Dimitrios' World

One of the major symptoms of Greek foreign policy is its chronic inability to be a protagonist beyond its immediate neighbourhoods, i.e. the Balkans, Turkey , and the Mediterranean – in spite of its extensive conscious involvement in the first two regions since the end of the Cold War. Successive Greek governments have used analogous rhetoric and set similar objectives – the need to ‘ Europeanise ’ Greece’s northern and eastern neighbours, the need to see them integrated into the European Union, the need for the wider neighbourhood to become ‘normal’, ‘boring’, ‘regular’. The diplomatic and political energy spent on assuring that the aforementioned comes to pass has been both inexhaustible and exhausting yet results (i.e. change in the desired direction) have been slow almost at snail’s pace. In part, this is due to the inability/unwillingness of the neighbours to completely transform themselves; in part it is due to the inability of the Greek foreign policy machinery to convince n...

The Mediterranean region has always been in the spotlight for some reason or other. The most striking reason is an almost daily reference in the press to developments in the Middle East, President Moammar Qadaffi of Libya occasionally finds himself at centre stage for his peculiar remarks on the state of the world, while Egypt is still seen as a regional power whose authority is being challenged in a variety of ways. Like other regions, the Mediterranean was also severely tested by the consequences of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, both in terms of their impact on the Arab world and through their association with militant Islam and in relation to the rise of neoconservative interventionism aspiring to remake the Greater Middle East which led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Closer to home, the sum total of the aforementioned trends and developments has also had an impact on how the states of Europe, especially through the cumulative expression of th...