[ CHAPTER 1 ] Greece in the European 20th century Dimitris Kousouris This short historical review of the continuities and discontinuities of fascism in Greece has no intent of reducing the causes underlying the current rise of the ultra-right to the Greek “anomalies” of the 20th century. The political dynamic behind the ultra-right today very clearly combines certain historical features with more general developments in the country’s recent European history. The latter include the (re)emergence of neo-fascist trends in European countries ater the 1970s crisis, the challenge to and disempowerment of anti-fascism as a dominant ideology of legitimization of European republics ater the “fall of the Berlin Wall”, and, inally, the international economic crisis since 2008.4 The three dictatorships, two civil wars and six interstate wars that marked the country’s political and constitutional life during the “short 20th century” were also manifestations of the social and political divisions that shook the entire European continent and took on frenzied form especially in those nation-states founded in the geographical space dominated less than a century earlier by the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. The Balkan area during the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods ofers a panorama of the ethnic, national, political and class divisions that composed a long and painful process of transition from (multi-ethnic) empires to a Europe of nation-states. It also ofers a peripheral viewpoint on the successive transformations of Europe’s eastern frontiers in the wider region from the Baltic through the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean.5 The three critical moments of Greek “fascism” are directly related to three major crises that shaped the formation of this frontier. The irst two of these crises took place in the 1910s and the 1940s, and mark the start and end points of what was efectively a second Thirty-Year War (1914-1945): a generalized political and cultural crisis and conlict that signaled the end of old regime structures and elites in Europe.6 From the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 to the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, the constitution of the “deep state” in Greece followed 4. 5. 6. 12 | Cf. Fenner & Weitz 2004. Cf. Diner 2000. Cf. Mayer 1981. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG