greek prisoners.Footnote 124
The sustained nature and the variety of organisations involved in these communist-led campaigns stood out against the dwindling international interest in Greece at the beginning of the 1970s, when the junta's relationship with the United States cooled down and the regime cloaked itself in a normalisation and liberalisation policy. The Socialist International's committee on Greece, established in 1969, was a failure: its operations were crippled by Western European members’ apathy and by continuing debates about the most suitable Greek partners for social democratic support.Footnote 125 This failure frustrated not only members at the local and national level but also the Greek opposition – which was annoyed by the normalisation policies pursued by Western European governments.Footnote 126 Andreas Papandreou – who in the late 1960s applied for access to the Socialist International – now became a fierce critic of Western European social democracy and focused his attention on closer collaboration with communists and the Third World.Footnote 127 Even if they were critical of the relations between the socialist states and the junta, the majority of Greek oppositionists’ belief in East–West détente ‘from below’ focused their participation on the ‘peoples’ campaigns’ for European cooperation and security. Critically, the appeal of communist campaigns was also due to access to information on the Greek situation they provided to the wider human rights movement. This is illustrated by the participation of Amnesty International delegations in these campaigns: while avoiding direct collaboration with exile movements and boycotted by the Greek government, Amnesty International relied to an important extent on information and documentation concerning political prisoners, torture and other human rights violations drawn from these campaigns as well as Greek exile committees in Eastern Europe.Footnote 128
The involvement of Amnesty International, social democrats and Christian movements in these campaigns is paradoxical since it were these movements that cultivated the idea of an ‘anti-totalitarian’ struggle against fascism in Southern Europe and communism in Eastern Europe. The World Confederation of Labour, which grouped Christian democratic trade unions, for instance, joined its Greek representatives with exiles from countries such as Poland and Ukraine, while Western European socialists denouncing the Greek regime supported Czechoslovak dissidents.Footnote 129 Eastern European dissidents, for their part, attempted in the early 1970s to link their cause to resistance against the ‘fascist’ dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal.Footnote 130 Their embrace of an anti-totalitarian struggle hinged on efforts to make inroads into the Western left, and to counter the currents of Ostpolitik and East–West cooperation that gained traction in broad circles among the European left.Footnote 131 Since the late 1960s Eastern European émigré groups faced increasing difficulties in keeping their position at the level of international social democratic movements, which even banned them from their organisations in order not to jeopardise relations with Eastern Europe.Footnote 132 By connecting to the opposition in Southern Europe, dissidents aimed to ‘hijack’ communist solidarity with the Southern European opposition. They also sought to dramatise their mission against the backdrop of détente and normalisation policies pursued by West European governments towards Eastern Europe. In addition to the trope of resistance against Franco, leading Eastern European exiles also drew links between the ‘black colonels’ in Greece and Eastern European regimes. During the 1970s, for instance, the Czechoslovak dissident and Rome-based exile Jiři Pelikán regularly made references to Greece in international campaigns on behalf of human rights in Eastern Europe. Pelikán and other Czechoslovak exiles in the United Kingdom participated together with Melina Mercouri in a campaign against NATO and the Warsaw Pact, staged by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1970.Footnote 133 Pelikán – a former president of the International Union of Students – claimed that his engagement in communist campaigns on behalf of Greece, Spain and Portugal had been a critical inspiration for his struggle for democracy in Eastern Europe and was keen to profess his solidarity with Greek, Spanish and Portuguese oppositionists.Footnote 134 Other Eastern European dissidents (such as Jacek Kuroń and the communist youth reform movements in Hungary) also turned official campaigns against the Greek junta into venues for pressuring their governments on human rights.Footnote 135
However, the majority of Greek exiles balked at anti-totalitarian comparisons between the Greek junta and Eastern European regimes, as such comparisons tended to understate the repressive nature of the junta. Contacts with dissidents could jeopardise their relations with the Soviet Bloc and exile organisations in Eastern Europe. In contrast to Eastern European dissidents, Greek oppositionists – much like their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts – were able to link their campaigns to iconic movements in the Third World. After the overthrow of President Allende in Chile in September 1973, campaigns over Greece became closely interrelated with solidarity campaigns on behalf of the Chilean opposition.Footnote 136 Chilean exiles were keen to link their fight against fascism in Chile with the plight of Southern Europe. When the Chilean Communist Party leader Volodia Teitelboim addressed the audience of an international Helsinki conference on Chile staged by the World Peace Council in September 1973, he declared his country to be another Greece, and blamed the United States for being the common orchestrator of fascist regimes overthrowing democracy.Footnote 137 During the World Congress of Peace Forces in Moscow in October 1973, Greek representatives illustrated the development of common campaigns with the Chilean opposition, while simultaneously professing their solidarity with the Arab world and Palestine.Footnote 138 Andreas Papandreou joined Hortensia and Beatriz Allende in public campaigns on behalf of Chile in West Germany.Footnote 139 Likewise, Brazilian exiles showcased campaigns over Greece as models to inspire European campaigns against torture in the early 1970s.Footnote 140 This connection between Latin American and Southern European fascism also became potent among the Western European left – for whom the international groundswell against Pinochet offered a means to advocate tougher measures from Western European governments towards Southern European dictatorships.Footnote 141 By and large, international campaigns over Greece, as well as the Greek opposition, remained wedded to the belief in East–West détente and an alliance with the Third World.Footnote 142
