GREECE IS | DEMOCRACY 2017

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DEMO C RA C Y

SEPTE M B E R 2 0 1 7

ISSN: 2529-041X

special edition

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ORIGINS

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153 - 175 FEASTS

Ancient democracy may have been different than its modern versions, but it shared many of the strengths and weaknesses that bring us hope and despair in the 21st century.

In Greece’s museums, at its archaeological sites and in the natural landscape, we are surrounded by evocative reminders of the ideals of egalitarianism.

Writers and scholars provide thought-provoking arguments on the issues of inclusion, technology, nationalism, demagoguery, oppression and defiance.

Sharing food, drink and ideas around a convivial table has always been an integral part of Greek society, from ancient symposia to today’s tavernas.

The Endless Blue OF GREECE AND DEMOCRACY

On the evening of September 15th in Kotzia Square, just a stone’s throw from the Acropolis and the Athenian Agora in the city where, 25 centuries ago, democracy was born, National Bank of Greece will join in celebrating the UN-designated International Day of Democracy by bathing its national headquarters in a blue light symbolic of the colors found on the flags of both Greece and the UN. For National Bank of Greece, this is an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment, reflected throughout its corporate social responsibility programs, to the guiding principles of democracy, principles that are at the core of its innovative new Act4Greece initiative. On this night, the light that will shine against the darkness will be the light of hope, of action and of a future made better by the power of the many.

HISTORICAL SYMBOLS CONTEMPORARY ACTIONS

Democracy through Crowdfunding THE POWER OF MANY IN ACTION

A Crowdfunding Program for the Economy & Society For the first time in Greece, an online platform has been created which enables the gathering of resources from the “crowd” – from anyone interested, wherever they may be in the world. The resources are then directed to specific projects undertaken by implementing bodies. The program covers projects falling within 7 action areas: 1) Welfare, Health and Solidarity, 2) Social Economy and Entrepreneurship, 3) Culture and Cultural Entrepreneurship, 4) Young and Innovative Entrepreneurship, 5) Environment and Sustainability, 6) Research, Education and Training, and 7) Sporting Activities.

Donate by clicking on www.act4greece.gr/en strategic partners

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“Time for leaders to listen...” Βy Antonio Guterres T H E U N S E C R E T A R Y - G E N E R A L’ s M E S S A G E T O T H E A T H E N S D E M O C R A C Y F O R U M

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There is a growing and deepening divide among people, as well as between people and the political establishments that exist to represent them. Fear is driving too many decisions.

This is a danger to democracy.

send warm wishes to the Athens Democracy Forum. I commend you for gathering again in the birthplace of democracy to observe this International Day of Democracy, in cooperation with the United Nations Democracy Fund.

Let me also commend the City of Athens for bestowing the Athens Democracy Award this year upon Felipe González, my friend and ally for twenty-five years, and an inspiration to democracy activists around the world.

The International Day of Democracy is an opportunity to recommit to a world defined by the values enshrined in the United Nations Charter: peace, justice, respect, human rights, tolerance and solidarity. Yet, in many societies around the world, there is a crisis of faith.

Globalization and technological progress have lifted many out of poverty, but have also contributed to inequality and instability. There is a growing and deepening divide among people, as well as between people and the political establishments that exist to represent them. Fear is driving too many decisions. This is a danger to democracy.

It is time to reconstruct relations between people and leaders – national and international. It is time for leaders to listen and show that they care about their own people and about the global stability and solidarity on which we all depend. And it is time for the entire international community to address one of its most severe shortcomings: our inability to prevent crises.

To work credibly for prevention, we need to better support countries in their efforts to strengthen their democratic institutions and make their soci-

eties more resilient. In some countries, a dangerous illusion has taken hold that democracy is in contradiction to stability or conflict prevention. Quite the contrary: by destroying democratic institutions, by suppressing civil society, by undermining the rule of law and human rights, authoritarian rule creates conditions for extremist ideologies and terrorist activities to thrive. It prevents societies from developing peaceful channels and effective instruments for the resolution of grievances and other challenges. By the same token, toppling a dictator, or holding elections in a post-conflict situation, does not mean that democracy will flourish by itself. It requires leadership in ensuring that emerging and developing democracies are supported, so that they can succeed. It requires strengthening civil society, empowering women and upholding the rule of law.

These are the conditions that allow democracy, stability and peace to prevail.

On this International Day of Democracy, let us dedicate ourselves to those values enshrined in the United Nations Charter – without double standards, with full commitment, and with full transparency. I thank all of you for coming together to give life to this mission.

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CONTENTS Greece Is - DEMOCRACY, September 2017, Special Edition WELCOME

SYMBOLS

6. Messages. By Giorgos Kaminis, Mayor

72. Traces Of a Glorious Notion.

of Athens; by Annika Savill, Executive Head of the UNDEF; by Achilles

ideas

Conferences, The New York Times

86. Women in Power.

12. Obama’s Speech on Democracy.

20. Timeline.

94. The Future of Nationalism.

24. Generals, Treasurers and Plumbers.

30. Making Athens Great Again.

40. Leader For a Day. 44. Democracy Backfiring.

50. Taxes Are Forever.

56. Aristotle: Surprisingly Modern.

62. The "Republic" of Sparta.

66. Violence: An Inconvenient Truth.

98. A Turkish Tragedy.

114. Filming the EU "Monster"

editor-in-chief Giorgos Tsiros (editor@greece-is.com)

118. The Future of Polling.

122. Democratizing Food.

126. Lies, Tricks and Flattery.

130. Laughing at Power.

134. The Task of the Cartoonist.

144. Watchdog on Duty.

148. The Greek Experience.

Symposia.

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154. A Beginner’s Guide to

Who Eats Whom? Cartoon by Dimitris Hantzopoulos.

Ethnarchou Makariou & 2 Falireos, Athens, 18547, Greece,

102. Fresh Voices.

FEASTS

ON THE C OVER

published by E xe re vnitis - E xplore r S. A .

Tsaltas, Vice President, International

ORIGINS

greece is

160. The Sharing Table.

172. Ode to the Taverna.

commercial director Natassa Bouterakou commercial inquiries Tel. (+30) 210.480.8227 Fax (+30) 210.480.8228 Ε-mails: sales@greece-is.com, emporiko@kathimerini.gr public relations welcome@greece-is.com Greece is - DE MOCR ACY

is a yearly publication, distributed free of charge. It is illegal to reproduce any part of this publication without the written permission of the publisher.

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A LABORATORY OF PLURALISM Βy GIORGOS K AMINIS M A YO R O F A T H E N S

© VANGELIS ZAVOS

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Ensuring that democratic rule does not spiral into demagoguery and populism, that it is shored up against intolerance, extremism and threats to its institutions, is a constant uphill battle.

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n behalf of the city of Athens, I would like to personally welcome you to the fifth consecutive Athens Democracy Forum, an outstanding opportunity for a multifaceted and meaningful discussion on both the major challenges facing democracy today and the conditions that are needed to ensure the prospects of a better future for the citizens of Europe.

Factors such as the oft-unpredictable turbulence in international affairs; the deadly terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe and elsewhere; the protracted economic crisis and growing inequalities in many countries; the humanitarian crisis caused by the refugee exodus; the surge of populism and growing isolationism; the fear of globalization, the multiculturalism – all these issues demand that the discussion about democratic governance remains active, open, productive and without prejudice. Defense of our hard-won democratic rights must be constant, and respect for human rights non-negotiable.

Democracy has a duty to reclaim its credibility and prove the adaptability and functionality of the traditional institutions of political representation.

It must draw clear lines against its enemies. It must inspire the younger generations and strive for their active participation in public discourse and other procedures in the public sphere.

Cooperation, respect for the rules of democracy and a synthesis of opinions are all key to effectively combatting violence, anomie and fanaticism. But the task also requires organized planning, a coherent strategy, innovation, solidarity and vision.

Ensuring that democratic rule does not spiral into demagoguery and populism, that it is shored up against intol-

erance, extremism and threats to its institutions, is a constant uphill battle.

This is something we’ve known since ancient times in Athens, the city that gave birth to democracy. In the aftermath of two world wars, we have seen countries like Spain, Portugal and Greece achieve the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy and the daunting task of safeguarding democratic governance and stability.

Athens itself, despite the economic and social crisis Greece has experienced over the past eight years, is on the path of recovery. By embracing innovation, bolstering civil society, supporting creative forces, elevating culture and tourism into drivers of the economy, and opening itself to the world, the Greek capital has become a laboratory of creativity and pluralism of international note.

As an active participant in the European dialogue (indeed, in the world dialogue) on democracy in the modern age, the City of Athens last year established the Athens Democracy Award, a distinction bestowed on internationally acclaimed and recognized individuals or organizations whose work and moral integrity show them to be consistently and actively involved in the defense of democracy.

The award, which is an intrinsic part of the Athens Democracy Forum, will be presented on September 15, the International Day of Democracy. This year, we will be honoring Spain’s longest-serving prime minister, Felipe González Márquez, whose meaningful and consistent contribution was instrumental in establishing a democratic regime in his country after Franco’s dictatorship, and who has defended the ideals of the European project with dedication and inspiration.

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the power of inclusion Î’y A N N I K A S AV I L L E x ec u t i v e H e a d , The U n i t e d N a t i o n s De m o cr a c y F u n d

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s we gather for the fifth annual Athens Democracy Forum, we look back on yet another remarkable year in the story of democracy – a story that continues to be told by people who struggle for dignity and human rights, for an end to corruption, for a say in their future, for jobs, for justice and a fair share of political power. Their engagement confirms that democracy is yearned for by people around the world, and cannot be exported or imposed from abroad. It must be generated by the will of the people and nurtured by a strong and active civil society. And it requires painstaking work in building and sustaining the rule of law, fostering transparency and accountability, strengthening political participation, and reinvesting in political and economic systems.

Speaking the truth takes two: one to talk, the other to hear. My work with the United Nations Democracy Fund, UNDEF, has brought home to me that a lively and open discussion among men and women sitting under a tree can sometimes do more for participatory democracy than all the government summits and cabinet meetings in the world. When grass-roots activists, community organizers, labor mobilizers and youth and women leaders come

together at their own initiative, all with a stake in the outcome, they will persevere until all sides have a say.

This inclusive discourse must never end. As important, there must be someone in the capital listening. A confident nation gives citizens a role in the development of their country; the most effective, stable and successful democracies are in fact those where a strong civil society works in partnership with the state, while holding it accountable at the same time. This is what creates a virtuous circle of rights and opportunity under the rule of law, underpinned by a vibrant civil society and an enterprising private sector, backed by efficient and accountable state institutions. Social and economic development is more likely to take hold if people are given a genuine say in their own governance and a chance to share in the fruits of progress. Conversely, faced with bleak prospects and unresponsive governments, people will act on their own to reclaim their future.

In other words, democracy is not a spectator sport. And it is more like a marathon than a sprint. It is a long struggle waged by individuals, communities and nations. Let us ensure that all of us can and do play our part to the full.

Social and economic development is more likely to take hold if people are given a genuine say in their own governance and a chance to share in the fruits of progress.

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Defending the Truth Β y A c h i l l e s T s a l ta s V i ce P re s i d e n t , I n t er n a t i o n a l C o n f ere n ce s – T h e Ne w Y o r k T i m e s

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The NYT Athens Democracy Forum’s ambitious mission is to strengthen our ancient system of values and governance and to ensure it continues to be both relevant and beneficial to all.

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s we come together for the fifth annual Athens Democracy Forum, our world has become even more polarized and appears to be teetering on the edge. Events since last year’s edition have made the Forum, and this issue of “Greece Is,” dedicated to democracy, even more critical. Our society stands at a crossroads – do we need a new model of democracy? This is the reason for the promise of this year’s Forum to offer “Solutions for a Changing World.” It is our hope that the debate and opinions expressed in the pages of this magazine and on the Forum’s stage can inspire us to find these solutions and determine the way forward.

The New York Times convenes the Athens Democracy Forum in cooperation with the United Nations, the City of Athens and Kathimerini (our publishing partner in Greece, which generously publishes this magazine), in an effort to bring the International Day of Democracy to life. The aim of the Forum is to create a community with a common mission to empower society through better governance and polity.

And we do this at the ancient Athenian Agora because the lessons of deliberative democracy and civic engagement of ancient times have relevance once again amid today’s crises, hastened by the transformational forces of globalization and technology.

The Forum aspires to recreate the ancient Greek agoras, or public squares, where diverse members of society would meet to trade, network and discuss the important issues of the day.

The New York Times has achieved this by bringing together some of the most distinguished and influential speakers from the worlds of politics, business, academia, journalism and the nonprof-

it sector to identify and respond to the urgent challenges facing liberal democratic governments, institutions and societies.

Among the topics to be tackled include: political discourse in the “posttruth” era; the relevance of multilateral institutions and the need to reform or overhaul them; economic growth as a driver for democratic development; the future of polling and elections; and the role of youth in the democratic process. Through deliberative debate, and a post-event action plan produced with the help of a group of university students from around the world, the Forum will face these pressing issues that affect us all. Its ambitious mission is to strengthen our ancient system of values and governance and to ensure it continues to be both relevant and beneficial to all.

Truth is a core value of The New York Times, one that we have committed to defend even more vigorously in this “post-truth era.” The Athens Democracy Forum is part of this effort. It is an endeavor in which we are joined

by Kathimerini and “Greece Is.’’ Informative, inspirational and occasionally provocative, the views of our speakers as well as the articles you will find in this magazine represent the plurality of views and voices that constitute a healthy, vibrant and engaged democratic civic society - solutions for a changing world, inspired by the legacy of ancient Athens.

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BUILDING A STRONGER SOCIETY On his final trip overseas as president of the United States, in November 2016, Barack Obama visited Athens and gave a historic speech on the enduring values of democracy and the challenges it faces.

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was determined to come to Greece – partly because I’ve heard about the legendary hospitality of the Greek people – your filoxenia. Partly because I had to see the Acropolis and the Parthenon. But also because I came here with gratitude for all that Greece – “this small, great world” – has given to humanity through the ages.

Our hearts have been moved by the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Our minds have been opened by the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Our understanding of the world and our place in it has been expanded by Socrates and Aristotle.

In the United States, we’re especially grateful for the friendship of so many proud Greek-Americans. Greek-Americans have worn the uniform to keep our country free.

Greek-Americans have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to make us more just.

Most of all, we’re indebted to Greece for the most precious of gifts – the truth, the understanding that as individuals of free will, we have the right and the capacity to govern

ourselves. For it was here, 25 centuries ago, in the rocky hills of this city, that a new idea emerged. Demokratia. Kratos – the power, the right to rule – comes from demos – the people. The notion that we are citizens – not servants, but stewards of our society; the concept of citizenship – that we have both rights and responsibilities; the belief in equality before the law – not just for a few, but for the many; not just for the majority, but also the minority. These are all concepts that grew out of this rocky soil.

Athenians also knew that, however noble, ideas alone were not enough. To have an impact, principles must be enshrined in laws, protected by institutions and advanced through civic participation. And so they gathered in a great assembly to debate and decide affairs of state, each citizen with the right to speak, casting their vote with a show of hands, or choosing a pebble – white for yes, black for no. Laws were etched in stone for all to see and abide by. Courts, with citizen jurors, upheld that rule of law.

Politicians weren’t always happy because

Barack Obama on stage at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center on November 16, 2016.

This is an abridged version of the speech he gave there.

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sometimes the vote could be used to ostracize, banish those who democracy is good for the people of the world, but it’s also good did not behave themselves. Αcross the millennia that followed, for our national security. Our democracies show that we’re different views of power and governance have often prevailed. stronger than terrorists, fundamentalists and absolutists who But through all this history, the flame first lit here in Athens can’t tolerate difference, can’t tolerate ideas that vary from their never died. It was ultimately nurtured by a great Enlightenown, who try to change people’s way of life through violence and ment. It was fanned by America’s founders, who declared that would make us betray or shrink from our values. Because our “We, the People” shall rule; that all men are created equal and democracies are inclusive, we’re able to welcome people and refendowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. ugees in need to our countries. And nowhere have we seen that Now, at times, even today, those ideals are challenged. compassion more evident than here in Greece. The Greek peoWe’ve been told that these are Western ideals. We’ve been told ple’s generosity towards refugees arriving on your shores has that some cultures are not inspired the world. equipped for democratic Just as democracies governance and actually are premised on the peaceprefer authoritarian rule. It ful resolution of disagreeis absolutely true that every ments within our societies, country travels its own we also believe that cooppath, every country has its eration and dialogue is the own traditions. But what I best way to address chalalso believe is that the basic lenges between nations. longing to live with digniI would point out that ty, the fundamental desire there is a connection beto have control of our lives tween democracy and sciand our future, and to want ence. The premise of scito be a part of determinence is that we observe and ing the course of our comwe test our hypotheses, our munities and our nations ideas. We base decisions – these yearnings are union facts, not superstition; versal. They burn in every not what our ideology tells human heart. By necessity, us, but rather what we can we work with all countries, observe. And at a time and many of them are not when the globe is shrinkdemocracies. Some of them ing and when, more and are democracies in the more, we’re going to have sense that they have electo take collective action tions, but not democracies to deal with problems like in the sense of actually perclimate change, the presmitting participation and ence of a democratic debate dissent. But our trajectory allows science to flourish as a country has been to and to shape our collective support the efforts of those response. Democracy, like President Obama tours Acropolis with Dr Eleni Banou, director of the who believe in self-governall human institutions, is Ephorate of Antiquities for Athens of the Ministry of Culture. ance, who believe in those imperfect. It can be slow; it ideas that began here so can be frustrating; it can be many years ago. hard; it can be messy. PoliOpen, democratic societies can deliver more prosperity – ticians tend to be unpopular in democracies, regardless of party, because when people are free to think for themselves and share because, by definition, democracies require that you don’t get ideas and discover and create, that’s when innovation is una hundred percent of what you want. It requires compromise. leashed, when economies truly flourish. In contrast to regimes And in a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural society, like the that rule by coercion, democracies are rooted in consent of the United States, democracy can be especially complicated. governed – citizens know that there’s a path for peaceful change, But it is better than the alternatives because it allows us to including the moral force of nonviolence. And that brings a stapeacefully work through our differences and move closer to our bility that so often can facilitate economic growth. ideals. It allows us to test new ideas and it allows us to correct The history of the past two centuries indicates that democour mistakes. Any action by a President, or any result of an elecracies are less likely to fight wars among themselves. So more tion, or any legislation that has been proven flawed can be cor14

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rected through the process of democracy.

The same forces of globalization and technology and integration And throughout our history, it’s how we have come to see that have delivered so much progress and have created so much that all people are created equal – even though, when we were wealth have also revealed deep fault lines. Around the world, infounded, that was not the case. We could work to expand the tegration and closer cooperation, greater trade and commerce, rights that were established in our founding to African-Amerand the internet have all improved the lives of billions of people, icans, and to women, to Americans with disabilities, to Native lifted families from extreme poverty, cured diseases, helped Americans; it’s why all Americans now have the freedom to people live longer, and gave them more access to education and marry the person they love. opportunity than at any time in human history.

And so here, where democracy was born, we affirm once I’ve often said to young people in the United States, if you more the rights and the ideals and the institutions upon which had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not our way of life endures: know ahead of time who freedom of speech and you would be, you’d choose assembly – because true now. Because the world has legitimacy can only come never, collectively, been from the people, who must wealthier, better educated, never be silenced; a free healthier, less violent than it press to expose injustice is today. And a lot of that has and corruption and hold to do with the development leaders accountable; freeof an integrated, global dom of religion – because economy. But trends underwe’re all equal in the eyes way for decades have meant of God; independent judicithat in many countries aries to uphold rule of law and in many communities and human rights; separathere have been enormous tion of powers to limit the disruptions.

Technology reach of any one branch of and automation mean that government; free and fair goods can be produced with elections – because citizens fewer workers. It means must be able to choose their jobs and manufacturing can own leaders, even if your move across borders where candidate doesn’t always wages are lower or rights win. are less protected. And that And that’s why, as hard means that workers and as it can be sometimes, it’s unions oftentimes have less important for young people leverage to bargain for betin particular, who are just ter wages and better benenow becoming involved fits and have more difficulin the lives of their county competing in the global tries, to understand that marketplace. Hardworking progress follows a winding families worry their kids The former US president seen during his private tour of the Acropolis path – sometimes forward, may not be better off than Museum with director Dr Dimitrios Pantermalis. sometimes back. But, as they were because of this long as we retain our faith global competition. in democracy, as long as we What we’ve also seen is retain our faith in the people, as long as we don’t waver from that this global integration is increasing the tendencies towards those central principles that ensure a lively, open debate, then inequality, both between nations and within nations, at an acour future will be okay, because democracy remains the most celerated pace. And when we see people – global elites, wealthy effective form of government ever devised by man. corporations – seemingly living by a different set of rules, It is true, of course, over the last several years that we’ve avoiding taxes, manipulating loopholes, and when the rich and seen democracies faced with serious challenges. And I want the powerful appear to game the system and accumulate vast to mention two that have had an impact here in Greece, have wealth while middle and working-class families struggle to had an impact in the United States, and are having an impact make ends meet, this feeds a profound sense of injustice and a around the world. feeling that our economies are increasingly unfair.

The first involves the paradox of a modern, global economy.

This inequality now constitutes one of the greatest chalG R E E C E IS

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lenges to our economies and to our democracies. An inequality that was once tolerated because people didn’t know how unequal things were now won’t be tolerated because everybody has a cellphone and can see how unequal things are. There’s an awareness that people have in the smallest African village; they can see how people in London or New York are living. The poorest child in any of our countries now has a sense of what other people have that they don’t. So not only is there increasing inequality, but there is also greater awareness of inequality. And that’s a volatile mix for our democracies.

In our countries, in America and in most advanced market economies, we want people to be rewarded for their achievement. We think that people should be rewarded if they come up with a new product or a new service that is popular and helps a lot of people. But when a CEO of a company now makes more money in a single day than a typical worker does in an entire year, when it’s harder for workers to climb their way up the economic ladder, when they see a factory that used to support an entire city or town close down, that fuels the feeling that globalization only benefits those at the top. Rather than a win-win situation, people perceive that if you’re winning, I’m losing, and barriers come up and walls come up.

And in advanced economies, there are at times movements from both the left and the right to put a stop to integration, and to push back against technology, and to try to bring back jobs and industries that have been disappearing for decades. So this impulse to pull back from a globalized world is understandable.

If people feel that they’re losing control of their future, they will push back.

But given the nature of technology, it is my assertion that it’s not possible to cut ourselves off from one another. We now are living in a global supply chain. Our growth comes through innovation and ideas that are crossing borders all the time. The jobs of tomorrow will inevitably be different from the jobs of the past. So we can’t look backwards for answers, we have to look forward.

We cannot sever the connections that have enabled so much progress and so much wealth. For when competition for resources is perceived as zero-sum, we put ourselves on a path to conflict both within countries and between countries. So I firmly believe that the best hope for human progress remains open markets combined with democracy and human rights. But

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I have argued that the current path of globalization demands a course correction. In the years and decades ahead, our countries have to make sure that the benefits of an integrated global economy are more broadly shared by more people, and that the negative impacts are squarely addressed.

And we actually know the path to building more inclusive economies. It’s just we too often don’t have the political will or desire to get it done. We know we need bold policies that spur growth and support jobs. We know that we need to give workers more leverage and better wages, and that, in fact, if you give workers better wages, businesses do better, too, because their customers now have money to spend.

We know that we have to invest more in our people – the education of our young people, the skills and training to compete in the global economy. We have to make sure that it is easy for young people who are eager to learn and eager to work to get the education that they need, the training that they need, without taking on huge amounts of debt.

We know that we have to encourage entrepreneurship so that it’s easier to start a business and easier to do business. We know that we have to strengthen the social compact so that the safety net that is available for people, including quality health care and retirement benefits, is there even if people aren’t working in the same job for 30 years, or 40 years, or 50 years. We have to modernize our infrastructure, which will put people back to work. We have to commit to the science and the research and development that spark new industries.

In our trading relationships, we have to make sure that trade works for us, and not against us. And that means insisting on high standards in all countries to support jobs, strong protections for workers, strong protections for the environment, so that even as we freely trade, people and workers in all countries see the benefits of trade in their own lives, not just benefits for the bottom line of large, multinational corporations.

So economics is something that will be central to preserving our democracies. When our economies don’t work, our democracies become distorted and, in some cases, break down. But this brings me to another pressing challenge that our democracies face – how do we ensure that our diverse, multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious world and our diverse nations uphold both the rights of individuals and a fundamental civic adherence to a common creed that binds us together?

Politicians tend to be unpopular in democracies, regardless of party, because, by definition, democracies require that you don’t get a hundred percent of what you want. They require compromise.

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Democracy is simplest where everybody thinks alike, looks alike, eats the same food, worships the same God. Democracy becomes more difficult when there are people from a variety of backgrounds trying to live together. In our globalized world, with the migration of people and the rapid movement of ideas and cultures and traditions, we see increasingly this blend of forces mixing together in ways that often enrich our societies but also cause tensions.

Faced with this new reality where cultures clash, it’s inevitable that some will seek comfort in nationalism or tribe or ethnicity or sect. In countries that are held together by borders that were drawn by colonial powers, including many countries in the Middle East and in Africa, it can be tempting to fall back on the perceived safety of enclaves and tribal divisions.

In a world of widening inequality, there’s a growing suspicion – or even disdain – for elites and institutions that seem remote from the daily lives of ordinary people. What an irony it is, at a time when we can reach out to people in the most remote corners of the planet, so many citizens feel disconnected from their own governments.

So, just as we have to have an inclusive economic strategy, we have to have an exclusive political and cultural strategy. In all of our capitals, we have to keep making government more efficient and more effective in responding to the daily needs of citizens. Governing institutions, whether in Athens, Brussels, London or Washington, have to be responsive to the concerns of citizens. People have to know that they’re being heard. Here in Europe, even with today’s challenges, I believe that by virtue of the progress it has delivered over the decades – the stability it has provided, the security it’s reinforced – that European integration under the European Union remains one of the great political and economic achievements of human history. And today more than ever, the world needs a Europe that is strong, prosperous and democratic.

But I think all institutions in Europe have to ask themselves: How can we make sure that people within individual countries feel as if their voices are still being heard, that their identities are being affirmed, that the decisions that are being made and that will have a critical impact on their lives are not so remote that they have no ability to impact them?

We have to make clear that governments exist to serve the interest of citizens, and not the other way around. That’s why, both at home and around the world, we have taken steps to fight

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corruption that can rot a society from within.

In closing, our globalized world is passing through a time of profound change. Yes, there is uncertainty and there is unease, and none of us can know the future. History does not move in a straight line. Civil rights in America did not move in a straight line. Democracy in Greece did not move in a straight line. The evolution of a unified Europe certainly has not moved in a straight line. And progress is never a guarantee. Progress has to be earned by every generation. But I believe history gives us hope.

Twenty-five centuries after Athens first pointed the way, 250 years after the beginning of the great American journey, my faith and my confidence, my certainty in our democratic ideals and universal values remain undiminished. I believe more strongly than ever that Dr. King was right when he said that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But it bends towards justice not because it is inevitable, but because we bend it towards justice; not because there are not going to be barriers to achieving justice, but because there will be people, generation after generation, who have the vision and the courage and the will to bend the arc of our lives in the direction of a better future.

In every corner of the world, I have met people who, in their daily lives, demonstrate that, despite differences of race or religion or creed or color, we have the capacity to see each other in ourselves. Like the woman here in Greece who said of the refugees arriving on these shores, “We live under the same sun. We fall in love under the same moon. We are all human – we have to help these people.” Women like that give me hope.

In all of our communities, in all of our countries, I still believe there’s more of what Greeks call filotimo – love and respect and kindness for family and community and country, and a sense that we’re all in this together, with obligations to each other. Because in the end, it is up to us. It’s not somebody else’s job, it’s not somebody else’s responsibility; it’s the citizens of our countries and citizens of the world that must bend that arc of history towards justice.

And that’s what democracy allows us to do. That’s why the most important office in any country is not president or prime minister. The most important title is “citizen.” In this great and imperfect but necessary system of self-government, power and progress will always come from the demos – from “We, the people.” And I’m confident that, as long as we are true to that system of self-government, our futures will be bright.

In the end, it is up to us. It’s not somebody else’s job, it’s not somebody else’s responsibility; it’s the citizens of our countries and citizens of the world that must bend the arc of history towards justice.

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TIMELINE

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FIRST STEPS 462/461 BC

Pericles and Ephialtes bring democratic reforms to Athens: powers of Areopagus Court and archons are transferred to Council of 500 (Boule) and people’s law courts; payment established for members of Boule; Council members now appointed by lot (Marble portrait bust of Pericles, British Museum).

508/507 BC C. 700 BC

Athens joins with the other towns and villages of Attica to form a single political unit, the Athenian city-state, centered around the Acropolis.

Democracy is restored and broadened; a democratic constitution drafted; Cleisthenes’ reforms enacted. Practice of ostracism established, which Pericles later exploits in his rise to power – having his chief rival Cimon ostracized in 461 BC (Ostracon with Cimon’s name, Ancient Agora Museum).

454 BC

Treasury of the Delian League transferred to exclusive Athenian control on the city’s Acropolis (where it was eventually stored in the Parthenon). Henceforth, Athens retains one mina (1/6th of a talent) from each talent of tribute paid by its allies, ostensibly as an offering to Athena, thus signaling another move by Athens toward an imperialistic foreign policy and ensuring greater prosperity at home.

C. 683 BC

An aristocratic republic, ruled by archons (serving one-year terms), becomes fully established in Athens.

594 BC

Solon institutes social and constitutional reforms in Athens (Marble bust of Solon, Roman copy of Greek original from the 4th c. BC, Naples National Archaeological Museum).

451 BC

487 BC

Archons no longer elected, now appointed by lot (Parthenon, north frieze, Block X. A procession of “Thallophoroi” marching or standing and conversing, Acropolis Museum).

561 BC

Peisistratus seizes power in Athens as a “tyrant.”

Athenian citizenship restricted; Pericles elevates status of Athenian women by requiring a citizen to have both a native father and mother. Pay for jurors introduced. Pericles would also “democratize” Athens’ knighthood by offering subsidies to citizens aspiring to be knights but unable on their own to afford the necessary equipment.

(A white ground jug bearing a woman’s figure, made in Athens in the early 5th c. BC, British Museum).

480 BC

Persians overrun the Acropolis only to be later defeated by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis (Painting by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1868).

514 BC

The tyrant Hipparchos, Peisistratus’ youngest son, is slain by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the “Tyrannicides” (Stamnos by the Syriskos Painter, Martin von Wagner Museum, University of Würzburg, Germany).

510 BC

The tyrant Hippias, Peisistratus’ eldest son, is overthrown.

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431 BC

478/477 BC

Athens takes the lead in forming the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city-states, to combat the Persian threat (Delos).

Start of the Peloponnesian War; the year Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration (as transmitted by Thucydides) at the Athenian cemetery, the Kerameikos, in which he states that Athens considers citizens who do not participate in the operation of their government as useless; discussion among citizenry is no stumbling block to action, but an indispensable preliminary to any wise action; democratic Athens described as the “School of Hellas.”

Along an often arduous, twisting path, many ancient milestones mark the early stages of democracy.

BY John Leonard

336 BC

An anti-tyranny law is passed in Athens, allowing the blameless killing of anyone who seeks to become a tyrant or who conspires to establish tyranny. Philip II is assassinated and Alexander the Great assumes the Macedonian throne.

335 BC

Aristotle, Plato’s student, founds school (Lyceum) at Athens (Pictured, Aristotle by Justus of Ghent and Pedro Berruguete, 15th c., Louvre Museum, Paris).

404 BC

429 BC

Pericles perishes from plague (“Plague in an Ancient City,” Michiel Sweerts, c. 1652-1654, Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

End of the Peloponnesian War; Athens surrenders to Sparta, led in victory by Lysander, a cunning naval strategist (“Lysander” by J. Chapman, 1807).

425/424 BC

Total annual tribute paid by allies to Athens is recorded in an inscription at a level of more than 1,460 talents. (Fragment of an inscription, ca.

425-424 BC, of a tribute list recording payments to Athens by members of the confederacy, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

C. 385 BC

The great philosopher Plato starts teaching in Athens.

406/405 BC Socrates serves on the Boule (Socrates bust, British Museum).

323 BC

404/403 BC

The death of Alexander the Great (Lithograph by Karl von Piloty, 1886).

Democracy overthrown by the Thirty Tyrants.

359 BC

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Philip II becomes King of Macedon (Pictured here on silver tetradrachm, Cabinet des Médailles, Paris).

351 BC

Demosthenes rallies Athenians against Philip II.

404/403 BC

Thrasyboulos and fellow democratic freedomfighters occupy the mountain deme of Phyle NW of Athens, which they use as a staging point to rally additional pro-democracy troops. After defeating a force sent against them by the Thirty Tyrants (mainly Spartan troops), Thrasyboulos’ army descend on Athens and Piraeus, defeat the Thirty, free Athens of military occupation and restore constitutional democracy.

(Thrasyboulos receiving an olive crown for his successful campaign against the Thirty Tyrants.

From Andrea Alciato’s “Emblemata” (1531), a collection of short Latin verse texts and accompanying woodcuts).

338 BC

Battle of Chaeronea; Athens and allies defeated by Philip II, Macedonians become the imperial masters of Greece. (The Lion of Chaeronea, probably erected by the Thebans in memory of their dead).

307/306 BC

Reestablishment of democracy by Demetrios Poliorketes (Pictured here on silver tetradrachm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

146 BC

Corinth burned by invading Romans; Greece eventually becomes an imperial Roman province.

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A WORK IN PROGRESS

c. 930 Iceland

The Viking Age parliament – the Althing – is first established, constituting a more elaborate version of the early governing assemblies (or Things) found throughout Northern Europe.

1689

1835

Reflecting the ideas of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, widely considered the “Father of Classical Liberalism”, the Bill of Rights further limits the powers of the monarch while firmly establishing the principle of regular parliaments, as well as of free elections and freedom of speech in Parliament.

