INTRODUCTION

Eleftherios Venizelos' vision of state, politics and society was by no means constrained by nineteenth-century conceptions of laisser-faire liberalism. He was fully aware that the state, were it to accomplish its national mission, had to be active and effective, undertaking a wide range of initiatives and responsibilities and pursuing policies that extended into many fields of national life. Such a state required, however, the rational and efficient organisation of its institutions. Understanding this is crucial in our effort to reconstruct an internally coherent constitutional philosophy out of his positions on various issues and problems. But a constitutional philosophy depends on the consistent endorsement of certain political principles, as much as it relies on a sensitive and insightful perception of political realities.

Eleftherios Venizelos was not an ideologue, but he certainly was a man of ideas. As N. Alivizatos has shown, Venizelos' constitutional programme was marked by three constant priorities: the rationalisation of the parliamentary system, the guarantee of the non-abusive exercise of individual liberties under the constitution, and the facilitation of the interventionist role of the state in the economy. This article follows Alivizatos' analysis, but it adopts a slightly different and more abstract formulation of the statesman's fixed constitutional ideals. Accordingly, popular sovereignty, the rule of law and effective government were the three pillars of Venizelos' constitutional edifice. Depending on the exigencies of the time, he did on occasion compromise these principles, but he never abandoned them.

Anyone who writes about Eleftherios Venizelos has to confront the controversial nature of his character and reputation. Judgements of him by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations, by both Greeks and foreigners, have varied from hero-worship to anathema. But time has had its effect. It is not so difficult now to appreciate the greatness and force of Venizelos while acknowledging his limitations and his mistakes.

I shall describe Venizelos' diplomacy and foreign policy, and assess his achievement in the crucial phase of his career which stretched from his assumption of office in Greece in 1910 to the turning point in Greek foreign policy marked by the Treaty of Lausanne.

I shall argue that, though briefly attracted after the Young Turk revolution by the idea of co-existence of the Greek and other Christian minorities with Muslims, in a modernised, multinational Ottoman Empire, he soon developed a foreign policy based on the nationalist premises of the Great Idea. He pursued this by means of internal reform and alliances with the liberal Western powers, until circumstances destroyed it in fire and bloodshed in 1922. This foreign policy was consistent with Venizelos' vision of a modernised, European Greece. The dominant influence of the Great Powers in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans, though it sometimes entailed humiliation for Greece, justified Venizelos' willing dependence on them.

To form a comprehensive picture of Venizelos' relations with the church, we must begin our investigation of the subject in his birthplace, Crete, for his view of the church was shaped by his personal experience of the stance and activities of the Orthodox Church in Crete. The Church of Crete naturally played its part in the crisis in relations between Venizelos and Prince George, high commissioner of Crete, and in the division that followed - a reflection in miniature of the future breach between Venizelos and King Constantine.

In Crete, the demographic situation was clearer than in other regions of the Ottoman Empire. The more numerous Christians (about 202,000) and the minority Muslim community (about 72,000 according to the 1891 census) became involved in armed clashes during the nineteenth century, a phenomenon rare in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1669, the cultural identity of the Orthodox population had been preserved by the Church of Crete, acting under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Church of Crete played a role of decisive importance in the shaping of events in Crete under Ottoman rule.

It was against this historical and geographical background that Venizelos defined his relationship with the church and clarified his attitude to it through his collaboration with members of the hierarchy. The church's activity in Crete was to define for Venizelos a policy to which he later steadfastly adhered. The Venizelist faction that emerged in the bosom of the church included eminent prelates with whom Venizelos had closely collaborated.

For many years, following the bankruptcy of Greece in December 1893 and the disgraceful defeat of the Greek army during a short campaign against the Ottoman forces in Thessaly in April 1897, Greece underwent a period of prolonged international isolation and domestic stagnation. National expansionist aspirations, while continuing to be the principal concern of politicians, remained unfulfilled, whereas social and financial problems accumulated. All the main issues stemmed from the impasse of the traditional Great Idea (Megali Idea). A military solution of Greek expansionist aspirations was a utopian vision unless the country could meet the financial burden of increasing its strength by means of a costly military and naval reorganisation. Successive Greek governments had pursued several ineffective policies, which had all led to increased financial burdens and repeated national humiliation. The military, junior officers in particular, were disillusioned and restless. Some sought a solution by joining the ongoing struggle of Greek bands in Macedonia, while others tried to advance their career at home. Meanwhile, Crete had become a powder keg in the Eastern Mediterranean. The young Cretan state was balancing precariously between the vestiges of Ottoman sovereignty and full Greek statehood. Whether in order to further their political aims or in order to embarrass their opponents in power in Chania, often encouraged by Athens, impatient Cretan politicians clamoured for enosis, union of their autonomous island with Greece.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of primary and secondary education during the Venizelos era. For the greater part of the period under review, vocational education was essentially non-existent as a structural part of the system. As for the tertiary level, the Venizelos governments attempted two major legislative interventions: one at the very beginning (1911) of the period and another at the very end (1932). The main axis of both was the power relations between the government and the professorial establishment (in July 1931 a law had been passed which established the post of a government delegate in universities). During the years that intervened, many related matters were discussed, dominant among them being those concerning the living, schooling and study conditions of students. However, all this did not directly affect (nor did it lead to different interpretations of) the factors which, on other levels, shaped and expressed educational policy in each period. Important to future developments and to the linking of the system to goals of national prestige and economic development were the founding of the University of Thessaloniki (1925-6), the granting of university status to the Polytechnic School (1929) and to the School of Fine Arts (1930), as well as the earlier (1920) founding of two post-secondary institutions (the Agronomy School and the Commercial School) which later evolved into universities.

Venizelos was an intensely public man, consumed by politics. By his own admission he had no personal life, he only lived for politics, which he understood as a service to his country. Yet this pervading political commitment, the intense politicisation of life at the expense of personal feeling and motivation, could by no stretch of the imagination be equated with the attitude and mentality of latter-day populist politicians, who appear similarly consumed by politics, but lack Venizelos' moral understanding of the character of public life. Venizelos was not evincing a twentieth-century posture of the public man; rather he could be seen to be carrying on a nineteenth-century tradition of statesmanship. With a host of great nineteenth-century political leaders he also shared another characteristic of European statesmanship, the immersion of the public personality in historical culture, understood as a kind of training-ground of responsible political action and decision. Incidentally, this had been the understanding of the purposes of their task by many nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historians as well. The understanding of history as a reading of the past detached from the commitments of the present had to wait for the critique of the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ in order to come into its own.

The clearest evidence of this orientation of Venizelos' intellectual interests comes from the composition of his library, which, despite its dramatic adventures survives in large part to provide the modern scholar with clues and hypotheses. The collection is made up of many categories of books, including a remarkable section of modern European literature, mostly books of French literary works which apparently belonged to Madame Venizelos, who was responsible for the removal of the library from their residence in Athens to the family home in Chania following her husband’s death.

The 1967 military dictatorship in Greece came as a surprise to all foreign observers who considered the country part of a Western family of democratic regimes. The event generated a belated interest in the study of Greek civil-military relations and scholarly research sought to identify the precursors of 21 April 1967. The Venizelist coup which backed the break-away Thessaloniki government of 1916 was probably the first of a series that politicised the officer corps and introduced the armed forces to military conspiracies.

The role of the military throughout the nineteenth century was of a different nature. The first mission of the regular army and its officer corps in post-independence Greece was to consolidate the authority of the centralised state and its institutions. While accomplishing that task officers also embraced the ideology of Greece's expansion and were engaged in the irredentist pursuits of the Greek kingdom. Throughout the nineteenth century the military rarely challenged civilian supremacy in state policy. When they did enter the political discourse in the twentieth century, officers were initially united in their protest against the shortcomings of the crown and its supporters but were later subordinated to liberal or royalist agendas rather than acting as a corporate body. The only organised attempt against civilian authorities that conformed to the pattern of a corporate military conspiracy, namely the coup of 1935 against the government of Panagis Tsaldaris, was undermined by clientele networks and personal rivalries and failed miserably.

The idea of this book originated in a conversation I had several years ago at a Bilderberg meeting in Scotland with Margaret MacMillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Margaret, a great scholar of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, was keenly aware of the role played by Eleftherios Venizelos in the meetings that redrew the political map of Europe and expressed an interest in reading more about him and his policies. I promised to send her books in English to satisfy her curiosity, which I understood had also to do with the close personal friendship between Venizelos and her great grandfather David Lloyd George.

