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The concept that the Balkans are the door of the East to the West is not new. However, it gained some new dynamic around the Greek crisis and the fact that six years after its eruption the country is still meandering between the old, which is unwilling to go away, and the new, the coming of which is not wanted by everyone.

Similarly - as a country that is in continuous transition from East to West, is how the professor of political science at Yale University, Stathis Kalyvas, describes Greece in his latest book entitled, Modern Greece: What everyone needs to know.

In it, Kalyvas scrutinises the history of the modern Greek state since the beginning of the 1821 Greek War of Independence until today, dividing it into seven rounds. "What characterises all these rounds is that they set out with a vision, which is mighty and hard to achieve. Down the road, Greece begs for help overseas and ends up receiving it. And the result of all this transition is pushing the country one step up," explains Kalyvas during the presentation of his book in the Athens Pleiades bookstore.

Photo: Pleiades bookshop

But why do Greek crises always ultimately make it to the international stage and trigger interventions by the international community? "The answer is complex, but is primarily linked to the fact that the country's endeavours have always been associated with major international bets," says the author.

In the preface, he states that the aims Greece was targeting during its development were linked to the organisation of society, the building up of its statehood, the democratization of its political institutions and the acceleration of its economy. "They are all endeavours, which stand at the core of modernisation as a concept. Their interpretation shows the big challenges of grafting Western institutions onto countries that pursued neither the historical, nor the cultural development of the West. At the same time it offers a brief description of the challenges faced by the developing world's attempts to reach modernity. From this perspective, I believe that Greece's history is a matter of both special and wider interest."

The gist of the seven rounds was presented in a fascinating dialogue between the author and the writer Petros Tatsopoulos. The first round begins with the creation of the modern Greek state in 1828 and runs through the polemics between rebels, who participated in the War of Independence, and the Greek nationals who got educated in Western countries – and were trying to borrow the European model of governance.

"Lord Byron, who was tasked to deliver the loan granted to Greece, had to decide who was worth giving the money to. And the looks of the two sides in this stand-off speak volumes: on the one side were the moustachioed ones, and on the other were the bespectacled ones," says Kalyvas. After much hesitation, Byron gave the cash to the Western graduates, but it wasn't ultimately used for the modernisation of the downtrodden and impoverished former Ottoman province.

The second round began when the loan was spent, but Greece was still struggling to adopt the standards of a Western country. The same period is connected with the emergence of Greek irredentism embodied in the Big Idea (Megali Idea). The already established state was far from meeting even the minimum standards, and its relations with the West were still fraught, despite the West's tendency to admire the achievements of ancient Greece.

Photo: Pleiades bookshop

The third round marks the first genuine attempt by Greece to join the West. Under the rule of Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis, the country raised large loans and invested heavily in its infrastructure. Greece lost the 1897 war and 1 million of its folk were compelled to emigrate mostly to the United States to seek a livelihood and a better life.

The sovereign bankruptcy, which went down in history with the famous "Unfortunately, we went bust" announced by Tricoupis in parliament, however, laid the foundations of the subsequent economic revival. It is worth noting that this period saw the rebuilding of the entire state machine. Both Kalyvas and Tatsopoulos emphasised that the Eleftherios Venizelos, known as a reformer who steered Greece up to the standards of the modern bourgeois state, had largely found the foundation  for his subsequent endeavours already in place.

Venizelos' era, known for his reform agenda, is placed at the beginning of the fourth round of Greek modern history. But the political situation was often shaken by military movements, dictatorships and, of course, the two world wars.

During WW2 Greece became the first front of the Cold War. Although the view enshrined in historical literature is that the Greek civil war began in 1946, Tatsopoulos pointed out that in fact it happened way back, in 1943, during the German occupation. "Members of the Greek Liberation Front – the military arm of the Greek Communist Party – conducted purges against their political opponents since then. The subsequent Treaty of Varkiza, signed in 1945, was breached by both the communists, many of whom did not surrender their weapons, and the authorities. But the important thing to note is that the Civil War only lasted as short as it did because of the conflict between Tito and Stalin. Had it not occurred, and had the Greek Communists not rallied openly behind Stalin, the conflict could have lingered even into the 1960s," said Petros Tatsopoulos.