French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville publishes the first two volumes of his extremely influential Democracy in America.

England

France

1918 Britain

Women aged 30 or over win the right to vote. Ten years later, suffrage is extended to all women over the age of 21, finally giving them the right to vote on the same terms as men.

1215

England

Rebellious barons force King John to sign the Magna Carta.

For the first time, this “Great Charter” establishes the principle that everyone, including the king, is subject to the law, thus marking the start of Britain’s transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy.

1787 USA

The US Constitution establishes a federal system of government in which powers are separated.

A system of checks and balances is introduced to prevent any single branch acquiring too much power. The Constitution guarantees certain basic rights for citizens, though slaves and women cannot vote.

1893

New Zealand

The self-governing British colony becomes the first country to grant adult women the right to vote.

1920 USA

A constitutional amendment extends the right of suffrage to women.

1295

England

Edward I convenes the “Model Parliament,” which brings together members of the clergy and the aristocracy, as well as representatives from the counties and boroughs. In doing so, he becomes the first king to call a parliament. Although Edward’s main goal is to raise funds for his military campaigns, the writ of summons to attend Parliament states that “... what touches all, should be approved by all....”

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1789

France

The outbreak of the French Revolution is followed by a decade of social and political turmoil which sees the overthrow of King Louis XVI and the country’s transition from an absolute monarchy to a republic.

1917 Russia

Social and political upheaval leads to the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy, only to usher in seven decades of totalitarian communist rule.

1947 India

India attains independence from the British Empire to become a republic and the world’s largest democracy by population.

Highlights in the 11-century adventure of democracy around the world

BY S T E P H E N S TA F F O R D

1976

Portugal

The Constituent Assembly adopts a democratic constitution, ending decades of dictatorship.

1967 USA

Congress passes the Freedom of Information Act, fostering greater accountability through transparency, vital to the functioning of a democratic society. The following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, providing for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed or origin.

2010

Arab world

1993

South Africa

1985

Soviet Union

Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party. His efforts to democratize the country’s political system and reform the economy precipitate the end of the Cold War, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Europe.

End of the Apartheid system of racial segregation which disenfranchised the country’s non-white population, with twothirds of white voters voting for its abolition in a referendum. Τhe following year, the country holds its first multi-racial elections and Nelson Mandela becomes the first democratically elected president.

2016

1968

USA

Czechoslovakia

The “Prague Spring” reform movement is crushed by Soviet tanks, but the non-violent resistance prefigures the transition to liberal democracy just over two decades later.

1989 China

Student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square are brutally suppressed by the military.

Chile General elections are held, ending 16 years of military rule.

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A popular revolutionary wave of protests and armed rebellions begins to ripple across the Middle East and North Africa, driven by demands for greater democracy, political accountability and civil rights.

2004

Afghanistan

Mohammed Karzai wins the country’s first-ever direct presidential election, though the process is marred by accusations of widespread fraud.

Donald Trump becomes 45th president of the United States in an election marred by allegations of vote-rigging and Russian interference.

During Trump’s first months in office, his attacks against the free press and independent judiciary are condemned as an erosion of American democratic institutions.

1970

Chile

Salvador Allende becomes the first Marxist to be democratically elected as president of a Latin American country, though three years later he dies in a military coup.

1974

Greece

The sevenyear military dictatorship collapses and democracy is restored.

2017 Turkey

1990

Poland

Solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa becomes the country’s new leader in its firstever direct presidential election, accelerating Poland’s transition from communist party rule to a Western-style liberal democracy.

2005

Iraq

Multi-party elections are held for the first time in half a century, resulting in the formation of a permanent 275-member National Assembly, despite numerous allegations of vote rigging.

G R E E C E IS

Voters in a nationwide referendum approve a new draft constitution that significantly increases the powers of President Erdogan, effectively turning the country from a parliamentary to a presidential republic. The referendum was held during a state of emergency, nine months after a failed military coup.

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ORIGINs

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Generals, Treasurers and Plumbers With modern democracy in disarray, it is worth considering if there were some things that were handled better in antiquity than today.

BY JOHN MCK . CAMP II

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thens, like most Greek city-states, was ruled early on (7th c. BC) by aristocratic families, who held most of the power, thanks to their wealth and the control they exercised over religion. Eventually, most cities limited the powers of the aristocracy, not unlike the gradual erosion of the authority of the House of Lords in England. The transition was frequently spurred by the rise of an individual set against the aristocrats, often with popular support. This individual was termed a tyrant (tyrannos), a word which meant he seized and held power unconstitutionally, but did not refer to how he wielded that power. Over time, the word picked up all the negative connotations associated with it today, but early on this was not necessarily the case. Here is Thucydides’ account of the tyranny of the Peisistratids in 6th c. Athens: “Indeed the Peisistratidai carried the practice of virtue and discretion to a very

high degree, considering that they were tyrants; and although they exacted from the Athenians only five percent of their incomes, not only had they embellished their city, but also carried on its wars and provided sacrifices for the temples.

In other respects the city enjoyed the laws established before, except insofar that the tyrants took precautions that one of their own family should always be in office.”

It is hard not to approve of someone who maintained infrastructure, built temples and aqueducts, ran a successful defense department, and still expected to collect only a 5% tax every year. One has to believe that, had there been an election, such a candidate would have won easily.

Perhaps inevitably, tyrants overstepped the bounds. A common mistake was to try to establish a dynasty, and nowhere in Greece did tyranny as an institution last beyond the third

Democracy (personified) crowning an enthroned Demos. The law against tyranny, voted by the Assembly in 337-336 BC, can be found inscribed on the main part of the stele (Museum of the Ancient Agora, Athens).

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A bronze tablet bearing the name of a jury candidate; jurors were appointed by lot. Such tablets also contained the name of the candidate’s father, his demos (suburb), and a public seal, usually in the form of an owl, confirming their legitimacy (Museum of the Ancient Agora, Athens).

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generation. Despite genetics, the offspring often lacked the wisdom, charisma, or vision of their fathers, and the citystates turned to new forms of government. The first to develop and implement that form called democracy was Athens, late in the 6th c. BC. The creation of the Athenian democracy was a process, not an event, though the focus has often been on the reforms of a little-known individual named Cleisthenes, who in 507 BC began the erosion of aristocratic control based on clans and geography by assigning all Athenians to a newly-created group of tribes (phylai). Citizenship and most political, military, and social activities were henceforth controlled by the tribes, thereby undercutting the earlier authority of the clans and creating a semblance of equality. There were, however, important changes made by other leaders, both before and after.

Earlier in the 6th c. BC, Solon had created courts where jurors and judges were chosen from all Athenians, not just from aristocrats or magistrates, which had previously been the case. As in the American system, the judicial branch had final say over executive and legislative actions, and juries of the people were the bedrock on which democracy was founded.

In promoting Athenian naval power, Themistocles changed the political landscape of the city early in the 5th c.

BC. The tens of thousands of rowers who manned the fleet that carried Athens to preeminence expected – and were granted – a greater share of power, which came at the expense of their

social superiors who made up the smaller land army. This change broadened access to political power considerably.

Political power is a fine thing, but only if one can afford to wield it. By the 5th c. BC, Athenians were paid to sit on the council and assembly, or on juries, so the poorer citizens could actually afford to participate in the political life of the city. Pericles was influential in this final necessary step leading to democracy.

With modern democracy in disarray following the results of elections in the US, Turkey, the UK and a number of other EU countries as well, it is worth considering whether some aspects of government were handled better in antiquity than today. When we think of the differences between ancient Greek democracy and the modern version(s), several things stand out.

In most modern democracies, women usually participate fully, both in voting and holding office. In antiquity, women had no public role, and resident foreigners and slaves were not allowed to participate, either so the percentage of the actual population that shared in Athenian democracy was rather small.

Electing officials is, of course, a fundamental feature of modern times; that is another major difference. In Athens, there was a much greater reliance on the “luck of the draw” than on election. Sortition, or allotment, was the preferred means of picking most public officials and deliberative bodies in Athens. At first glance, that may seem odd, and yet we

If we pulled 535 names out of a hat, could we do worse than the fractious, entitled, and ineffective congresses that US elections have brought us in recent years?

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Part of the east pediment of the second Archaic Temple of the Acropolis bearing a representation of Athena in the Gigantomachy, dedicated to Athena Polias. The marble sculptures are attributed to a renovation effort carried out by the sons of Peisistratos (c. 525 BC, Acropolis Museum).

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A bronze juror’s ballot from the 4th c. BC. If the cylindrical shaft protruding from the center had perforated (open) ends, the juror was casting a “guilty” vote.

ORIGINS

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A potsherd used in ostracism etched with the name of Themistocles, Athens’ triumphant leader at the Battle of Salamis.

Themistocles became a candidate for ostracism in 480 BC and was ostracized in 472 BC.

A ceramic clepsydra of the 5th c. BC. A clepsydra was a kind of water clock, used to calculate the time allotted for speeches in court proceedings.

should ask ourselves: if we pulled 535 names out of a hat, his competence in leadership – much like our governors, who could we do worse than the fractious, entitled, and ineffective have a record of executive action in office demonstrated by runcongresses that US elections have brought us in recent years? ning a state, that is, a segment of the population.

To be sure, there might be 50-odd wackos on the left and 50Others, of course, could display their competence as well. odd wackos on the right, but in the middle there would be a In Athens, there were few or no professional politicians and the large majority of individuals from a cross-section of American citizens themselves were expected to participate: to “rule and society, trying with good will to make useful, necessary, and be ruled in turn,” as the phrase goes. The allotment of offices effective laws. In theory, at least, common sense and fair play was facilitated by elaborate kleroteria, machines designed to ensure that the draw was fair. These machines were also used would have a far better chance of prevailing than at present. to pick the large juries with which the Athenians filled their There are, however, a few positions too important to leave courts, with a minimum of 200 jurors. to the luck of the draw, no matter how thorough the Athenians Strict and effective term limits were also a given in Atheniwanted their democracy to be. You need competent generals an politics, as was accountability. Except for a few organizers to run an army, and you need trained bookkeepers to serve as responsible for the big festivals held every four years, all other treasurers, so these officials were elected in Athens. officials, including magistrates, members of boards and comThe third position, perhaps less obvious, was the water missions, senators ( bouleutai) and jurors were expected (and commissioner, because managing water is essential to manallowed) to serve only for a single year at a time. Incoming offikind. In this respect, my wife has often repeated her acute obcials were examined before taking office and were also expectservation that, if a nuclear holocaust does occur, it makes no ed to render full accounts at the end of the year. What’s more, sense to hide away the 500-plus Washington-based lawyers of each year it was possible through ostracism to remove any one Congress; what we will need when survivors crawl out of the individual from both public life and the bunkers is 500 plumbers, capable of city for no less than 10 years. providing water, removing waste and Democracy today, as in antiquity, resurrecting a healthy society. remains a process; changes in society We speak of “Periclean” Athens or and technology require revisions as to “Periclean” Democracy, and yet Perihow we govern ourselves. The concept cles was never the Eponymous Archon, of full and equal citizenship, a sense of the top official in the state, after whom wishes and values of the people, and an each year was named. He was, instead, ABOUT THE AUTHOR understanding of the privileges, rights, repeatedly elected general of his tribe, John McK. Camp II is Stavros Niarchos and duties of the individual are all part which allowed him regular access to Foundation Professor of Classics at Randolph-Macon College, Virginia; he’s of striving for the best political system. the council ( boule) and assembly (ekalso Director of the Athenian Agora klesia), while demonstrating his popuIt cannot hurt to look back and consider Excavations and author of many books on ancient Greece. lar appeal with at least a segment of the the past as we prepare for and move into population. In this way, he could show the future.

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The Agora in Athens (wood engraving) as imagined by a 19th-century artist.

Š GRANGER/Bridgeman Images

(c) 2017 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine.

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Making Athens Great Again What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality – with the complicity of many of its own citizens? It’s a question as old as democracy itself.

By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

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wenty-four centuries ago, Athens was upended by the outcome of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned by its leaders, wanted to feel great again – a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then as now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would soon be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state’s sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more secure times. Athenians were in no mood to have their views shaken up. They had lost patience with the lively, discomfiting debates sparked by the old man. In 399 BC, accused of impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates stood trial before a jury of his peers – one of the great pillars of Athenian democracy. That spring day, the 501 citizen-jurors did not do the institution proud. More of them voted that Socrates should die than voted him guilty in the first place.

It’s all too easy to imagine the degree of revulsion and despair Plato must have felt at the verdict rendered by his fellow Athenians on his beloved mentor. How could Plato, grieving over the loss of the “best man of his time,” continue to live among the people who had betrayed reason, justice, moderation, goodwill – indeed, every value he upheld? From his perspective, that was the enormity Athenians had committed when they let themselves be swayed by the outrageous lies of Socrates’ enemies. Did truth count for nothing?

A despondent Plato left the citystate of Athens, whose tradition of proud patriotism and morally confident leadership at home and abroad had been recently and severely shaken.

Whether he was witnessing the end of Athenian exceptionalism or a prelude to the long, hard work of rebuilding

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Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Socrates”, oil on canvas (1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

it on firmer foundations, he could not have begun to predict.

Plato was in his late 20s when he lost Socrates. Born an aristocrat, he boasted a lineage that went back, on his mother’s side, all the way to Solon the Lawgiver, the 7th-c. BC sage often credited with laying the cornerstone of Athenian democracy. Born and bred to play a prominent role within “the Hellas of Hellas” – as Athens had anointed itself – he nevertheless now turned his face away. On a voyage that lasted about 12 years, he ventured well beyond the borders of the Greek-speaking lands. He went south

and studied geometry, geography, astronomy, and religion in Egypt. He went west to spend time with the Pythagoreans in southern Italy, learning about their otherworldly mixture of mathematics and mysticism, absorbing from them esoteric sources of thaumazein, or ontological wonder. Plato, already primed by Socrates not to take Athenian exceptionalism for granted, was on a path toward metaphysical speculations and ethical and political reflections beyond any entertained by his mentor.

High on the list of presumptions that Socrates had aimed to unsettle was

To be an Athenian, ran a core credo of the polis, was to partake in its aura of moral superiority.

Socrates dedicated his life to challenging a confidence that he felt had become overweening.

his fellow citizens’ certainty that their city-state brooked no comparison when it came to outstanding virtue. To be an Athenian, ran a core credo of the polis, was to partake in its aura of moral superiority. Socrates dedicated his life to challenging a confidence that he felt had become overweening.

Of course, Athens was undeniably extraordinary, and the patriotic self-assurance and democratic energy that fueled its vast achievements put it over the top, even among the competitive Greeks. Their quest for outstanding achievements should be seen in the context of a fundamental preoccupation that emerged contemporaneously in many centers of civilization – wherever a class of people enjoyed enough of a respite from the daily grind of life to ponder the point of it all.

How to make one’s brief time on Earth matter? That was the essential question at the heart of ambitious inquiries into human purpose and meaning.

Every major religious framework that still operates, the philosopher Karl Jaspers pointed out, can be traced back to a specific period: from 800 to 200 BC – the Axial Age, he called it. The 6th c.

BC (roughly a century before Socrates’ prime) was the most fertile interlude, when not only Pythagoras but the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, and several Hebrew prophets including Ezekiel lived and worked. From Greece emerged Western secular philosophy, which brought reasoned argument to bear on the human predicament and the reflections it inspired. Those reflections, no less urgent now than they were then, can be roughly summed up this way:

Untold multitudes have come before us who have brought all the same passions to living their lives as we do, and yet nothing of them remains to show that they’d ever been. We suspect, each one of us, that the same will happen to us. The oceans of time will cover us over, like waves closing over the head of a sailor, leaving not a ripple, to use an image that inspired abject terror in the seafaring Greeks. Really, why do any of us even bother to show up for our own existence, for all the difference we ultimately make? Driven to pursue our lives with single-minded passion, we are nevertheless, as the Greek poet Pindar put it in the 5th c. BC, merely “creatures of a day.”

The Athenians’ conviction that they mattered uniquely – the entitled spirit that prevailed by Plato’s time – had long been in the making. For several generations of Greeks before him, a less assured proposition had served as a guide: We aren’t born into lives that matter but have to achieve them. Such an endeavor demands a great deal of individual striving, because what counts is nothing less than outstanding accomplishments. Theirs was an ethos of the extraordinary, and its pitiless corollary was that most lives don’t matter.

The deeper, and humbler, sources of the ethos dated back even further, to a time of anomie and illiteracy – the Greek Dark Ages, as scholars used to call the GREECE IS

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period that followed the mysterious destruction of the great palace kingdoms of the Bronze Age around 1100 BC. The wondrous ruins left behind – the massive bridges and beehive tombs, the towering edifices inscribed with indecipherable lettering – spoke of daunting feats of engineering. “Cyclopean,” the awestruck successors called the remains, for how could mere humans have wrought such marvels without the collaboration of the one-eyed giants?

