Last March in Delphi, I was talking with the leader of the conservative New Democracy party, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, four months before he was elected prime minister of Greece. We both emphatically agreed that Greece had just about everything to offer: magnificent and haunting scenery; a blessed prospect on the Mediterranean; a geostrategic location between East and West, making it a gateway to both Europe and the Middle East; a uni-ethnic population with no real religious or ethnic divides; and a resourceful, inspired ethos. But the big thing Greece has always lacked—we both said—has been strong institutions and reasonably good governance, making it ultimately a weak state: the root cause of why the twentieth century was such a devastatingly disappointing one for the country.
Indeed, I lived seven years as a journalist in Greece in the 1980s, and was an eyewitness to the sordid, coffeehouse politics, spiced by then–Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s leftist Peronist flair, that allowed Greece to squander the benefits of new membership in the European Union (then the European Community) and remain a semi–third world state rather than becoming a first world one of rigid laws, muscular institutions, and credible tax collection.
Twenty-five hundred years of Greek civilization in Asia Minor abruptly came to an end.
Greece’s squalid twentieth-century politics actually goes back all the way to the aftershocks of World War I. Following the Great War and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Greece attempted to annex the western edge of
