executive. It is “State”, yet it also reports to the State. It is, or at least it can and should be, accountable, and it is under administrative and disciplinary control. In short, the police depends upon political choices made by the head of the executive, despite the fact that, as any other institution functioning in a context of relative independence, it has developed a speciic culture and mentality. In any case, if the head of the executive decides to send a powerful message to the police branch, this message may arrive late, or it may be obstructed, or it may even be spoiled to a certain degree, but, at some point, it will certainly reach its destination. For instance, if in Greece today some police oicers are punished and put to jail or are dismissed because, rather than hunting down Nazi criminals, they have been busy making friends with Nazi criminals and hunting down immigrants along with their new friends, one can be sure that many of their colleagues will refrain from doing the same, even if they actually wish they could. At the same time, if the police is trained in a proper way by liberal-democratic standards, results are certain to follow, whether sooner or later. However, in the case of the judiciary, things are more complicated. The reason is that its institutional status within the division of powers, typical of every modern rule-oflaw State, allows the judiciary to enjoy a special degree of independence, which is indispensable in order to be able to perform its functions. The judiciary is a head per se. It is nobody’s branch; it only represents the regime in the widest of senses. The judiciary is one of the three parts of government; indeed, its duty is to provide solutions to the problems of the two other parts. This is its vested right, yet this also creates the most serious diiculties as long as one remarks systematic judgments and views that exceed the liberal-democratic limits of any modern State. Let us, then, reread in a new, somewhat brighter light our rather summary introductory formulation: This is why we do believe that the main issue of this study in Greece today concerns especially the Greek judiciary. This is not to say that the judiciary poses any particular danger to democracy, but that it does reproduce judgments and views that consolidate as the normative horizon (i.e., as the common view of what is just) of the Greek political community a culture that may be convincingly shown to share most features of the ultra-right. As a postlude, a more general remark may be in order. The stinking history of ultraright intrusion into the Greek State has features that point to identiiable Greek particularities, as well as features that fully enter into a wider comparative frame of reference, where Greece is a typical case of transition in southern and southeastern Europe, that is, of the Mediterranean and Balkan legacy, which both form part of the wider European heritage. As Mazower writes, in Dark Continent: “Europe in the 20th century was not the natural home of freedom and democracy, but a frequently nightmarish laboratory for social and political engineering, inventing and reinventing itself through war, revolution and ideological competition”143. In this sense, the Greek ultra-right symptom is nothing but an extreme version of the European symptom. 143. 96 | Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century, Greek trans. K. Kouremenos, Alexandria, Athens, 2001, back-cover. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG