Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sia culturally as it is to Europe, by virtue of its Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in turn a
legacy of Byzantium. Greece throughout modern history has been burdened by politic-
al underdevelopment. Whereas the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe were of-
ten of middle-class origins with political liberties as their goal, the Greek independence
movement was a mainly ethnic movement with a religious basis. The Greek people over-
whelmingly sided with Russia in favor of the Serbs and against Europe during the 1999
Kosovo War, even if the Greek government's position was more equivocal. Greece is the
most economically troubled European nation that was not part of the communist zone dur-
ing the Cold War. Greece, going back to antiquity, is where Europe—and by inference the
West—both ends and begins. The war that Herodotus chronicled between Greece and Per-
barely remained in the Western camp at the beginning of the Cold War, owing to its own
civil war between rightists and communists, and the fateful negotiations between Winston
Churchill and Joseph Stalin that ultimately made Greece part of NATO. Greece, as Mac-
kinder writes, lies just outside the Eurasian Heartland and is thus accessible to sea power.
But possession of Greece in some form by a Heartland power (namely Russia) “would
probably carry with it the control of the World-Island.”
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Of course, Russia is not going to be taking control of Greece anytime soon. Yet it is inter-
esting to contemplate what would have happened during the Cold War had the negotiations
between Churchill and Stalin gone differently: imagine how much stronger the Kremlin's
strategic position would have been with Greece inside the communist bloc, endangering
Italy across the Adriatic Sea, to say nothing of the whole eastern Mediterranean and the
Middle East. The Greek financial crisis, so emblematic of Greece's political and economic
underdevelopment, rocked the European Union's currency system beginning in 2010, and
because of the tensions it wrought between northern and southern European countries was
nothing less than the most significant challenge to the European project since the wars of
the Yugoslav secession. As Greece ably demonstrates, Europe remains a truly ambitious
work in progress: one that will be influenced by trends and convulsions from the south and
east in a world reeling from a crisis of room.