Clearly, there had been a previous age when mortals had realized possibilities all but unthinkable to lesser specimens. Those people had mingled so closely with immortals as to assume an altogether new, heroic category of being, celebrated in tales sung by ordinary Greeks. The reverence is embedded in The Iliad, which extols Achilles as the greatest of all the legendary Greek heroes, for he was the man who, given the choice, opted for a brief but exceptional life over a long and undistinguished one. Achilles’ song-worthy life, a life of kleos – glory, fame – is what inspires the immortal Homeric poem. And so it should be for all of us.

Living so that others will remember you is your only solace in the face of the erasure you know awaits.

But an ethos of the extraordinary poses a practical problem. Most people are, by definition, perfectly ordinary, the ancient Greeks included. Ultimately, they found a solution to this problem in propounding a kind of participatory exceptionalism, encouraging a shared sense of identity in the collective pursuit of song-worthy exceptionalism.

No collective experience more en-

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Mosaic found in the villa of T. Siminius Stephanus, near Pompeii. It is thought to represent Plato’s Academy, with the philosopher plying his craft in the center (1st Century BC- 1st Century AD, National Archeological Museum, Naples)

couraged such a solution to the human predicament than the unlikely Greek victory over the Persians. In vanquishing the vastly superior forces of this world empire, the Greeks had given their poets a contemporary feat to sing about, as Herodotus announces in the opening words of his Histories, written so as to secure the heroes “their due meed of glory.” The Greco-Persian Wars helped convert the ethos of the extraordinary from ancestor reverence into a motivational agenda. Aristotle, writing his Politics a century after the end of the wars, observed the spillover into the life of the mind: “Proud of their achievements, men pushed farther afield after the Persian wars; they took all knowledge for their province, and sought ever wider studies.”

And nowhere were this pride and this pushing more assertively on display than in 5th-c. BC Athens, where business was conducted within sight of the Acropolis, with the monuments emblematic of Athens’ newly gained imperialist glory on display. The architectural splendors, proof of undaunted genius and vitality, had arisen out of the ruins to which the older shrines of the Acropolis had been reduced in 480 BC by the invading Persians.

Personal fame, he contended, counts for nothing if your life isn’t, in itself, a life of virtue, which is alone the kind of extraordinary accomplishment that counts.

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Pericles went so far as to suggest that Athens’ vanquished enemies should take pride in having been bettered by such unparalleled specimens of humanity.

The democracy that had gradually developed in Athens, a direct democracy in which every citizen was expected to participate, added considerably to the ethos of supreme distinction. The contrast to the oligarchic, tyrannical, and monarchical systems elsewhere couldn’t have been starker. And, just in case there were any Athenian citizens who didn’t fully appreciate the uniqueness of Athens and what it conferred on them, Pericles – whose very name means “surrounded by glory” – articulated it for them.

“In sum, I say that our city as a whole is a lesson for Greece,” he declared in his famous Funeral Oration in 431 BC. One of the first battles of the Peloponnesian War had just taken place, the start of what turned into a 27year struggle, and Pericles called upon Athenian exceptionalism for inspiration. Elevation in the minds of others, now and in the future, went hand and hand with demonstrations of power: “This is not merely a boast in words for the occasion, but the truth in fact, as the power of this city, which we have obtained by having this character, makes evident. For Athens is the only power now that is greater than its fame when it comes to the test … We are proving our power with strong evidence, and we are not without witnesses: we shall be the admiration of people now and in the future.”

But navigating the line between patriotic pride and arrogance wasn’t easy. In extolling the greater glory of Athens, its leaders didn’t just aim to pump up ordinary citizens. They also hoped to tamp down individual hu36

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bris – to keep the city-state’s ambitious upstarts committed to the collective cause, rather than to the lawless pursuit of their own personal glory. If that meant stoking civic vanity, Pericles was more than ready. “We do not need Homer, or anyone else, to praise our power with words that delight for a moment,” he said. He was not advising modesty.

Quite the contrary, he celebrated the collective accomplishments of imperial

Athens as indelible proof of superiority. Cataloging Athenian achievements, from the uniqueness of the city-state’s democracy to its magnanimity to lesser others, Pericles went so far as to suggest that its vanquished enemies should take pride in having been bettered by such unparalleled specimens of humanity.

Here, in the attitude underlying Pericles’ Funeral Oration, lies the meaning of Socrates’ life, as well as the meaning of his death – and of Plato’s response, which was not, in the end, a retreat. Even, or especially, a democratic society with an exceptionalist heritage – as Plato and his fellow Athenians were hardly the last to discover – may prove unprepared to respond wisely when arrogance takes over and expectations go awry.

Neither Socrates nor Plato ever

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challenged the Greek conviction that achieving a life that matters requires extraordinary effort and results in an extraordinary state. But Socrates was determined to interrogate what being exceptional means. Personal fame, he contended, counts for nothing if your life isn’t, in itself, a life of virtue, which is alone the kind of extraordinary accomplishment that counts. And the same could be said for city-states. The virtuous citizen, indeed, is inseparable from the virtuous polis, his claim to significance rooted in his commitment to the common good. What is demanded, Socrates taught, is the quest for a better understanding of what virtue is, what justice and wisdom are. The goal is a moral vision so compelling that every citizen, no matter his position, will feel its force and be guided by it. A democratic state that fosters the continuous

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self-scrutiny demanded by such a vision can hope for greatness. Mere kleos is for losers.

Only an exceptional man would have dared to challenge such a fundamental presumption of his society. But if Socrates was so extraordinary, how did Athenians – who took pride in citizens of distinction and had long been fondly tolerant of their exuberantly eccentric philosopher – come to turn against him? Socrates’ conviction and execution are even more puzzling given that his trial was a complete farce, at least as Plato presented it in the Apology. The philosopher ran rings around Meletus, the man put up to be the prosecutor.

But the date of the trial reveals a polis whose exceptionalist identity had been challenged and whose citizens had been caught off-balance: How

great were they, really? Athens was still reeling from defeat in the Peloponnesian War five years earlier – and at the hands of those uncultivated Spartans, who had no high culture to speak of, no playwrights or Parthenon. They could barely string three words together, much less match the rhetorical brilliance on which the Athenians congratulated themselves. It surely didn’t help that the Spartans had behaved far more magnanimously in their final victory than the Athenians had behaved during the long and brutal conflict. Sparta’s nobility in declaring that it would treat the vanquished city as befit the great imperial power it once had been must have felt particularly galling.

Aided by a Spartan garrison, an oligarchic government rose to power, composed of aristocratic Athenians (including one of Plato’s relatives) who disapproved of democracy. The Thirty, as they were called, employed secret informers and terrorist tactics, drawing many Athenians into ignominious collusion. When, in 403 BC, the oligarchic collaborators were driven out after less than a year, Athenian democracy was restored – under quite unusual conditions. The customary bloodbath never happened. No vicious rounds of retribution and counter-retribution ensued. A declaration of general amnesty, granted to all but a notorious few at the top, eased the way toward an ameliorating fiction that the Athenians, with the exception of the Thirty and a coterie of their conspirators, had been victims. It was a collective act of willful forgetting.

In fact, the citizens were subject to an oath, me mnesikakein, which means “not to remember past wrongs.”

The amnesty was an act of political brilliance, and the Athenians, predict-

Socrates teaching the people in the Agora: engraving, 19th century, after a bas-relief.

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Exceptionalism has to be earned again and again, generation after generation, by citizens committed, together, to the endlessly hard work of sustaining a polity that strives to serve the good of all.

ably, couldn’t stop praising themselves for it. The rhetorician Isocrates joined in, arguing that, though others, with the assistance of Fortune, might win wars, “for the moderation we showed toward one another, no one could find any other cause than our good judgment,” concluding that the result must be “this glorious reputation.”

But the plaudits they bestowed on themselves couldn’t hide the fact that Athenian exceptionalism had taken a hit since the glory days of Pericles, when the statesman had declared that any enemy would be proud to be vanquished by so superior a people. Moral shame accompanied military shame. The grueling war had driven the Athenians to atrocities against fellow Greeks, about which the historian Thucydides was heartrendingly vivid. Along with the amnesty’s me mnesikakein, the citizens and their leaders might very well have wished to legislate a forgetting of the brutal enslavement and extermination of enemies at Athenian hands.

At a juncture like this, as Athenians strived to shore up their vision of themselves, perhaps it shouldn’t come as such a surprise that they lost their tolerance for Socrates’ hectoring. His fellow citizens could afford to appreciate a genuine Athenian original in the days when 38

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their worthiness was so manifest, as Pericles had declaimed, that no Homer needed to spread word of it. But not now, when their famous rhetoricians had been reduced to extolling how uniquely brilliant they were at handling defeat.

And so, at the first opportunity, with the Spartan forces withdrawn and democratic government stabilized, the gadfly of the agora was indicted.

Socrates’ compatriots wanted to make Athens great again. They wanted to restore the culture of kleos that had once made them feel so terrific about themselves. It’s not hard to understand why Plato fled a citizenry that, in struggling to recover from its sense of diminishment, was prepared to destroy what had been best about the polis – the extraordinary man whose subversive challenges to blinkered opinion and self-righteous patriotism held the key to resurrecting any exceptionalism worth aspiring to.

And yet eventually, after his years of self-imposed exile, Plato came back to Athens, bringing his newly gathered learning along with him, to take up where Socrates had left off. Except Plato didn’t philosophize where Socrates had.

He abandoned the agora and created the Academy, the first European university, which attracted thinkers – purportedly even a couple of women – from across greater Hellas, including, at the age of 17 or 18, Aristotle. Foremost among the problems they pondered was how to create a society in which a person like Socrates would flourish.

Athens may never again have presided as the imperial center it was before the war. Instead, it staked what has proved to be a far more enduring claim to extraordinariness in becoming a center of intellectual and moral progress.

Empires have risen and fallen. But the bedrock of Western civilization has lasted, built upon by, among many others, America’s founders – students of Plato determined to create a democracy that could avoid the flaws Plato observed in his own.

In establishing the Academy, Plato didn’t forsake the people of the agora,

who, as citizens, had to deliberate responsibly about issues of moral and political import. It was with these issues in mind that he wrote his dialogues – great works of literature as well as of philosophy. And in 25 out of Plato’s 26 dialogues, Socrates is present, often as the leading spokesperson for the ideas that Plato is exploring, though sometimes, in the later dialogues, as a silent bystander. It’s as if Plato wants to take Socrates along with him on the intellectual quest he pursues during the course of his long life. It’s as if he wants us, too, to take Socrates along as we return again and again to the Herculean effort of applying reason to our most fervently held assumptions.

And still Socrates’ underlying message could not be more timely. The mantle of glorified greatness belongs to no society by right or by might, or by revered tradition. It belongs to no individual who, ignoring the claims of justice, strives to make a name that might outlast him. Exceptionalism has to be earned again and again, generation after generation, by citizens committed, together, to the endlessly hard work of sustaining a polity that strives to serve the good of all.

After his beloved mentor was put to death, condemned by his fellow citizens, a despairing Plato left the city-state of Athens.

But he returned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher with a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Princeton University. She is a novelist and a MacArthur Fellow, and was presented with the National Humanities Medal by former US President Barack Obama. Her latest book is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (2014, Pantheon).

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LEADER FOR A DAY Unlike the ancient Athenians, who were encouraged to participate in governance, most of us today are excluded from the process of civic deliberation. Î’y Edith Hall

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he ordinary private citizen of a modern democracy spends a tiny part of his or her life participating in politics. Where voting in national elections is voluntary, which it is in most countries (Australia, Belgium, Greece and parts of Latin America constitute some of the exceptions), we are not obliged to participate in politics at all. If we do choose to vote, national elections are normally held once every four to five years (more often in times of instability). Local elections are usually held more frequently, sometimes annually. But voting requires our active engagement for only a few hours a year.

Most democracies oblige citizens to be available for jury service, but there are many professions which al-

experience of the individual citizen participating in the classical Athenian democracy with our own.

There are, of course, significant differences between ancient and modern democracy. Most modern democracies are representative, which means we elect MPs to represent us rather than voting directly on policies (except in special referenda, such as that by which UK citizens voted in June 2016 to leave

A 20th-c. Italian swwchool lithograph, depicting the Gymnasium in ancient Athens.

Š Private Collection / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images

low an individual to claim exemption.

In England, the chances of being summoned for jury service over the course of a lifetime are only one in three, and most trials last less than three days. Although a minority of civic-minded people become involved in local politics, or join political parties, the demands that modern democracy makes on its citizens are miniscule. This becomes glaringly apparent if we compare the

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Ancient Athenian citizens were likely to be involved at some point in their lives not only in voting on issues but also in formulating the choice and content of proposals to be made.

the European Union). Most modern democracies include women in their definition of the demos, the sovereign body wielding the kratos, or power, and so today women vote as well as men. Modern democracies do not depend on slave labor, so they do not, as ancient societies did, exclude much of the resident population from citizenship. While some democracies do retain the practice of a year’s national service, most do not require all their voting citizens to be ready for military service at any time up to the age of sixty, as was the case in ancient Athens.

The greatest difference, however, is the proportion of our lives we each spend exercising our citizenship muscles. The difference here is not merely quantitative: most of us today are excluded from the process of civic deliberation. Ancient Athenian citizens were likely to be involved at some point in their lives not only in voting on issues but also in formulating the choice and content of proposals to be made. This 42

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was because most served for a whole year on the Athenian Council (the Boule).

Discussion of classical democracy usually focuses on the two crucial decision-making bodies constituted by the Assembly and the law courts. The Assembly, in which citizens could vote from the age of eighteen, was the supreme legislative body, meeting from thirty to forty times a year; in theory, any citizen was entitled to speak on any proposal. In practice, the number of people able to address the Assembly was limited, and men over fifty in the queue to speak were given precedence by the herald. The wisdom which comes with experience was recognized as a qualification for greater civic responsibility.

Once a citizen was thirty, he could volunteer for jury service, for which he would be paid. Juries were selected by a complicated system designed to prevent bribery: from the body of volunteers, juries were selected and allocated randomly and at the last minute. If you were a citizen who frequently acted as juror, such as Philocleon, the protagonist of Aristophanes’ Wasps, you would have been involved in cases connected with the political life of the city-state, such as appeals against Assembly or Council rulings. Many civil and criminal cases also had political ramifica-

tions, since statesmen and aspiring politicians used litigation to further their own careers and damage those of their rivals.

Yet neither voting in the Assembly on the Pnyx Hill, even though it offered an opportunity to hear debates on the expediency of policies, nor sitting on juries in the various courts across the city entailed anything like the commitment of time and intellectual effort required of Council members, the officials charged with extended deliberation of policies. The bouleutai, or “Deliberators,” met in the Bouleuterion, a large chamber on the west side of the agora.

Supposedly founded by Solon in 594 BC, the old building was replaced circa 415 BC with a new one still further west than the first. The councilors were symbolically privileged as thought-leaders; they sat together in seats of honor at the front of the theater during the festivals.

The importance of the Council in the Athenian democracy is underlined by the haste with which the oligarchs who took power in the coup of 411 BC ousted the democratically elected councilors and hijacked the Bouleuterion as their power base.

Our understanding of the importance of the Council, and the sheer complexity of the tasks each member was expected to be competent to fulfill, was transformed by the discovery of the Constitution of Athens, attributed to Aristotle and discovered on two separate papyri, in Egypt in 1879 and 1890.

The Council required no fewer than 500 citizens to serve, proportionately selected from each of the 139 demes of Attica. They were replaced every year by lot (at least from the mid-5th c. BC).

The Council is likely to have contained, in any year, a representative cross-section of all classes and income brackets across the citizen body: one ancient scholar described it as a mikra polis, i.e., a “mini-city.” Since no man could serve more than twice in his life, chances were good that any citizen who had reached the qualifying age of 30 would

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serve at some point, especially after pay was instituted in the later 5th c. BC to encourage poorer citizens. Although there is evidence that originally only the top three property classes could serve, to the exclusion of the thetes, or lower working class, this qualification was either not rigidly enforced, or eventually dropped altogether. The Council considered matters relating not only to the state’s finances and the scrutiny of magistrates, but also to all its cults and festivals, its navy, its civic building program, and the care of the sick, disabled, and orphaned.

To serve as a councilor required accumulating information, assessing past actions and deliberating about future ones. It required doing this virtually all day, every day, for a whole year. How many of us would want or feel qualified to take on such a heavy responsibility in the 21st century? The quality of attention required of the Council’s members seems breath-taking compared with what is required of politicians, let alone ordinary citizens, today.

What’s more, for one-tenth of every year, the fifty councilors from each of the ten Attic tribes had to assume even greater responsibilities. For thirty-five continuous days (a period called a prytany), they became chief executives (prytaneis) of the Council and were required to work every single day from the building known as the Prytaneion,

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the heart of government and the spiritual centre of the city-state, where the revered laws of Solon were kept on inscribed tablets. This role was so important that councilors from remote demes took lodgings in the city center for its duration: a peasant from Rhamnous or a fisherman from Thorikos would thus, for more than a month, be charged alongside his forty-nine other tribesmen with the most solemn responsibilities in the nation. They summoned the meetings of the Council and Assembly. They dealt with dayto-day emergencies as they arose. The state archers who carried out policing tasks came under their jurisdiction.

They received foreign embassies. They even hosted weddings of young women whose fathers had been killed in battle.

