East European Quarterly/Volume 15/Number 1/Reviews

REVIEWS

 

A Short History of Modern Greece. By Richard Clogg. Cambridge University Press, 1979. x. 3 242 pp.

 

Richard Clogg’s monograph constitutes another major addition to the list of single-volume histories of modem Greece. It bears obvious comparison with two other recent volumes, Modern Greece (1968), by John Campbell and Philip Sherrard, and The Story of Modern Greece (1968), by C.M. Woodhouse. Clogg, who holds the lectureship in modern Greek history at King’s College, London, is unusually well prepared to deal with the full range of modern Greek history. He has written numerous articles on Greek political and intellectual history from the Ottoman period down to very recent events when Greece was under the “colonels’ dictatorship.”

The chronological scope of Clogg’s history differs significantly from that of Woodhouse’s, while approximating that found in the Campbell/Sherrard volume. Clogg begines in 1204 with the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade-the 1204 date marking for Clogg a significant transition in the ultimate downfall of Byzantium. Woodhouse, on the other hand, begins the story of “modern” Greece with the reign of the fourth-century Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. Campbell/Sherrard are less concerned with political chronology than Clogg, but begin their account with the development of Greek national consciousness, which they find in late Byzantium.

The subsequent line of chronological division in Clogg’s Short History bear out his primary political interest. His treatment of Ottoman rule and the “struggle for emancipation” is followed by a single chapter surveying political and diplomatic developments from King Othon’s arrival in 1833 to the assassination of King George in 1913. Remaining chapters are divided by the ascendancy of Gen. John Metaxas (1935/36), the close of the Greek civil war (1949), and the fall of the military dictatorship (1974). This attention to political analysis underlines what is a central organizing principle of the work-the evolution of the modern Greek state.

Fit into this central focus on the developing Greek nation-state are subtle secondary themes. Clogg notes the difficulty encountered in the nineteenth century in “trying to graft the forms of constitutional government onto a society whose values and historical experience were alien to such a concept.” In that same context, Clogg notes the growth toward political “maturity” of the Greek state as it had to contend with the heavy influence of the Great Powers in both foreign and domestic affairs. Also, Clogg has clearly utilized recent works by Petropulos, Diamandouros and Legg in describing the phenomenon of political clientelism and the influence of patronage networks in Greek domestic politics. These subordinate themes help to set his larger political focus into a solid analytical framework.

The result is a significant political history of modern Greece in which the reader can also count on accurate and balanced accounts of such issues as the language question, Venizelos republicanism, the Metaxas regime, the divisive Civil War, the colonels’ dictatorship, and the Cyprus issue. An up-to-date bibliography of English language literature is appended.

Because of Clogg’s appreciation for the internal dynamics of Greek politics from the Ottoman period to the present, his account is an improvement over Woodhouse’s more diplomacy-oriented Story of Modern Greece. The Clogg account also reflects the considerable development in modern Greek historiography since the 1960s. However, as Clogg recognizes in his preface, there are significant aspects of Greek history which are underrepresented in this more narrowly political history. Students wishing an introduction to Greek Orthodoxy, modern Greek literature, and Greek social and economic history will still want to use the Campbell/Sherrard volume which is arranged topically and not along lines of political chronology.

One feature unique to the Clogg account is its availability in an attractive paper edition, appropriate for classroom surveys of Balkan history.

 

Stephen K. Batalden
Arizona State University

 

Ethnicity and the U.S. Foreign Policy. Edited by Abdul Aziz Said. New York: F.A. Praeger, 1977. pp. vii, 180. $17.50.

 

This interesting symposium has a preface by the editor which advances theoretical generalizations about the ethnic factor in U.S. foreign policy and international politics. It has a section titled “The End of Geopolitics and the Rise of Ethnicity” (pp. 3–6) which is an extremely weak premise and whose assumption is nearly always discarded in the subsequent six chapters of Eastern European, Greeks, Greeks, Jews, Blacks and ethnic politics in Congress. From our point of view, the most interesting is the coverage of “The Ties That Bind: Immigrant Influence on U.S. Policy Toward Eastern Europe,” by Stephen A. Garrett (pp. 59–82), whose main weakness is that it fails to note quite a lot of previous studies of this field. The whole publication is an indictment of investigation that needs to be done rather than a survey of what has been quite often successfully written up in this field.

 

Joseph S. Roucek
City University of New York

 

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in Retrospect. Edited by Béla K. Király & Paul Jónás. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Pp. x, 157. $11.00.

 

Following very closely the appearance of N.F. Dreisziger, Ed., The Hungarian Revolution Twenty Years After, (Hungarian Readers’ Service, Ottawa, Canada, 1976), this symposium is also focused on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, viewing from the standpoint of the passing of two decades. It contains valuable contributions of individuals who participated in the revolution together with the scholars from Europe and the U.S. Especially valuable are the sections dealing with the lack of reactions to this upheaval by Hungary’s neighbors (Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) and the United States.

 

Joseph S. Roucek
City University of New York

 

Czechoslovakia’s Role in Soviet Strategy. By Josef Kalvoda. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978. Pp. ix, 381. $9.75.