When I returned to Greece I called a close friend, Paschalis Kitromilides, Professor of Political Science at the University of Athens and asked him to suggest some works on Venizelos in English. He chuckled on the phone and told me that the latest book in English on Venizelos had been published by our Cypriot compatriot Doros Alastos as far back as 1942. I was both slightly shocked and amused by the revelation. This gave me the idea that under the aegis of the A. G. Leventis Foundation a new book presenting a profile of Venizelos as leader, statesman and reformer of Greek society could be published. For this undertaking I thought there was no one better than Professor Kitromilides himself, a well-established and respected authority on modern Greek history and politics. I therefore asked him to organise the project in his capacity as Director of the Institute for Neohellenic Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. The present book is the result of his strenuous effort to co-ordinate a group of distinguished authorities on Venizelos in the community of scholars on Greece.

Venizelos departed from the Greek political scene as he had entered it: in the wake of a military coup. Unlike the other great statesman of twentieth-century Greece, Constantine Karamanlis, who did everything in his power to abstain from activities that called into question constitutional legality, Venizelos more than once acted under the conviction that political requirement must occasionally be allowed to prevail over legitimate government. Unlike Karamanlis also, who prepared for himself the place in history he thought appropriate for a great statesman, Venizelos did not appear to care much about how posterity would judge his actions. From the point of view of respect for established institutions, then, Venizelos belonged to a set of new men, like Camilo di Cavour and Otto von Bismarck, who believed that their nation's interest justified all means, including revolution against legitimate authority. Like Karamanlis, however, he was neither a convinced republican nor a staunch supporter of the monarchy; both were prepared to support either the monarchy or the republic as long as the hereditary or the elected head of state did not seriously question their definition of the national interest, perhaps because both had little faith in the capacity of either regime to function properly without a strong man, in a country lacking either a strong monarchical or republican tradition.

Eleftherios Venizelos did not link his name with the economy, yet it was the economy that was largely responsible for his downfall. It is history's irony, in his case, that he played a part in the emergence of a new world which, in the end, annulled him. He came to power with an ambitious reform policy, which included transforming the watchman state into the welfare state, a transformation that was already in progress in the developed countries. However, the abandonment of liberalism and the preponderance of state intervention in the economy, as well as the deflection towards autocratic means of dealing with social relations, were not necessarily part of the original plan. Venizelos was led empirically in this direction, without theoretical groundwork, which is perhaps why it is particularly interesting to explore the mechanisms that brought about this shift, which is, moreover, characteristic of European history in the inter-war period.

Eleftherios Venizelos' economic ‘training’ was that which secondary education and legal studies were able to provide at the time he was growing up, as well as what he gleaned from practical involvement with his family's business. We know that he was taught commercial courses at high school, and while in the law school of the University of Athens, where he studied from 1881 until 1887, he must have attended lectures in political economy by the ‘father of economic science in Greece’, Ioannis Soutzos. His spell of service in his father's firm was rather brief: he ran it himself from 1883 to 1885, after the death of his father Kyriakos, but finally sold it in order to dedicate himself to his studies and to his career as a lawyer.

The island of Crete was the last Greek region to be subjugated by the Ottoman Turks, falling after a long and bloody war that lasted from 1645 to 1669. Following the example of mainland Greece, the island rose against Ottoman domination in 1821 but, despite some early successes, the struggle made little or no progress for three years. No major urban centre was captured by the insurgents, who were restricted to the possession of two forts of limited importance - those of Kisamos and Gramvousa. The presence of a solid Muslim population - almost half the population were Tourkokritikoi (i.e. Turco-Cretans), most of whom sided with the sultan - was certainly one of the reasons for this situation. Another factor in this was the isolation of the island, on account of its distance from the main theatre of the revolution, to overcome which, ‘special commissioners’, unacquainted with local conditions and characteristics, were sent from Greece. Finally, the lack of a fleet of any size accounts for the Cretans' failure to counter the steady arrival of Ottoman reinforcements. With the aid of the Egyptians, who landed on Crete in 1822 and 1823, long before Ibrahim Pasha's intervention in the Peloponnese, the uprising was quickly restricted to the western provinces, where it smouldered until it was finally extinguished.