As a reward, they were served meals, paid for by the state, in the tholos, the circular state dining-room adjacent to the Bouleuterion.

Moreover, for one twenty-four hour period, even our fisherman from Thorikos could expect, once in his life, to be selected by lot, during his tribe’s period in the Prytaneion, to be appointed the supreme executive officer of Athens. Every day, one of the prytaneis served as the Foreman of the Council, taking on the momentous responsibility of the keys to the state archives and treasuries and the use of the state seal.

Since no individual was ever allowed to

The participatory aspect of ancient democracy holds lessons for our electorates today, and might suggest solutions to the prevalent ignorance about serious issues, or to feelings of apathy or exclusion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edith Hall is Professor in the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London, specializing in ancient Greek literature.

She has published more than twenty books, broadcasts frequently on radio and television, works as consultant with theaters, lectures all over the world, and publishes widely in academic and mainstream journals and newspapers.

hold this consummate office more than once, at least half of all citizens must have held it during their lives.

Our ancient Athenian citizen, therefore, not only had the right to attend and vote in the Assembly many times a year, and volunteer for nearly full-time jury service, but he could expect twice in his life to be involved in active government at the highest level full-time for a whole year. For one extraordinary twenty-four hour period, he was more than likely to be Foreman of the Council, the most important official in the land. This participatory aspect of ancient democracy holds lessons for our electorates today, and might suggest solutions to the prevalent ignorance about serious issues, or to feelings of apathy or exclusion. Given the contemporary crises in democracy internationally, shouldn’t the ancient Council and the prytaneis become, alongside the Assembly and the dikasteria, a more significant part of our discussion?

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DEMOCRACY BACKFIRING From its very beginning, demokratia has been ripe with the same flaws we see in it today.

BY DIMITRIS PLANTZOS

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reek democracy was devised in Athens when, following several years of political instability and social unrest, a sweeping constitutional reform was introduced in 508-7 BC by Cleisthenes. The new constitution broke the family ties of the old landed aristocracy and increased the influence of ordinary citizens on the day-to-day running of the city. Although Cleisthenes himself referred to his political program as an attempt at isonomia (equality before the law) rather than demokratia (rule of the people), his reforms lay the foundations of the celebrated Athenian democracy of the 5th c. BC. Soon, however, the new system showed signs of fatigue, revealing one of democracy’s fundamental flaws: that “the rule of the people” can often deteriorate into the rule of the easily manipulated mob.

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GERRYMANDERING IN THE AGORA One of the political reforms that Cleisthenes is generally credited with introducing was ostracism: at given times, Athenian citizens were asked to nominate anyone they thought might pose a threat to democracy in the imminent future; if at least 6,000 votes were cast, the person collecting the majority of these votes was to be banished for 10 years. The law lay dormant for a while; it was used only after the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when the Athenians realized the potential of their democratic regime and de-

An illiterate Athenian unwittingly asks Aristides the Just to carve his own name on an ostracon because he was “tired of hearing people calling him ‘the Just’.” Aristides, true to the law and to his nickname, complies (Lithography, 1880).

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As a system of government based on the free will of the public, democracy was prone to manipulation by members of the political establishment.

cided to guard it against the threat of tyranny at all costs – even if they had to act pre-emptively. It was practiced regularly in the 480s, but less often after that. By our own standards, ostracism seems a rather unjust procedure: no charge was brought against the person voted out each time, and they were unable to mount their legal defence.

The procedure itself was simple: each citizen was expected to scratch the name of the person he wished to nominate as a potential tyrant on a broken pottery sherd – an ostracon, hence the name of the law – and bring it to a cordoned-off section of the Agora, which was thus designated as a makeshift polling station. As literacy was the exception rather than the rule in ancient Athens, and potsherds were readily lying around in their hundreds, tampering with such do-it-yourself voting tokens must not have been too difficult for the average citizen. In an anecdote preserved by Plutarch, Aristides “the Just,” who was ostracised in 482 BC after having dominated the Athenian political scene for a decade or so, was asked, on the day of the vote, to scratch his own name on an ostracon to be used against him by an illiterate man who did not recognize him. Aristides obliged, but asked why. “Because I am sick of hearing him being called Just!” was the man’s reply.

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the Athenian Agora itself, however, might throw some more negative light onto the entire process. A massive find of 190 ostraca, mostly round fragments broken off black-glazed drinking cups, all inscribed with the name of Themistocles, suggest that some foul play may have been going on. Themistocles, of humble birth, had risen to power in the late 490s BC, and soon became the most prominent Athenian politician.

He was the architect of the Athenian navy and played a crucial role at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. His arrogance, however, seems to have tired his fellow-citizens, who also started to suspect him of anti-democratic tendencies (as he was seen to befriend tyrannical regimes elsewhere). Only fourteen people seem to have written the 190 ostraca found in the Agora, suggesting they may have been used by Themistocles’s enemies to sway the undecided, or even perhaps fool the illiterate.

ONE MAN’S RULE As a system of government based on the free will of the public, democracy was prone to manipulation by members of the political establishment. Even under Pericles, a prominent advocate of democracy and a statesman who dominated Athenian politics for thirty years during what would become known as the city-state’s Golden Age, the government was, according the contemporary historian Thucydides, “democracy by name, but in fact one man’s rule.” Ostracism was for Pericles, as it would be for others, a key tool, one which he used to eliminate his principal political opponent Cimon, the leader of the aristocratic party. Another tool was his policy of “radical democracy,” granting to the lower classes further access to public offices and to the mechanisms of the state at large, which his opponents criticized as populist. After Pericles’ death, democracy fell prey to a clique of what most ancient writers called “demagogues,” crowd-pleasers who gained popularity and, as a result, political power by exploiting common prejudice or ignorance.

Cleon, the most conspicuous demagogue of the time, was a member of the commercial class. Although he came from a wealthy background, he was not an aristocrat (his father was a successful tanner). He dominated Athenian politics as a warmongering rabble-rouser, at least according to his critics. While also a democrat, Cleon had fiercely opposed many of Pericles’ initiative as too “tame,” systematically taking a populist standpoint against state officials. He must have been a rather ragged character, brutal and unsophisticated, but he was also a forceful speaker who knew how to play on the sentiments of his audience.

A classical scholar recently called him “the Donald Trump of ancient Athens.”

Cleon’s vulgarity may have earned him public prominence and political power, but it also won him the scorn of his critics, including Thucydides and the comic playwright Aristophanes. In fact, Cleon is satirized in several plays by Aristophanes; in the Knights, he is described as a boorish fish-eater and is cursed by one of the play’s characters who hopes he will choke on his own sizzling calamari.

The damaging role of demagoguery in Athenian politics became obvious on a number of occasions during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), none more so than in those tragic events surrounding the revolt of Mytilene against Athens in 427 BC. Cleon urged his fellow citizens to put the men of Mytilene to death. The assembly first accepted Cleon’s proposal that Athens ought to make an example of Mytilene to her other allies, and a boat was sent to the island of Lesbos to carry the order. The resolution was retracted the next day, however, by the same assembly, after a forceful address by the more moderate Diodotus. A second boat was sent, with double the men so they could row overnight, and arrived just in time to prevent the massacre. Even so, approximately 1,000 among the men of Mytilene, thought to be the leaders of the revolt, were executed. Based on these dramatic events, Thucydides argued that when public policies are used to further pri-

© Bagdatopoulos, William Spencer (1888-1965) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

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William Spencer Bagdatopoulos, “The Mytilenean Debate,” illustration from Walter Hutchinson’s “History of the Nations” (1915, private collection).

The Athenians discuss reprisals against the city-state of Mytilene for its revolt during the Peloponnesian War (427 BC).

Elderly fishmonger carving up a large fish for a bartering costumer, as depicted on a red-figure krater, c.

4th century BC (Archaeological Museum, Cefalu, Sicily).

vate ambition, democracy backfires and it is the common people who suffer the dire consequences.

In ancient Athens, the institution of democracy depended on the systematic curtailment of any aristocratic attempts to monopolize political power. As a result, a great deal of energy was expended in efforts to marginalize old aristocratic cultural values and replace them with new, “democratic” ones.

The divide between those of noble and those of common birth, however, was not merely one of class but, significantly, one of wealth as well. The city’s landed aristocracy maintained its economic clout long after an emerging class of small-property owners, farmers, and traders came, through sheer numbers alone, to dominate Athenian politics.

Commoners developed a strong distaste for the affectations of those of noble birth – particularly their eating and drinking habits.

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seem, closely scrutinized in classical Athens. People were free, in theory, to use their money as they wished; any excess that was detected, however, would be met with censure. Democracy at large seemed to condone only one form of communal feasting, that which took place after a public sacrifice to the gods, wherein the meat of the sacrificial animal was divided equally among those carrying out the sacrifice (the gods were expected to be satisfied with the smell of the roasting entrails and other bits and pieces). This was considered the truly “democratic” way of feasting, as each man got a random share and not one based on birth, social status, or wealth.

The aristocratic symposium (a communal but private drinking session), on the other hand, was considered “undemocratic,” as it was not open to all.

Furthermore, it was thought to lead to excesses considered improper for Athenians (these included displays of luxury, heavy drinking and lewd behaviour).

Fish was also suspect. While eating meat was generally thought to be proper and “Athenian-like,” eating fish was sometimes seen as offensive, especially if the one eating was a member of the aristocracy known for his taste for expensive seafood. These fish-eaters, known as opsophagoi in classical Athens, were treated with contempt. Socrates himself is known to have objected to vulgar displays of opsophagia during a dinner party (when the diner seemed too engrossed in the fish delicacies at hand to pay attention to his own sophisticated discourse). Aristophanes and other comic poets of the time make fun of the exorbitant prices that some would pay for, say, an eel from the lake of Kopais or a fresh sea-bass. Eventually, opsophagia came to be considered an affront to democracy itself. Spending too much money at the fish-stall while other, less fortunate, citizens waited in line for the leftovers could even lead to charges of treason; this happened to a man named Timarchus, who was found guilty of debauchery. His crimes included, among others, eating too much tuna; he was stripped of his citizenship and eventually committed suicide. (According to a later source, “Timarchus-like” became a Greek phrase describing the corrupt or the depraved.)

Democracy is, of course, a laudable system, but it is not flawless. It raises up the individual, but it also elevates the Crowd, a prejudiced being easily led and easily deceived by those who would use the worst parts of human nature to defeat the best parts of human aspiration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dimitris Plantzos teaches Classical Archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Athens.

He is the director of the Argos Orestikon Excavation Project (Kastoria, Greece) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London. He has published on Greek art, the development of classical archaeology as a discipline in the 20th century, and on modern receptions of classical heritage.

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Taxes are Forever Is it possible to tax someone and have him be grateful for it?

The ancient Athenians certainly knew how.

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he ancient Athenian financial system was not static; it evolved. Throughout the 5th c., and especially during the “Age of Pericles” (c. 450-429 BC), Athens benefited financially from the contributions of its allies in the Delian League, an alliance which was transformed de facto into an Athenian empire, comprising more than 200 city-state members.

The great public works on the Athenian Acropolis, including the Parthenon, were financed in large part from these contributions. Another very important source of revenue during the whole period of the Athenian democracy (508-323 BC), were the silver mines of Laurion, although this income fluctuated. During the “Dekelian” stage of the Peloponnesian War, for instance, revenue from the silver mines declined dramatically.

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By the mid-4th c., Athens no longer had an empire, and thus had to finance state expenditure through its own means.

Thanks to the efforts of two very able politicians and financial experts, Euboulos and Lykourgos, it succeeded in doing so.

Managing state finances in ancient Athens wasn’t like organizing government expenditure today. All decision-making, including decisions on financial and taxation matters (for example, Themistocles’ Naval Law of 483/2 BC aimed at funding the Athenian fleet which, together with its allies, defeated the Persians at Salamis) was carried out by direct democracy and took place as follows: a proposal was submitted to the Assembly, debate ensued and then a vote was held.

The tamiai (the treasurers of the temples, through which the Athenian state collected a significant amount of public revenues) served single-year terms. However, the post of epimelitis tis koinis prosodou, with duties akin to a modern finance minister, did not share this limitation; Lykourgos, held the office almost continuously from 338 BC until his death in 323 BC. Revenue accrued from renting out state-owned property such as the Laurion silver mines, from custom duties on imports and exports through Piraeus (assessed at 2% of total value), and the income of the treasures of the temples, among other sources. In general, Athenians thought that payment of direct taxes, such as income taxes, would infringe upon their freedom. Therefore, neither direct income nor property taxes were imposed except during periods of war.

Nevertheless, during the second half of the 4th c. BC, they did develop an indirect way to tax the rich (some 1,200 or so of the wealthiest Athenians out of a population of 30,000) called liturgies, a combination of payment and service. There were many types of liturgies, including, for instance, paying for the preparation and presentation of a theatrical performance.

The most important and expensive of these obligations was the trierarchy, under which the trierarch had to incur the running expenses for the maintenance (but not the cost of the crew) of a trireme warship for a year. In fact, the actual period was closer to 8 months, since active service did not usually extend to the winter months. As the nominal commander of the vessel, the trierarch had a strong incentive to keep the ship in good shape, since his own survival in battle depended on it.

Regardless, these services remained costly, and one can only imagine how many people today would protest against

The Lenormant Relief, a representation of the trireme Paralos, complete with its commander and oarsmen. The Paralos was a state trireme which participated in both sacred and state missions (Acropolis Museum).

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Providing an entire theater troop with adequate costumes might cost a small fortune, but few would dare to cut costs and mount a poor show for fear of being ridiculed by their fellow citizens in the audience.

such a law or even attempt to koinis prosodou, he managed circumvent it entirely. And yet to increase revenue to 1,200 what actually happened back talents. This was all the more then was that, despite the conremarkable since it was colsiderable cost they entailed, lected solely from Athenian the vast majority of wealthy sources, without the allies Athenians who found themcontributing as they had durselves tasked either by the city ing Pericles’ period. Lykourgos council or one of their 10 genused the revenues to promote erals to undertake liturgies a “social contract” between would perform their duty with poor and rich Athenians diligence, if not necessarily through the implementation with joy. Providing an entire of a Keynesian type of public theater troop with adequate works program, e.g., rebuildcostumes might cost a small ing the Dionysos Theater, putfortune, but few would dare ting in a new sewage system to cut costs and mount a poor in Piraeus or building roads show for fear of being ridiculed and fortresses. By doing so, by their fellow citizens in the he gave employment to poorer audience. An important man citizens who, until then, had was sure to have rivals eager only found work as rowers in to strike at their opponent in Depiction of the treasury officials of the Sanctuary of Athena presenting the the fleet and consequently had annual accounts for the year 400/399 BC to the goddess herself. any way they could; showing been apt to vote in favor of war.

(Epigraphical Museum - National Archaeological Museum, Athens). an evident lack of enthusiasm For the first time, income tax in supporting the state and (eisphora) for the wealthy was made a permanent feature the demos (especially in times rather than an emergency of war) would be akin to social wartime measure. Even so, the change was favorable for the suicide. The liturgies, therefore, appealed to a man’s sense of rich as well. They did have to pay income tax, but with peace as honor, but also to his pride and his vanity. an official policy, they did not have to carry the higher cost of The only way for a rich man to blamelessly avoid a liturgia a trierarchy. Business thrived in peace as well. All evidence we was through the antidose, the practice of proving that the task have indicates a thriving Athenian economy during this period. required of him was beyond his financial means. If so, the duty An analysis concerning taxation in ancient Greece must was passed onto another, wealthier, citizen. Another, less honalso include the issue of ancient Greek federalism, since fedest, loophole was to simply hide some of their wealth − by stasherations were the next step after the city-state model. Revenue ing it, for example, in foreign cities − to claim poverty and saddle sources for federations included city-state contributions acanother with what should have been their burden. cording to their financial strength; a regular direct tax called It was extremely rare for a man to outright refuse to pertelos, paid by city-states to subsidize war campaigns; and cusform the liturgia without making use of the antidose, since tom duties levied on exports and imports. Other sources were they would inevitable be called to stand trial for their actions. grants by wealthy citizens to the federal treasury in order to A conviction would mean the seizure of much of the riches they increase their own political prestige and influence; liturgies presumably sought to protect. The scandal, moreover, would (inspired by the Athenian example); loans to the state offered be immense, truly condemning the offender to live the life of by individuals; and the military plunder accumulated during a pariah. successful expeditions against enemies. Such campaigns would When Lykourgos took over from Euboulos as epimelitis tis 52

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Silver Athenian tetradrachm, c. 520-510 BC. On the obverse is the head of Athena. On the reverse, the owl (glaux), sacred to the goddess.

The “Glaux” coin type began appearing in Athenian coinage under the rule of Hippias, son of Peisistratos, and inspired confidence by remaining unchanged for many years; thus, these coins circulated in many foreign market places (Numismatic Museum, Athens).

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Representation of a commercial transaction, from the black-figure amphora signed by the Taleides Painter. The two men weigh goods without using weights, instead balancing the scale with equal quantities of goods (540-530 BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

very important stimulus to those who wished to make a career also bring further income in the form of ransom for captives in the political life of Athens. taken. Seignorage from the minting of federal coins stayed at Furthermore, while liturgies were expensive, they never the federal level as well. fell consecutively upon the same person, but only periodically, Ancient Greek federal states practiced many advanced after a respite of some years. In the end, taxation was always economic institutions, one of which was acknowledging pubto the benefit of the majority of citizens and most importantly, lic debt. An example of this was the case of the city-state of it was perceived as such. Generally speaking, both the wealthy Orchomenos (a member of the Boeotian Federation), which and the less well-off citizens considered the taxation system to acknowledged, after the judgement of a federal court went be fair. There were a few cases of tax evasion, but these were against it, to repay the loans that the city had borrowed from a exceptions rather than the rule. wealthy woman named Nicareta.

This is in sharp contrast to today’s situation, in which the Over the course of its existence, the ancient Greek tax government has been accused of tax system evolved to meet new challengpiracy. Simply put, Greek citizens and es and requirements. It adopted new enterprises are, on average, the most policies, such as the peace strategy of heavily taxed individuals among OECD Lykourgos, that helped strengthen the countries, while the benefit derived from economy. What’s more, it did so without taxation in the form of public goods and alienating its tax base. Athenians who services is the lowest among all OECD undertook liturgies had a sense of pride ABOUT THE AUTHOR nations. At the same time, these high in serving their city and often received Nicholas C. Kyriazis is Professor at the University of Thessaly, Department tax rates result in less investment and rewards, seeing their names inscribed of Economics. Emmanouil M.L. drive activity towards the black econoin public stele as benefactors of the city Economou, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the University of Thessaly, Department my. It seems clear that, in tax matters as or receiving public gifts. Rewards of this of Economics, and at the Technological in the working of democracy in general, kind had a strong positive effect on the Institute of the Ionian Islands, Department of Business Administration. modern democracies can learn valuable liturgists; recognition increased their lessons from the past. reputation in the political community, a 54

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Surprisingly Modern Aristotle’s philosophy of equality, peace and democracy

BY M at t Q vo r t r u p

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he son of a doctor, Aristotle was born in the city of Stageira in Halkidiki in the year 384 BC, and was educated at Plato’s Academy in Athens. When his mentor Plato died in 347 BC, Aristotle returned north and became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon. His pupil, who later gained the suffix “the Great,” was rather fond of his teacher, and is supposed to have said, “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”

Aristotle stayed at the court of Alexander until 335 BC, when he founded his own academy, the Lyceum, in Athens. He remained in Athens until 323 BC, when anti-Macedonian sentiments forced him to leave. “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy” he said, with reference to the execution of Socrates, and fled to Chalcis, on the island of Euobea where he died a year later, in 322 BC. Reading Aristotle is easier than you might think. Even those who are not able to read him in the original Greek cannot fail to be charmed by his enthusiasm. A fascinating thing about Aristotle’s Politika (Politics) is the way

this enormously erudite man got carried away in his lectures. Aristotle simply could not help telling his students about a certain Hippodamus, a 5th-c.

BC Athenian, who was “the first man not engaged in politics to speak on the subject of the best Constitution.” This first political scientist was, “somewhat eccentric in his general mode of life owing to his desire for distinction… [he] lived fussily, with a quantity of hair and expensive ornaments and a quantity of cheap clothes – not only in winter but also in the summer.”

This is perhaps a glimpse of how entertaining Aristotle could be when he lectured in his Lyceum – how he could spellbind his audience with seemingly irrelevant but highly entertaining anecdotes. Aristotle – the founder of psychology, logic, poetics, physics, biology, and many other disciplines – had a childlike joy in telling his audience about all he knew. No wonder Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman and philosopher, noted that Aristotle’s writings were “like a pouring out of gold” (Academia Priora, Book II). And yet we don’t even have Aristotelian treatises: his only surviving books are lecture notes.

Progressive Politics What’s most engaging about Aristotle’s political philosophy is how modern he was. His thoughts echo through the ages and can still inspire those who read him more than 2,200 years later. Not merely a philosopher who wrote about contemporary institutions and the ideal constitution (though he did that, too), he had foresight, or so it seems today. Many of the issues he addressed are ones that concern us: terrorism, inequality, and the dangers of the excessive greed of a small class of wealthy individuals. Moreover, his solutions and analyses are remarkably relevant for our time. It’s both surprising and extraordinary how Aristotle’s politike épistême, or “science of government,” was based on ideals that arguably could have been expressed by leftist activists in the West today. The man who had tutored a king was no friend of the rich and powerful. Rather, he believed that “the truly democratic statesman must study how the multitude may be saved from extreme poverty.” This makes him an inspiration to modern left-leaning progressives, who once again place equality at the heart of the political struggle. Aristotle insisted that

Aristotle and 13th-c. scholastic philosopher Albertus Magnus, locked in scholarly debate. A sketch by Olaus Johannis Gutho (c.1516), with accompanying philosophical reflections, from the library of the University of Uppsala.

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“measures must be contrived that bring about lasting prosperity for all,” and he was willing to advocate the redistribution of wealth on the grounds that this would be better for the state and the nation as a whole. He even spelled out how this could be done. “The proper course,” he wrote, “is to collect all the proceeds of the revenue into a fund and distribute this in lump sums… to start them in business.” Like modern center-left progressives, he was adamant that redistribution and state intervention not only benefited the poor, but that it was “advantageous also for the well-to-do.”

On the subject of wealth, Aristotle was always clear that “money was brought into existence for the purpose of exchange” and not as an end in itself.

He famously made a distinction between oikonomia, “the art of household management,” and kremastike, “the art of getting rich.” His misgivings about the excesses of self-interest was reflected in his policy prescriptions: “the first among the indispensable services [rendered by a state] is the superintendence of the market,” he wrote in a perhaps prescient comment on the dangers of deregulation. Who needs to read Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times when they can read Politika?

Today, politicians usually appeal to self-interest and utility. For Aristotle, conversely, “to seek utility everywhere is unsuited for free men.” Rather, a political science should be based on recognition that “the good life is the chief aim of society.” Aristotle wrote that it is “the business of the lawgiver to create the good society.” For, as he wrote in Nicomachean Ethics (the prequel to Politika), politics, being an extension of ethics and morals, “legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, and the end of this political science must be the good for man.”

In other words, we have politics and we teach political philosophy because we want to create true happiness, or eudaimonia – to achieve a state where our “actions accord with virtue (arête) [and] with an adequate supply of goods in a complete life.”

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Aristotle addressed all the major issues: education, equality, democracy, justice, war, peace, and social unrest. It is not least because of his interest in revolutions and uprisings that his philosophy is so relevant for present-day politics and policy-making.

Politics is not just about self-interest; “the state is not merely a sharing of a common locality for the purpose of preventing mutual injury and exchanging goods.” Financial matters, Aristotle admits, “are necessary preconditions of a state’s existence. Yet even if all these conditions are present, that does not make a state. For a state is a partnership of families and clans living well and its object is the full and independent life.”

Political Violence Of course, not all of Aristotle’s views have stood the test of time – his views on slavery and women are particularly problematic. But this does not mean we should disregard his philosophy. After all, few Christians agree entirely with the Bible and most neo-Darwinists allow themselves to disagree with parts of the Origin of Species.

Most prominent political philosophers were strangely one- or two-dimensional. Thomas Hobbes focused almost exclusively on peace and security and Karl Marx concentrated on attacking an unjust economic system. By contrast, Aristotle addressed all the major issues: education, equality, democracy, justice, war, peace, and social unrest.

It is not least because of his interest in revolutions and uprisings that his philosophy is so relevant for present-day politics and policy-making.

Political violence, revolutions and terror characterize our current political debates. These issues were also hotly discussed in Aristotle’s time. It’s

remarkable that, here too, he reached some of the same conclusions as political scientists have discovered today.

Like modern political scientists who have found that terrorism is caused by disenfranchisement, Aristotle also recognized that lack of political influence breeds anger, aggression, and ultimately violence. He wrote “men… cause revolutions when they are not allowed to share honors and if they are unjustly or insolently treated.” He also said: “Angry men attack out of revenge, not out of ambition,” and he posed the rhetorical question: “How is it possible for individuals who do not share in the government of the state to be friendly towards the constitution?” The answer was, of course, in the negative. Fundamentally, Aristotle was of the view that men who are excluded from political influence ultimately resort to violence.

To maintain a peaceful political system, then, Aristotle thinks that it is necessary to involve all citizens, for political systems endure because those in power “treat those outside the constitution well” and they do so “by bringing their leading men into the constitution.”

The ancient thinker’s logic is straightforward, and his lesson is clear: more democratic engagement leads to less inequality and lower levels of violence (terrorism). It is difficult to overstate how prophetic this view is, especially when compared with what passes for public policies today. Looking back over the past fifteen years, in many countries, the policies pursued have

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Working in the fields, an illustration from Aristotle’s Politics, manuscript translated into French by Nicola di Oresme, 1382, France.

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been characterized by increased surveillance and a preference for dealing with terrorism through military action.

The results of these policies have not been impressive. If we use the figures from the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index and exclude Syria and Nigeria, the world has seen an 80% increase in the numbers of terrorist attacks over the last decade and a half. If we include Syria and Nigeria, there has been a seven-fold increase (statistics based on 2015 Global Terrorism Index Report).

Indeed, today’s terrorists are no more deterred by the prospect of violence than in Aristotle’s day: “Men attacking under the influence of anger are reckless of themselves...”

Constitutional Democracy Aristotle, always the empiricist, collected everything from zoological specimens to political facts: he wrote commentaries on an estimated 170 ancient constitutions. Unfortunately, only one of these, on the constitution of Athens, is extant, discovered in Oxyrhynchus in Upper Egypt in 1879.

It is not surprising, given his obsession with facts, that Aristotle’s main proof of the beneficial influence of what he called “the democratic nature” was drawn from his empirical studies; and especially from a comparative analysis with the remarkable democratic state of Carthage. Aristotle wrote that the proof that “its constitution is well regulated is that its populace willingly remain faithful to the political system, and that neither civil strife has arisen in any degree, nor yet a tyrant.” That Carthage was successful in avoiding revolutions and what we today would call “terrorism” was due, he says, to its

Aristotle the wise and a pupil. From the Kitab Na’t al-hayawan, an 13th-c. Arab manuscript on the characteristics of animals. It contains texts of both Aristotle and Ibn Bakhtishu (British Library).

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balanced constitution, one in which its parliament – “the Hundred and Four” – were elected “from any class” and “by merit.” Further, in this surprisingly democratic system, the elected representatives were balanced by “the Elders” – chosen by the people and by a head of government who “as a superior feature was elected.”

While Aristotle warned that government by the people could degenerate into mob rule, he maintained that it is “advantageous for the form of democra-

cy… for all the citizens to elect the magistrates and to call them to account.”

He even spoke about the “consent of the governed” – a line later copied by Thomas Jefferson into the American Declaration of Independence.

Aristotle’s model constitution was in fact one characterized by an elected aristocracy – but an aristocracy based on uncommon prudence and intelligence, not on wealth. But even under this system of government, the people would have a greater say than under

The man who had tutored a king was no friend of the rich and powerful. Rather, he believed that “the truly democratic statesman must study how the multitude may be saved from extreme poverty.”

gether, just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties.”

This, he concluded, “is why the general public is a better judge,” for “different men can judge a different part.” For this reason, “it is necessary for all to share alike in ruling and being ruled.”

It is difficult to find a more precise and succinct case for democracy than this. Aristotle speaks across the ages.

His writings are proof, if such is needed, that the philosophy of the ancient masters is not a historical relic but a timeless guide. A democrat, a defender of social equality, and an opponent of the authoritarian state, Aristotle should be on the reading list for all those who support radical or progressive causes.

most systems of indirect democracy: in Aristotle’s ideal state, “when the Kings introduce business in the assembly, they do not merely let the people sit and listen to the decisions that have been taken by their rulers, but the people have the sovereign decision.”

Why did this intellectual place such faith in the ordinary people? Why did he trust them to make good decisions? He recognized that some are more intelligent than others; but he also acknowledged that many individ-

uals deliberating together would have a greater combined knowledge than even the wisest person. His argument here is worth quoting at length: “It is possible that the many, when they come together, may be better, not individually but collectively, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost. For where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of virtue and wisdom, and when they have come to-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University and Director of RISING Global Peace Forum.

A frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC, he is the author of several books, including Direct Democracy, Referendums and Ethnic Conflict.

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Delve deep enough into the past and you’ll find that much of what we hold as self-evident is, in fact, erroneous. The same is true about the world’s first democracy.

Artist’s concept of the Αgora in ancient Sparta.

From El Mundo Ilustrado, Barcelona, 1880 (Private Collection).

BY PETROS DOUK AS

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ost people believe that the world’s first democracy was that of Athens, but it wasn’t: instead, that distinction belongs to Sparta.

Lycurgus of Sparta, whose exact birth date is unknown but who ancient sources say was asked by the various factions in Sparta to draft a constitution c. 830 BC, was the first statesman to make a general assembly of “the people” (known as the Apella in ancient Sparta) the final arbiter of all major state decisions. True, Homer lists the demos of Athens as participating in the Troy expedition, but it wasn’t until 598 BC that Solon gave the lowest-ranking Athenians the right to vote in the Athenian general assembly, and even then, they did not have the right to be elected to higher magisterial posts; they did not get that privilege until Cleisthenes’ reforms (c. 507 BC) and not for all magistracies.

Giving power to the assembly wasn’t the only political change that Lycurgus made. He carried out several major reforms, including the redistribution of Spartan lands into some 9,000 lots of equal value, as well as the establishment of a mandatory system of public education and military training, arguably the first universal state education in the world. What’s more, his reforms

kindled a sense of civic pride; according to Aristotle’s Politics, Lycurgus imparted a sense of participation, inclusion, and belonging to every single Spartan.

As a direct result of Lycurgus’ actions, Sparta was able to benefit from what Aristotle called the “wisdom of the many,” the idea that the combined intelligence of many people, no matter how mediocre they are as individuals, coupled to that of the wisest citizens would make for a much more potent decision-making body. The philosopher explained this theory with a colorful simile; a potluck dinner, in which each participant brings a modest dish or two, can be more enjoyable than a sumptuous dinner orchestrated and supplied by just one host.

Above all, Lycurgus sought to maintain a political balance within Sparta, to ensure that the temporary wishes of a simple majority of the people would not take precedence over the laws of the city. This is the quintessentially “republican” feature of his constitution.

How did he achieve this? First, he established a “dual monarchy” with two kings from the two ancient royal houses of Sparta reigning simultaneously while also keeping an eye on each other. (This duality was later copied by the Romans in their institution of two Consuls, Praetors and Censors, as well as

A blending of popular power and political institutions made Sparta the first real and stable democracy, one that would survive virtually unchanged for close to 600 years.

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by the US system of electing a President and Vice President). tan life, as was the fact that women were not allowed to vote, The two kings presided over the deliberations of the Spartan even though they did gradually accrue major land holdings Senate, much as the US Vice-President presides over the deand eventually came to wield substantial economic power liberations of the US Senate. They were also the supreme leadSimilarly, the free non-Spartan perioikoi, the farmers, technicians, artisans, traders and others that were not deemed as ers of the Spartan army, “first in the field of battle and last citizens of the state, were not allowed to vote. (Such shortcomto return home,” a responsibility that, as it happens, is also ings have allowed some to propose that Sparta was effectively carried out today, at least symbolically, by the President of the an oligarchy; this is not so. In fact, the Spartan constitution United States in his or her role as Commander-in-Chief. was an example for the political reforms made to Athenian The second part of his plan was to establish, for the first politics by Solon, and it was an inspiration not only for the time in history, a Senate (akin to the informal councils of elRoman Republic but also for the founding fathers of the US.) ders of old), with the purpose of drafting, reviewing and then Eventually, a continuous reduction in the number of the submitting decrees to the Apella. The senators were elected by omoioi (full Spartan citizens), which arose in part due to voice vote from amongst those Spartans over 60 years of ageSparta’s strict rules on who could exercise the full rights of and not appointed by lot (the usual practice in ancient Greek citizenship and in part due to disfranchisements and to heavy democracy). This meant that the more powerful candidates military casualties in Sparta’s many campaigns, weakened could influence the electorate, and thus was considered an oliSparta. Unlike Rome, Sparta did not actively replenish its citgarchic feature of the system. izenry from beyond its original borders and therefore could Lycurgus also prohibited Spartan citizens from speaking not sustain these substantial losses. The citizenship reforms in the Apella (a right their Athenian counterparts had), and of the admirable Spartan kings Agis and Cleomenes (around from amending drafted decrees proposed by the Senate. Ap235 BC) came too late in the game to turn things around. parently, this was done in an effort to avoid an inevitable deA trend towards the concentration of wealth was also a scent into lengthy deliberations and demagoguery. factor in Sparta’s decline. The 9,000 equal land lots assigned About a century later, possibly during the Messinian Wars during the time of Lycurgus, had shrunk to around 100-200 (which saw most of the Spartan citizens leaving their polis), by c. 240 BC. This was a major destabilizing development, another change was made to the Spartan system. With the which would eventually lead to the tyrannies of first Machgoal of making the government more efficient, it was decided anidas and then Navis. Similarly, Lycurgus’ idea that monthat the Apella would be led by 5 all-powerful ephors, elected ey-making activities detracted citizens from pursuing a life of officials with virtually dictatorial powers. Not surprisingly, civic virtue meant that Sparta had not accrued the financial the ephors were not bound by any accountability clauses, as reserves to allow it to impose a longer-lasting hegemony. In they also acted as judges in civil cases. The ephors served for fact, Sparta was actually much fairer to its foes and allies than only one year; this short period of service was undoubtedly in Athens, and unlike its rival, did not tax its allies, losing in this line with Aristotle’s maxim that the more powerful an office way a great source of potential income. Historically, Sparta is, the briefer its tenure should be, in order to avoid the develwas the pre-eminent foe of Greek tyrannies (in particular opment of family dynasties and tyrannies. those of Athens, Naxos, Samos and Sikyon), a stance perhaps This blending of popular power and political institutions obscured by the need, during the Peloponnesian War, to favor made Sparta the first real and stable democracy, one that cities with oligarchies in place. That expedient tactic, howevwould survive virtually unchanged for close to 600 years. Neier, was at least in part the result of efforts by Athens to control ther the US nor the UK can yet boast such stability. As for the democratic regimes of the area during that conflict. ancient Athens, which, according to Aristotle, amended its Today, the world salutes Greece as the birthplace of an inpolitical power structures at least 11 times, that city-state novative and audacious political idea – was, indeed, “more” democratic than the right of the people to decide public Sparta, but only because the Assembly policy – but they give the glory for this of the People, often guided by demato Athens. Why? One answer is simple gogues, chose to derive its right to powenough; despite having had a republier by a show of hands, sometimes disrecan-style of constitution, Sparta was garding the rule of established law and also a monarchy, much like the UK thus asserting that the might of any ABOUT THE AUTHOR simple majority makes right! (with its royal house) is today. HowevPetros Doukas is Chairman of Capital Partners SA. He has served as Deputy Of course, Spartan democracy had er, just as no one would argue that the Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs. its weaknesses and its failings. Helot presence of a monarch precludes deHe holds a Ph.D in Economics from New York University, an MBA in Finance slavery (a system under which a conmocracy in Great Britain, the existence from Columbia University and a BA quered worker sub-class was made to of twinned Spartan kings do not disin International Affairs from George Washington University. provide for the Spartan population) credit the fundamentally democratic was, undoubtedly, a dark side of Sparnature of ancient Sparta.

