090050 VO Greece and the European crises (2017S)

​Focusing on four major European crises from the 1870s to the 1970s, this course adopts a peripheral viewpoint on the history of contemporary Europe. The making of the Modern Greek on the southeastern edge of the continent offers a highly instructive view to the successive transformations of the Eastern European border, in the lands that lie between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The new balance of power in Europe during the 1870s, after the German and Italian unification and the emergence of Balkan national states, provoked a deep transformation of the Greek national ideology, political system, and state-building process. The Balkan wars of 1912-1913 and the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922 constituted respectively a prologue and a late episode of the Great War of 1914-1918 that marked the end of the continental multiethnic empires. The Greek civil war that unfolded during the 1940s offers a privileged view of the conflicts that shook the prewar social and political order all over the continent and announces the divisions of the Cold War -avant la lettre. Finally, the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy during the international crisis of the 1970s, figures among the events that launched the so-called “third wave of democratization” and a process of successive expansions of the EEC/EU towards the Southern and Eastern periphery of the continent.