Turk-Greek Rapprochement

Amid the clashes occurring around us on several levels (ethnic, religious, national), a hopeful sign is the thaw between Greece and Turkey. Stephen Schwartz notes that Greece's recent elections, in contrast to Spain's, saw the ouster of a Socialist government that for years had antagonized its neighbors and the US. Kostas Karamanlis's New Democracy Party, the center-right victors, promise to liberalize the Greek economy as part of a plan to modernize the country's infrastructure. We too easily forget that, in the post-Cold War world, when the superiority of the free market is clear, most of the reactionaries are on the left. Fanning the flames of hatred toward the Turks helped the outgoing Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) draw closer to radical Arab militants in a Mediterranean version of radical chic, since (as Schwartz points out) Arab Islamists hate the Turks for their tradition of secularism and centuries of Ottoman rule. Many Greeks still smart from that same rule, carried out from the former Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople (Istanbul).

Schwartz's essays concludes: "In the age of terrorism, a rapprochement between Greece, the cradle of democracy, and Turkey, the pioneer of Muslim secularism, is welcome news for the civilized world. It is of course anathema to al-Qaeda." It isn't surprising that the road to warmer relations between these age-old enemies was a democratic one. Modernizing, bourgeois societies have better things to do than nurse historical enmities.