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Portrait of Lycurgus, legislator of Sparta. Painting by Merry-Joseph Blondel (1781-1853), 1828. Oil on canvas. Picardie Museum, Amiens, France.

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AN UGLY TRUTH Bloodshed has long been an indispensable tool for those in power – but is it an effective device for modern democratic states?

BY SOTIRIOS PEITHIS

© Purchase, Rogers Fund and Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, 1922

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iolence is never the solution, or so we have been brought up to believe. Yet the truth, like most things, is more complicated than we would like to admit, and the fact that every successful civilization in history has made extensive use of violence as a means to prolong its existence seems to contradict that statement.

Many of our ideals, like the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, never would have existed without the numerous acts of brutality of the French Revolution that brought an end to the Old Regime and paved the way for the more egalitarian society we know today.

As far back as memory extends, we see that the great civilizations that have defined us and shaped us made prolific use of what we would consider inhuman acts of cruelty. Indeed, no world-defining nation has shied away from violence, and the ancient Greeks were, of course, no exception.

It is perhaps telling that the world’s leading authority on the correct use of violence drew much of his inspiration and many of his examples from ancient Greece. Readers of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince will be familiar with names such as Xenophon, Epaminondas, Agathocles, Pyrrhus, Hiero, Antiochus the Great, Philip V, Philo66

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poemen and, of course, Alexander the Great and Philip II of Macedon.

Machiavelli believed that violence was an indispensable tool, and the Greeks were among his favorite examples to illustrate his point. His list is not exhaustive either, as many other Greeks known for their harshness fail to appear in his book. These include Draco, the Athenian lawgiver who made even slight offences punishable by death on the grounds that he could think of nothing worse to inflict for larger crimes; Cleon, the Athenian strategos (general) who vigorously pursued the escalation of the Peloponnesian War and was the chief spokesman supporting the execution of every male citizen of Mytilene and the enslavement of all its women and children; and Iphicrates, the Athenian mercenary commander famous for his disciplinary actions, such as when he executed one of his sleeping sentries before declaring to his men that he had simply left him as he had found him. All of these individuals would have been valid examples for Machiavelli’s argument.

Throughout most of the 20th century, scholars often idealized ancient Greek warfare, and their society in general. War in ancient times was thought to have been gentler and more honorable than that of their own days. Today,

The Same, Plate 3 of The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, 1810-14, pub. 1863 (etching).

however, a less flattering view of ancient Greek aggression has been adopted. Whether within their own state or when dealing with others, the Greeks knew perfectly well that violence was an effective and necessary tool for their survival, and did not shy away from using it.

This is not to say that the Greeks were inherently cruel or, for that matter, that we today are not. Yet one could hardly argue against the fact that mod-

ern Western society is far less inclined to open acts of aggression and violence than it used to be. Violence, to a clever statesman, is but a tool, and as such it can be easily misused by an inexperienced leader; yet in the hands of the right man, it will bring about swift results.

History teaches us that several rules must be followed if one is to be successfully violent, the most important ones being that violence must be swift, limit-

ed in time, and unflinching. Indiscriminate, clumsy and constant violence will simply not do; to maximize results, one must think carefully about the methods to be used and the duration of the action. Iphicrates, for instance, may have been merciless when it came to punishing his men, but his actions were always swift and complete, never leaving the subject of his ire in a position to strike back; this is a character trait Machiavelli lauds. He was also never G R E E C E IS

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Š Purchase, Rogers Fund and Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, 1922

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Nor In This Case, Plate 36 of The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, 1810-14, pub. 1863 (etching).

arbitrary: his mercenaries were indeed cowed, but also safe in the knowledge of exactly what would earn them an execution and how to avoid it. In contrast, Cleon never once gave ground when it came to the use of violence and the pursuit of war, so much so that he became one of the most hated figures of Athens. One may accordingly look to Alexander, whose campaigns saw hundreds of thousands killed or enslaved.

Yet, despite his cruel streak, he knew to temper his wrath with mercy, and those who surrendered to him very often saw him as a savior, while the same people he had once treated harshly came to love him.

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sparingly instead of constantly, but also inhumanly and publicly, for all to see. In a military theater, such violence can help precipitate the transition of power and ensure the establishment of a new ruler. (Issues will, nonetheless, inevitably follow. There is, after all, no such thing as a perfect cure-all, either in power relations or in any other aspect of life.) Used within the state, violence will enforce the law and discourage anyone from repeating whatever offence was punished so severely.

Having accepted those general rules in the correct and efficient use of violence, let us turn to our modern Western states, and to how violence can or cannot be utilized in our own era.

A modern Western democracy is guided, more or less, by the will and the general beliefs of its people. There are many who would argue that the masses have no control over their democratic states, yet when it comes to cruelty and bloodshed, any 21st-century Western state is severely restricted. Activists might scoff at such a declaration and point to the numerous cases of collateral damage that have been reported all around the world as a result of Western intervention, but the ugly truth is that these incidents pale in comparison to the practices of war to which an unrestricted state would inevitably revert.

While violence is, of course, still being used today, a Western democracy, for

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© Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932

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Even Worse, Plate 22 of The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, 1810-14, pub. 1863 (etching).

better or worse, is no longer capable of reaching the levels of brutality necessary for this violence to be effective.

The words “for better or worse” have been added in the preceding sentence not to express support for the use of violence, or any opposition to our general belief that people should simply not kill and torture each other, but rather to stress that any action, no matter how beneficial, moral, and well-meaning will always have unforeseen consequences. We should never fall into the trap of believing ourselves better than our predecessors: men like Agathocles or Hiero of Syracuse followed their own different set of morals, and were not cruel for the sake of cru-

elty. In their mind, and in the mind of any sane and stable statesman of their time, the violence they made use of was an acceptable compromise to stave off something worse, and they would regard our modern attitude as far more harmful than theirs.

Let us consider one of the most controversial and divisive political situations of our day: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel and the Gaza Strip have been locked in a state of perpetual conflict for years, and so much blood has been spilled on both sides (with no solution in sight) that it’s quite possible this deplorable situation will last for many decades to come. Realistically speaking, Israel has always been able

Whether within their own state or when dealing with others, the Greeks knew perfectly well that violence was an effective and necessary tool for their survival, and did not shy away from using it.

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Š Purchase, Rogers Fund and Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, 1922

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One Can’t Look, Plate 26 of The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya, 1810-14, pub. 1863 (etching).

to completely crush their neighbors, which is exactly what any of the ancient city-states or nations would have done.

In their eyes, a brief but bloody campaign, ripe with all the atrocities of war, would have ended the conflict swiftly, ensuring stability. This campaign could have, of course, been waged poorly, and success might have come only after decades of resistance, but it could also have been waged successfully, following the tactics of any of the many men already cited who knew how to use violence appropriately. Yet our society has changed enough that such an act is nowadays considered unthinkable or, at least, to the most cynical, impossible 70

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to implement without severe repercussions, both domestically and internationally. While this has, thankfully, ensured the survival of the innocents living in the cramped conditions and squalor of the Gaza Strip, it has also allowed for the continued existence of a conflict that could have been ended by absolute and ruthless violence. Israel and Palestine are now stuck in the worst position to be in when at war: the liminal situation, where no clear winner has emerged. The ancient Greeks, and all violent societies that acted completely against everything we hold dear today, would have been greatly amused at the consequences of our choices, and

would have asked if our way, which ensures the perpetuity of a war and the extension of the suffering it brings to several generations, is truly preferable to their quick and brutal ways.

The same can be seen in the actions of the United States in the Middle East.

While there are many things to criticize and condemn about the foreign policy of the US, its military does follow a set of strict rules for military engagement and for warfare in general, allegations of torture and other war crimes notwithstanding. The United States is also, in theory, completely capable of crushing any of its foes. Yet ever since the Vietnam War, the US, despite being

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Today, the result of American interventions is a series of inconclusive wars where the US completes all of its tactical objectives, wiping out all regular opposition, but completely fails in most of its strategic goals.

at times heedless of the opinion of the outside world, is keenly aware that it can no longer wage total war without completely alienating its own population. This was not always the case: during World War II, the United States made the completely Machiavellian decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese, followed quickly by a second one when the enemy refused to surrender. This infamous act fulfilled all the prerequisites for a successful act of violence: swift, brief and absolutely inhumane. The result was one of the world’s most controversial war crimes (even though it has never officially been recognized as such), but it also brought a swift end to a war which, considering the resolve of the Japanese Empire, could perhaps have lasted for several more years. Today, however, the result of American interventions is largely the same as what we saw in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a series of inconclusive wars where the US completes all of its tactical objectives, wiping out all regular opposition, but completely fails in most of its strategic goals.

Ostensibly, the US wishes to liberate the states in whose affairs they mingle, and to install democratic regimes

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to ensure the freedom of the local population. The simple fact of the matter is that one cannot impose, in a single generation, democratic ideals in a part of the world that has lived for years in a way often radically opposed to them.

Democracy is an acquired taste, and one that we ourselves still sometimes swallow with difficulty. The West did not come to its democratic condition overnight, but rather millennia after it had abandoned democracy as ineffective and undesirable. To expect a Middle Eastern state to accept our ways simply because the US destroyed its armies and installed what locals likely consider to be a puppet government is insane. The only way to truly impose democracy by force (instead of waiting patiently for a non-democratic society to evolve into it, or simply accept that it never will) would be to once again make use of brief but absolute violence, ensuring the complete surrender of the target state to the fate of being reshaped in our own image. Even then, one would have to be patient and ready to compromise, but the result of the initial application of the appropriate level of violence would have ensured that the Middle East would have been pacified in the same way the Greeks and the Romans pacified their provinces and slowly Hellenized or Romanized them, instead of letting them fester in liminal, indecisive positions, turning them into the perfect breeding grounds for terror groups and radical organizations.

In short, modern Western societies have changed too much to ever accept using the amount of cruelty required for violence to have an effect in the same way it did in ancient times. Yet we persist in its use, and in so doing reap all the destructive consequences violence can breed without getting the solace and comfort of its benefits. Perhaps more troubling, however, is the thought that our world might, in fact, be perfectly capable of reverting to those old ways. In 2015, then Presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and openly advocated the commission of war crimes. When Mr.

Trump, while speaking about the conflict with ISIS, declared on numerous occasions that he wanted to “take out their families,” he was directly referring (perhaps unconsciously) to a common practice in ancient warfare, a fact made all the more grotesquely comical when one considers that he has often declared with disgust and shock that the methods used by ISIS are “medieval.” However, putting aside all such grim jokes (and without dwelling on the fact that Trump’s boisterous and gungho attitude is the perfect character trait of a leader completely incapable of using violence effectively, and one that Machiavelli and the Greeks would have looked upon with disgust), President Trump’s general idea is, unfortunately, not baseless: extreme violence, as we saw, does bring about results.

If one considers a different theater of conflict, Afghanistan, where both the USSR and the US bogged down when faced with the hit-and-run tactics of the Afghans, and compares it to the campaigns Alexander waged in the same region, one can immediately see that the Greeks prevailed, among other reasons, thanks to Alexander’s prolific use of violence against the civilian population. So, yes, one could theoretically bring about results by reverting back to Machiavellian violence, if the right man or woman were to be found with the mettle and presence of mind to do what must be done. The question we must ask ourselves, therefore, is simple: is it worth it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sotirios Peithis is a Ph.D. student at UCL. An alumnus of the Universities of Montpellier and Saint Andrews, he specializes in Ancient Greek Warfare. His research focuses on tactical and strategic communications of the Greeks in the Classical period.

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traces of a glorious notion In Greece’s museums, at archaeological sites and prominent in the natural landscape, evocative reminders of past democratic ideals surround us.

By John Leonard

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Bouleuterion

© CLAIRY MOUSTAFELLOU

Among the key civic buildings that lined the west side of the Athenian Agora, the Bouleuterion was the most important, representing the beating heart of Athenian democracy. Here, the Council of 500 – with 50 members from each of the ten Attic tribes – met to vet and prepare state business before presenting it to the popular assembly (Ekklesia), which convened every ten days. The Council was established in 507 BC by the democratic reformer Cleisthenes. The Old Bouleuterion (now beneath the Metroon) was built c. 500 BC, while the adjacent New Bouleuterion dates to the late 5th c. BC.

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Theater of Dionysus On the South Slope of the Acropolis, the Theater of Dionysus was the first permanent home of drama, where, from the early 5th c. BC, Athenians and outside visitors from all walks of life gathered to watch tragedies and comedies that dealt with not only the Greeks’ rich mythical and religious background, but also the daily frustrations and humorous machinations of the Western world’s earliest experiment in democratic government. Here, Aristophanes and other comedic playwrights often poked fun at Athenian leaders – including the populist Cleon, whose demagogic approach, some 2,500 years later, is being so entertainingly emulated by today’s politicians [Actors after a satirical play, detail from a red-figure krater of Pronomos, (late 5th century BC, National Archeological Museum, Naples)]

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Kleroterion Particularly characteristic of ancient Athenian democracy were its courts, composed of at least 201 male jurors selected from the citizenry of Athens. To form juries fairly and reduce the chance of corruption, a device called a kleroterion was used to select jurors randomly from the ten Attic tribes, immediately prior to a trial. Bronze tickets bearing prospective jurors’ names, the first letters of their fathers’ names and their demes, were chosen randomly from baskets and placed in the device’s slots, then selected (or not) using a system of white (Yes) and black (No) balls that dropped arbitrarily through a tube.

[3rd c. BC kleroterion, Museum of the Ancient Agora, Athens]

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The Parthenon Ostensibly the greatest temple ever built for Athena, patron goddess of ancient Athens, the Parthenon was also a sculpture gallery whose exterior Ionic-style frieze and carved metopes carried meaningful messages aimed at the ancient city’s populace, visitors and opponents. Erected after the Greeks’ defeat of the Persians, at the height of Pericles’ democratic reforms, the Parthenon exalted the Greeks’ – particularly the Athenians’ – military strength and the triumph of Good over Evil and Order over Chaos as depicted in the various struggles and victories captured in its metopes. The frieze’s horsemen and numerous female figures may allude to recent strengthening of women’s civic rights and the democratization of the knighthood.

[Officials of the Athenian state during the procession of the Festival of the Panathenaia.

From the northern frieze of the Parthenon (Acropolis Museum, Athens)]

© ACROPOLIS MUSEUM/SOCRATIS MAVROMMATIS

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© DIONYSIS KOURIS

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The Ekklesia The open-air amphitheater on the Pnyx Hill was the meeting place of ancient Athens’ popular assembly. Athenian democracy called for new legislation and decrees to be prepared first by the council (Boule) in the Agora, then brought to the Pnyx for a final decision by the people, determined with a show of hands and a simple majority. In Pericles’ time, the citizens faced the city; ca. 404 BC, a new bema (speakers’ podium) was erected on the opposite side and the audience’s orientation was reversed. Great orators heard here included Demosthenes, who railed against the rising Macedonian imperialism of Philip II.