 

There has been quite an upsurge in recent years in the articles and books on Czechoslovakia. Kalvoda’s contribution is one of the best. It presents a political history of that hapless country, and is an excellent analysis of the relations by prominent Czech politicians with Moscow as well as a portrait of several democratic wishful thinkers who served the communists as useful dudes. One of the best chapters covers the disastrous role played by Beneš in Czechoslovak history. Quite valuable are the extensive bibliography and footnotes. The work gives us a lot of new light into pertinent events and a new evaluation and comprehension of most of them.

 

Joseph S. Roucek
City University of New York

 

Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968; Anatomy of a Decision. By Jiri Valenta, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. P. xii, 208.

 

Published eleven years after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, Jiri Valenta’s book joins the now staggering literature on the subject. It is an important addition to that larger literature, for it sheds a great deal of light on the murky and sometimes inscrutable process of foreign policymaking in the Kremlin. Professor Valenta does not exaggerate the lessons to be learned from this single, and perhaps exceptional, case study of Soviet decisionmaking. However, the process he has described leading up to the decision to intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia suggests a number of generalizable features in the way the Soviet elite resolves major foreign policy problems.

Valenta postulates a bureaucratic politics paradigm to explain Soviet decisionmaking. The model is derived from western paradigms developed by Graham Allison and Morton Halperin, among others, but Valenta has carefully noted the distinctive features of the Soviet political system. He stresses the supremacy of the Politburo, standing “at the center of the decisionmaking process” (p. 5), and he also analyzes the effect of other powerful organizations in the USSR—the Central Committee and its various departments, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the branches of the armed services, and the KGB. The Politburo itself makes key foreign policy decisions, Valenta affirms, but these decisions are made “in the face of signals and pressures from several powerful Soviet bureaucracies” . . . (p. 158), each of which pursues its separate organizational responsibilities and interests.

In the case of the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, Valenta has sought to identify the “coalitions” of support for intervention and nonintervention in a policy debate that went on for at least six months prior to the actual decision to intervene. Strong pressures in favor of putting an end to the Dubček regime’s reformism were exerted by several important Soviet bureaucracies. Officials in the ideological affairs bureaucracy, for example, were alarmed at the impact of Czechoslovak reformist ideas on Soviet dissidents and pressured the party leadership for action that would short-circuit that influence. The Ukrainian party organization, fearful of political instability in its own republic, was another source of pro-intervention pressure. Many KGB officials favored intervention, because they believed their intelligence-gathering activities in Czechoslovakia were jeopardized by the openness of political discussion there. Interestingly, Valenta suggests that the military elites were by no means united behind a pro-intervention position, though the dominant tendency among them was in favor of military action.

Less clearly explained are the forces and motivations behind the “coalition skeptical of intervention, Valenta includes among them the high officials of the Central Committee’s International Department, primarily Boris Ponomarev and V.V. Zagladin, as well as several sections of the Foreign Ministry. Premier Alexei Kosygin and foreign ideological affairs chief Mikhail Suslov are identified as noninterventionists. The author makes it clear that the noninterventionists were not at all proponents of the Czechoslovak reforms, but they strongly urged moderation in their government’s efforts to deal with the Dubček regime.

Professor Valenta has adroitly sifted through much of the available evidence bearing upon the Soviet decision, piecing together many separate strands from previously published works and adding data from Croch and Soviet primary sources as well. He has conducted many useful interviews with knowledgeable principals. As a result of his thoroughness, we now have a more well-integrated picture of the Soviet decision than we had before.

Especially revealing is the discussion of the role played by Soviet information-gathering agencies. Soviet intelligence agencies, according to Valenta, suffer from some of the same shortcomings exhibited by their American counterparts. They produce reports that are sometimes accurate, sometimes mistaken. They filter and distort information, and reports are often slanted for the purpose of influencing the policy judgments of the leaders who must rely on the incoming intelligence. This aspect of the Soviet decision remains only incompletely elucidated, but the book under review has taken us very close to an understanding this crucial question.

The book is a marvel of conciseness and shows few weak spots. One can note an occasional tendency to repetition. (For example, we are told three times that the timing of the intervention was chosen so as to preempt the Slovak party congress, scheduled to meet on August 26.) Some readers might feel uneasy about the Kremlinological approach of the author, which—like all good Kremlinology—requires him to read between the lines to determine the motives of specific Soviet actors at any given time. Still, Valenta’s argument is persuasive, and his use of the bureaucratic politics paradigm gives a most en lightening structure to the evidence he has brought to bear.

Finally, Professor Valenta’s study should put to rest the notion somettimes heard that the various Soviet and Warsaw Pact political manoeuverings of July–August 1968, the negotiations and conferences, were empty exercises meant only to distract attention from the “real” Soviet intentions, Valenta’s accounts of the Warsaw, Cierna, and Bratislava meetings, based on numerous firsthand reports, strongly argue that these negotiations were not purely tactical or deceptive manoeuvers. Rather, they represented genuine attempts to resolve the crisis in bloc relations through means short of military force. The author agrees with Zdeněk Mlynař that the decision to intervene was taken by the Soviet Politburo on August 17-three days before the actual occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries. The change in policy between the time of the Bratislava Declaration (August 3) and the Politburo decision can be explained by the mounting pressures from those bureaucratic elites who feared the continuing effect of Czechoslovak reformism on their organizational interests. According to Valenta, these pressures caused a shift in the balance of power within the Politburo, quite probably involving the conversion of General Secretary Brezhnev from a fence-sitter to a pro-interventionist. The pro-interventionists at last gained the upper hand, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

David W. Paul
University of Washington