This focus was further strengthened after the fall of the military junta over the crisis in Cyprus in 1974, and Konstantinos Karamanlis's New Democracy Party's electoral victory over the left. Rapprochement towards Eastern Europe remained a symbolic issue on the agenda of the newly recreated political parties of the left. Détente was key to solving the issue of the return of Greek exiles from Eastern Europe and tied in with continuing protest against NATO and anti-Americanism in Greek society.Footnote 143 Strikingly, it was the socialist Andreas Papandreou – who in 1968 had been quick to profess his sympathy with the Czechoslovak opposition – who turned Greece into a venue for East–West détente after his access to power in 1981 and cultivated the connections with state socialist regimes.Footnote 144 In Greece, the enemy was not on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but in the West, namely Turkey. In the 1980s Papandreou was one of the first political leaders from the West to breach the diplomatic isolation of the Jaruzelski regime. His PASOK government was highly critical of and even condemned the Polish independent trade union Solidarność, the most iconic dissident movement of the Cold War.Footnote 145
Conclusion
Ever since the fall of the military regime in 1974, and against the backdrop of the country's integration in the European Community from the mid-1970s onwards, European campaigns over human rights and democracy in Greece have been integrated in an anti-totalitarian narrative that has cherished the connections with resistance against communism in Eastern Europe and with Western European democracy. This association was cultivated from various quarters. In 1978 the Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis received the Charlemagne Prize, which was subsequently awarded to iconic Eastern European dissidents, such as Václav Havel, Bronisław Geremek and György Konrád.Footnote 146 1968 icons of solidarity with Greece, such as Melina Mercouri and George Moustaki, were embraced by the new left, which in the 1970s started to identify with Eastern European dissidents. In its 2009 resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism, the European parliament connected the experiences and memories of ‘fascist’ regimes in Southern Europe with those of communism in Eastern Europe.Footnote 147 So far, relevant historiography has largely supported this anti-totalitarian narrative, both through its focus on the new left and liberal NGOs – most notably Amnesty International – as well as through its limited understanding of communist campaigns, which have been reduced to inefficient propaganda tools of the Soviet camp.Footnote 148
Adopting an East–West perspective, this article has cut through this narrative on several points. It has revealed that this anti-totalitarian struggle was to a large extent an interpretation mainly borne of hindsight, which has neglected or obscured important ideas and networks that fuelled European campaigns over Greece prior to the transition in the mid-1970s. For one thing, European campaigns on behalf of human rights and democracy in Greece built on East–West networks, in which communist organisations, which have so far remained on the margins of human rights history, have played a critical role. Communist campaigns over Greece were not simply a matter of ‘blaming’ or ‘shaming’ the West for supporting the dictatorship, as it has often been argued. Campaigns staged by communist parties both in the West and within Eastern European regimes were inspired, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the politics of détente and rapprochement towards Western Europe. Against the backdrop of international crises in the Mediterranean and the Third World, they turned the plight of Greece into a symbol for the need for peace and cooperation between East and West. International organisations such as the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Democratic Youth were sites where campaigns over Greece globalised in real and imagined terms and became connected to causes in the Third World – such as the Vietnam War and solidarity with the defeated Chilean left in the early 1970s. In addition, these connections with the Third World also call for a measure of scepticism towards the idea that campaigns over Greece were above all inspired by the idea of a ‘return to Europe’. Campaigns over human rights in Greece became, already in the early 1960s, connected to models in the Third World and framed in an anti-colonial narrative that was critical of the European institutions and social democracy. The Greek junta was not so much compared with communist regimes in Eastern Europe but rather seen – even among liberal observers – as something that originated not in Europe but in the Third World.Footnote 149 This, in turn, helps to understand why in the 1970s oppositionists from countries such as Brazil and Chile were so eager to adopt strategies drawn from campaigns over Greece as they sought to gain support from European social movements: it allowed them to ‘Europeanise’ their struggle by erecting a bridge between the fascism and US imperialism simultaneously at work in Latin America and Europe. By contrast, connections with Eastern European dissidents in campaigns over Greece were marginal and more imagined than real. Communist campaigns on behalf of human rights and democracy in Greece may well have inadvertently nurtured Eastern European dissidents’ interest in solidarity with the Greek opposition as a symbol to pressure their own governments to live up to their pledges and rhetoric on human rights and democracy. Yet, their efforts to construct a common movement and to overcome official communist campaigns over Greece largely failed. Criticism of the Soviet Union and its allies was not only unwelcome for the larger part of the Greek opposition but was also overshadowed by the anti-communist repression of the Greek junta, which turned communism into a victim, and which empowered the belief in the role of East–West détente as a crucial means to realise the return to democracy and human rights in Greece.
