the Hellenic Armed Forces, and he opted out of NATO, in an efort to detonate social discontent and, more importantly, because of the Greek-Turkish conlict in Cyprus. This last move also signaled a change in the army’s disposition, that is, in the long term, shited its ideological orientation towards the “external” enemy and thus limited its aspirations for an “internal role”. Along with all of the above, Karamanlis also won the dispute over the departure of 163 tanks camped in Attica, despite the generals’ objections (led by then Chief of Armed Forces General Bonanos), and put an end to the Greek Military Police, the strongest support of the short-lived Ioannidis junta that had followd on the departure of the original colonels. Finally, Karamanlis reinstated the responsibilities of the political minister of national defence, which the junta had constitutionally conferred on the military chief of armed forces. At the same time the chief dictators of the 21 April 1967 regime were, to their surprise, arrested. The aforementioned attempts to reinstate dictatorship did not end, however. The most important of them was made in February 1975, when a group of army oicers prepared a military movement in Athens, Thessaloniki and Larissa, intending to overthrow Karamanlis’ government, bring Greece back into NATO’s military branch, and release the deposed dictator Dimitris Ioannidis, who had been imprisoned while awaiting trial.78 This infamous “pyjama coup” ended with the arrests of 37 oicers, who, according to then Defence Minister Evangelos Averof, were mere “droplets”: an insigniicant minority of junta-lovers inside an otherwise democratic army. The term “droplets” has become a ixture ever since in the political vocabulary of the Changeover period. It represents the predominant oicial perception about the problem of the iniltration of the Greek State by ultra-right pockets. “Droplets” means that there is indeed a problem, but a small, almost insigniicant one, which, therefore, can be tolerated and considered to be “within the limits”. As long as the issue of Cyprus was still unfolding, or at least was repeatedly claimed and declared still to be pending, the danger posed by the “droplets” was deinitely downplayed, and the military’s dejuntaization remained incomplete. At the same time, however, a reinstatement of the role played by the military before 1974 was simply unrealistic. The main reason was that the crisis of political representation had been resolved, as testiied by Karamanlis’ landslide victory in the irst election ater the reestablishment of democracy. Moreover, mostly because of the fallout from Cyprus, the military could no longer act as the “party” of the powers that be, since it had been disconnected from the immediate strategic, economic and political interests of the Greek bourgeoisie that, in a context of democratic stability, has always had the luxury of other outlets for political representation. There is also another important factor – social radicalism expressed almost on an everyday basis on the streets. This strong popular pressure proved crucial, and succeeded in frustrating whatever schemes there were to bring the country back to the “plaster” years. 78. 66 | Cf. “Evangelos Averof’s ‘droplets’”, Ethnos newspaper, 14 November 2011. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG