42 Xenakis S., Cheliotis L. Greek non-compliance with the European human rights regime: An historical perspective Greece’s persistent recalcitrance in complying with the ECHR appears paradoxical given the country’s long and continuing history of submission to repeated and sustained foreign intervention in its political and legal arrangements. Since achieving independence from 400 years of Ottoman rule in the early 1800s, illustrations of the extensiveness of the country’s experience of Great Power involvement have ranged from political parties being named after foreign states, to its secret service being established by a foreign power (see further [28]). Relatedly, Greece’s economic marginality has been equally deeply engrained; notwithstanding notable national economic growth in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is indicative that the country has defaulted on its external loans seven times since attaining statehood. Indeed, the most recent default also resulted in an extraordinary transfer of control of Greece’s governance to foreign institutions to whom Greece was indebted (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; see further [29]). Within the context of the European Union, meanwhile, although membership has grown over recent decades to include states with weaker economies, Greece has maintained rates of poverty and inequality that have stood stubbornly amongst the highest in the region. For a state thus very much of the global semi-periphery (see further [30]), the incentives and pressures relating to membership of an elite community such as the CoE, and the adoption of associated rules and norms, have been particularly acute. Indeed, relatively high levels of support for the pursuit of European integration amongst the Greek public and political and intellectual elites have been driven by the perceived imperative of redressing the country’s undue marginality in the international arena (see further [31]). From early on, the relationship between Greece and the European human rights regime was not one that would fit the expectations of Risse and Sikkink’s constructivist ‘spiral’ model of a slow process of human rights criticisms first meeting official resistance and then eventual concessions. Nor, during the period in which Greece joined the Council of Europe (1949), signed the ECHR (1950), and incorporated the Convention into Greek law (1953), was the European human rights regime so developed and powerful that it could be credited with having induced Greek adherence by dint of its success. Rather, as we elaborate below, Greece’s actions at this time were entirely driven by strategic objectives (both domestic and international) and its relationship to the human rights regime was wholly superficial. The year that Greece joined the Council of Europe saw the conclusion of a four-year civil war in the country, which itself had followed a five-year right-wing military dictatorship (1936–41). Decades of illiberal rule were to continue against the broader backdrop of the Cold War: emergency anticommunist legislation that originated during the Greek Civil War was only formally abolished in 1962, and its harsh provisions were all too quickly revived by the country’s military junta of 1967–74 (see further [32]). One interpretation of Greece’s attitude towards the ECHR at this juncture is that ‘the Greek authorities neither examined nor understood the obvious inconsistency of a considerable part of domestic legislation with the ECHR as an obstacle to its incorporation. […] Accession to the CoE and the ECHR was aimed at concealing rule of law deficits and securing their participation in the Western alliance’ ([26]: 452, 454). According to this logic, the substance of the ECHR was irrelevant to the concerns of