090107 UE Cold War at the Borders: Civil War, Reconstruction and Dictatorship in Greece, 1945-1974 (2023W)

This course aims to provide a detailed analysis of Greece’s position and involvement in the Cold War era since the end of WWII (1945) and until the fall of the military dictatorship (1974) through the "pericentric lens" of Cold War Studies (T. Smith 2000). The participants will be familiarized with interdisciplinary questions on the topic and will be able to distinguish between different subject-specific perspectives.

Did the Greek Civil War mark the beginning of the Cold War at a European - or even a global - level? What were the turning points in the modern post-war history of Greece, and how were they interconnected with events on a European scale? Was the Greek military dictatorship isolated internationally, as has been often postulated, or did it manage to establish itself? Similar questions will be discussed in the class. Furthermore, this course will investigate the characteristics, origins, course, and consequences of this turbulent period of Greek history and its immediate interconnection on a European level. We will focus on the political and diplomatic nature of Greece’s history, analyzing its domestic and foreign policy, including certain aspects of the Greek West- and Ostpolitik. Students will learn about periodization, actors, systemic characteristics, processes, events, backgrounds, and contexts and gain an understanding of the problems and causes of the Cold War in Greece.

In addition to reading and discussing secondary literature together, in which the approaches to the Cold War are examined from different perspectives, we will also look at the primary sources available to us to reconstruct encounters with actors and stories from historical testimonies of this era.