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Areopagus Hill and Court The prominent rock west of the Acropolis, the Areopagus Hill, was home to the Areopagus Council, Athens’ original central governing body that long pre-dated democracy. In the 5th and 4th c. BC, it acted like a present-day supreme court and special prosecutor’s office, handling intentional homicide and other important cases, conducting its own investigations, and assisting in times of crisis. It served as a check on the Assembly and thus safeguarded democracy at the highest level. The members of this highly respected supreme court were ex-archons (similar to former senators), carefully vetted by other top leaders and selected for life.

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Ostraca A powerful tool in the democratic system of ancient Athens was the practice of ostracism, through which a leader or other influential figure deemed a threat to the state could be banished from the city for ten years.

Citizens voted for such exile by scratching the name of their nominee on a potsherd or ostracon, a ubiquitous form of rubbish in a pre-plastic era when most ordinary containers were made of clay. Ostraca discovered dumped in the Agora and the Kerameikos after ostracism votes have revealed the names of some of Athens’ most prominent figures, including Themistocles, Pericles and Cimon.

[Ostraca, Museum of the Ancient Agora]

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Ancient Athenian democracy took root and flourished largely thanks to the power of its navy, spearheaded by triremes – light, fast attack ships, propelled by three banks of rowers, which could ram and “hole” enemy ships, putting them out of action or sending them down to the watery depths of Poseidon’s realm, the ancient equivalent of Davy Jones’ Locker. Athens reinforced its democratic ideals, even as it headed the Delian League and later promoted its own increasingly imperialistic goals, by requiring its citizens, both rich and poor, to serve shoulder to shoulder as rowers, essentially stress-bonding them into a unified force.

[Penteconter (50-oared) warship. Detail from the interior of an attic black-figure dinos (550-530 BC, Louvre Museum, Paris)]

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© GETTY IMAGES/IDEAL IMAGE

An Ancient SHIP

Kritios Boy Athens’ evolving social and political character in the late 6th and early 5th centuries BC is reflected in the statue of the Kritios Boy, in the Acropolis Museum, carved sometime after 480 BC in a transitional Archaic-to-Classical form termed the Severe Style. This Athenian youth (ephebos) seems to reveal an increasing emphasis on idealism, wherein the individual is less important than the whole, just as Athenian citizens were coming to devote themselves more selflessly to their democratic state. Gone is the “Archaic Smile,” while the body is more natural, relaxed, with its weight successfully shown resting on one leg.

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It is run by the E-learning Program of the Continuing Education Center of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUoA) and has already started its mission by describing and depicting the Peloponnese and Attica.

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Sports for all

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Τhe Medusa Model LOOKING AT WOMEN IN POWER From antiquity to the present, women wielding authority have been characterized as unnatural versions of their sex. Is it possible to move beyond stereotypes and accept new perceptions of female stewardship?

BY MARY BEARD

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n 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy about a nation of women – and women only. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful, brilliantly organized in everything from its sustainable agriculture and delicious food to its social services and education. And it all depends on one miraculous innovation.

At the very beginning of Herland’s history, the founding mothers had somehow perfected the technique of parthenogenesis, giving birth to baby girls with no intervention from men at all.

There is no sex in Herland.

The story is all about the disruption of this world when three American males discover it: Vandyck Jennings, Jeff Margrave and the truly appalling Terry Nicholson. When they first arrive, Terry refuses to believe that there aren’t some men around somewhere, pulling the strings – because how, after all, could you imagine women running anything? When, eventually, he has to accept that this is exactly what they are doing, he decides that what Herland needs is a bit of sex and a bit of male 86

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mastery. The story ends with Terry being unceremoniously deported after one of his bids for mastery –this one in the bedroom– goes horribly wrong.

There are all kinds of irony to this tale. One joke that Perkins Gilman plays throughout is that the women simply don’t recognize their own achievements. When confronted by their three uninvited male visitors (who lie somewhere on the spectrum between spineless and scumbag), they tend to defer to the men’s competence, knowledge and expertise; they are slightly in awe of the male world outside. Although they have made a utopia, they think they have messed it all up.

As well as describing imaginary communities of women doing things their way, Herland raises larger questions, from knowing how to recognize female power to the sometimes funny, sometimes frightening stories we tell ourselves about it, and indeed have told ourselves about it, in the West at least, for thousands of years.

I’ve talked before about the ways women get silenced in public discourse.

We need only think of Elizabeth Warren being prevented from reading out

Š AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

This text is an edited version of a speech given by the author as part of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures 2017 Series, the original transcript of which was published in the London Review of Books Vol. 39, No. 6, in March 2017.

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a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate. What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced, but that several men over the next couple of days did read the letter out and were neither excluded nor shut up. True, they were trying to support Warren. But the rules of speech that applied to her didn’t appear to apply to Bernie Sanders, or the three other male senators who did the same.

The right to be heard is crucially important. But I want to think more generally about how we have learned to look at women who exercise power, or try to; I want to explore the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms; and I want to think harder about how and why the conventional definitions of “power” (or for that matter of “knowledge,” “expertise” and “authority”) that we carry round in our heads have tended to exclude women.

It is happily the case that in 2017 there are more women in what we would all probably agree are “powerful” positions than there were 10, let alone 50, years ago. It’s still a clear minority – but there are more. But my basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male.

To put this the other way round, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man. The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes-horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female appear more male. It’s that idea of the divorce between women and power that made Melissa McCarthy’s parodies of Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live so effective. It’s said that these annoyed President Trump more than most satires on his regime, because “he doesn’t like his people to appear weak.” Decode that, and what it actually means is that he doesn’t like his men to be parodied by and as women. Weakness comes with a female gender.

Women are perceived as belonging outside power. A headline in the London Times in early January captured this won-

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derfully. Above an article reporting on the possibility that women might soon gain the positions of Metropolitan Police commissioner, chair of the BBC Trust and bishop of London, it read: “Women Prepare for a Power Grab in Church, Police and BBC.” Now, I realize that headline writers are paid to attract attention. But the idea that even under those circumstances you could present the prospect of a woman becoming bishop of London as a “power grab” (and that probably thousands upon thousands of readers didn’t bat an eyelid when they read it) is a sign that we need to look a lot more carefully at our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship with power. If we want to give women as a gender their place on the inside of the structures of power, we have to think harder about how and why we think as we do. If there is a cultural template which works to disempower women, what exactly is it and where do we get it from?

At this point, it may be useful to start thinking about the classical world.

More often than we may realize, and in sometimes quite shocking ways, we are still using Greek idioms to represent the idea of women in, and out of, power. There is, at first sight, a rather impressive array of powerful female characters in the repertoire of Greek myth and storytelling. In real life, ancient women had no formal political rights, and precious little economic or social independence; in some cities, such as Athens, respectable married women were almost never seen outside the home. But Athenian drama in particular, and the Greek imagination more generally, has offered our imaginations a series of unforgettable women: Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone.

They are not, however, role models – far from it. They are monstrous hybrids, who aren’t – in the Greek sense – women at all. And the unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered, put back in their place. In fact, it is the unquestionable mess that women make of power in Greek myth that justifies their exclusion from it in real life, and justifies the rule of men.

Go back to one of the very earliest surviving Greek dramas, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and you will find that its

The head of Medusa was one of the most potent ancient symbols of male mastery; of the dangers that the very possibility of female power represented.

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Caravaggio, “Medusa”, detail (c.1597, Ufizzi, Florence)

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Eugène Delacroix, “Medea”, detail (1862, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille).

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anti-heroine, Clytemnestra, horribly encapsulates that ideology. She becomes the effective ruler of her city while her husband is away and, in the process, she ceases to be a woman.

Aeschylus repeatedly uses male terms to refer to her. In the very first lines, her character is described as androboulon – something like “with manly purpose,” or “thinking like a man.” And, of course, the power that Clytemnestra illegitimately claims is put to destructive purpose when she murders Agamemnon on his return. The patriarchal order is only restored when Clytemnestra’s children conspire to kill her.

There’s a similar logic in the stories of that mythical race of Amazon women. This monstrous regiment always threatened to overrun the civilized world of Greek men. An enormous amount of modern feminist energy has been wasted on trying to prove that these Amazons did once exist. Dream on. The hard truth is that the Amazons were a Greek male myth. The basic message was that the only good Amazon was a dead one – or one that had been mastered in the bedroom. The underlying point was that it was the duty of men to save civilization from the rule of women.

There are occasional examples where it might look as if we are getting a more positive version of ancient female power. One staple of the modern stage is Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. Written in the 5th c. BC, it appears to be a perfect mixture of highbrow classics, feisty feminism, a stop-the-war agenda and a good sprinkling of smut. It’s the story of a sex strike, set in the contemporary world of ancient Athens.

Under Lysistrata’s leadership, the women try to force their husbands to end the war with Sparta by refusing to sleep with them. The men go around for most of the play with enormously inconvenient erections. Eventually, unable to bear their encumbrances any longer, they give in to the women’s demands and make peace. Girl power at its finest, you might think.

Athena, the patron deity of the city, is often brought in on the positive side, too. Doesn’t the simple fact that she was female suggest a more nuanced version of the imagined sphere of women’s influence? I’m afraid not.

If you scratch the surface and go back to the 5th-c. context,

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Lysistrata looks very different. It’s not just that the original audience and actors consisted entirely of men. It’s also the fact that, in the end, the fantasy of women’s power is firmly stamped down. In the final scene, the peace process consists of bringing onto the stage a naked woman who is metaphorically carved up in an uncomfortably pornographic way between the men of Athens and Sparta.

As for Athena, it’s true that in those binary charts of gods and goddesses that we make for ourselves, she appears on the female side. But the crucial thing about her in the ancient context is that she is another of those difficult hybrids. In the Greek sense, she’s not a woman at all. For a start, she’s dressed as a warrior, when fighting was exclusively male work. She’s also a virgin, when the raison d’être of the female sex was breeding new citizens.

And she wasn’t even born of a mother; she sprung directly from the head of her father, Zeus. It was almost as if Athena, woman or not, offered a glimpse of an ideal male world in which women could not just be kept in their place but dispensed with entirely.

The point is simple but important: if we go back to the beginnings of Western history, we find a radical separation between women and power. But one item of Athena’s costume brings this right up to our own day. At the very center of her armor is the image of a female head. This is the head of Medusa, and it was one of the most potent ancient symbols of male mastery of the dangers that the very possibility of female power represented.

It’s no accident that we find her decapitated, her head proudly paraded as an accessory by this decidedly unfemale female deity.

There are many ancient variations on Medusa’s story. One famous version has her as a beautiful woman raped by Poseidon in a temple of Athena, who promptly transformed her, as punishment for the sacrilege, into a monstrous creature. It later became the task of the hero Perseus to kill this woman, and he cut her head off using his shiny shield as a mirror so as to avoid having to look directly at her. At first he used the head as a weapon since – even in death – it retained the capacity to petrify; but he then presented it to Athena, who displayed G R E E C E IS

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Although unforgettable, Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone are not role models – far from it. They are monstrous hybrids, who aren’t – in the Greek sense – women at all.

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it on her own armor (one message being: take care not to look directly at the goddess).

What’s extraordinary is that this beheading remains even now a cultural symbol of opposition to women’s power. Angela Merkel’s features have again and again been superimposed on Caravaggio’s image. In one of the sillier outbursts in this vein, a column in the magazine of the Police Federation of England and Wales called Theresa May the “Medusa of Maidenhead.”

“The Medusa comparison might be a bit strong,” the Daily Express responded: “We all know that Mrs May has beautifully coiffed hair.” But May got off lightly compared with Dilma Rousseff, who had to open a major Caravaggio show in São Paolo. The Medusa was naturally in it, and Rousseff standing in front of the very painting proved an irresistible photo opportunity.

But it’s with Hillary Clinton that we see the Medusa theme at its starkest and nastiest. Predictably Trump’s supporters produced a great number of images showing her with snaky locks. But the most horribly memorable of them adapted Cellini’s bronze, a much better fit than the Caravaggio because it wasn’t just a head: it also included the heroic male adversary and killer. All you needed to do was superimpose Trump’s face on that of Perseus, and give Clinton’s features to the severed head (in the interests of taste, I guess, the mangled body on which Perseus tramples in the original was omitted). This scene of Perseus-Trump brandishing the dripping, oozing head of Medusa-Clinton was very much part of the everyday, domestic American decorative world: you could buy it on T-shirts and tank tops, on coffee mugs, on laptop sleeves and tote bags. It may take a moment or two to take in that normalization of gendered violence, but if you were ever doubtful about the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded or unsure of the continued strength of classical ways of formulating and justifying it – well, I give you Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.

It isn’t enough, however, to rest the case there without

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saying what we might actually do. What would it take to resituate women on the inside of power? Here I think we have to distinguish between an individual perspective and a more communal, general one. If we look at some of the women who have “made it,” we can see that the tactics and strategies behind their success don’t merely come down to aping male idioms. One thing that many of these women share is a capacity to turn the symbols that usually disempower women to their own advantage. Margaret Thatcher seems to have done that with her handbags, so that eventually the most stereotypically female accessory became a verb of political power: as in “to handbag.”

Many women could, I’m sure, share perspectives and tricks like this.

But the major issues I’ve been trying to confront aren’t solved by tips on how to exploit the status quo.

And I don’t think patience is likely to be the answer either, though gradual change very likely will take place. In fact, given that women in the UK have only had the vote for a hundred years, we shouldn’t forget to congratulate ourselves for the revolution that we have all, women and men, brought about. That said, if the deep cultural structures legitimating women’s exclusion are as I have argued, gradualism is likely to take too long for me, thank you very much. We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women aren’t perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn’t it power that we need to redefine rather than women?

Even if we restrict our sights to national politics, the question of the way we judge women’s success within it is tricky.

There are plenty of league tables charting the proportion of women within national legislatures. At the very top comes Rwanda, where more than 60 per cent of the members of the legislature are women, while the UK is almost 50 places down, at roughly 30 per cent. Strikingly, the Saudi Arabian Consultative Assembly has a higher proportion of women than the US Congress. It’s hard not to lament some of these figures and applaud others, and a lot has rightly been made of the role of

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The trousers worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female appear more male.

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To put it another way, if women aren’t perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn’t it power that we need to redefine rather than women?

women in post-civil war Rwanda. But I do wonder if, in some of “mansplaining” (despite the intense dislike of the term felt places, the presence of large numbers of women in the nationby many men)? It hits home for us because it points straight to al legislature means that that is where the power is not. what it feels like not to be taken seriously: a bit like when I get I’m also not sure that we’re being quite straight with ourlectured on Roman history on Twitter. selves about why we want women in parliaments. A number of So should we be optimistic about change when we think studies point to the role of women politicians in promoting legabout what power is and what it can do, and women’s engageislation in women’s interests (in childcare, for example, equal ment with it? Maybe, we should be a little. I’m struck, for exampay and domestic violence). A recent report from the Fawcett ple, by the fact that one of the most influential political moveSociety suggested a link between the 50/50 balance between ments of the last few years, Black Lives Matter, was founded by women and men in the Welsh Assembly and the number of three women; few of us, I suspect, would recognize any of their times “women’s issues” were raised there. I’m certainly not names, but together they had the power to get things done in a going to complain about childcare and the rest getting a fair different way. airing, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea that such things conI’m not sure that culturally we’ve got anywhere near subtinue to be perceived as “women’s issues,” and – for me at least verting those foundational stories of power that serve to keep – they aren’t the main reasons we want more women in parwomen out of it, and turning them instead to our own advanliaments. Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly tage, as Thatcher did with her handbag. I have been playing unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we the part of the pedant, objecting to Lysistrata being played as if do so; and we simply can’t afford to do without women’s experit were about girl power (maybe that’s exactly what we should tise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care. If be doing). There have been all kinds of well-known feminist that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must mean attempts over the last 50 years or more to reclaim Medusa for (social change always has its losers as well as its winners), I’m female power – not to mention the use of her as the Versace happy to look those men in the eye. logo – but it’s made not a blind bit of difference to the way she But this is still treating power as an elite thing, coupled to has been used in attacks on female politicians. public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called “leadThe power of those traditional narratives is very nicely, ership,” and often, though not always, to a degree of celebrity. though fatalistically, captured by Perkins Gilman. There is a It’s also treating power very narrowly as something only the sequel to Herland, in which Vandyck decides to escort Terry few – mostly men – can possess or wield. On those terms, womback home to Ourland, taking with him his wife from Heren as a gender – not as some individuals – are, by definition, land, Ellador: it’s called With Her in Ourland. In truth, Ourexcluded from it. You can’t easily fit women into a structure land doesn’t show itself off very well, not least because Ellathat is already coded as male; you have to change the strucdor is introduced to it in the middle of World War I. Before ture. That means thinking about power long, the couple, having ditched Terry, differently. It means decoupling it from decide to go back to Herland. By now public prestige. It means thinking colVan and Ellador are expecting a baby, laboratively, thinking about the power and – you may have guessed it – the of followers as well as leaders. It means, last words of this second novella are: above all, thinking about power as an “And in due time a son was born to attribute or even a verb (“to power”), us.” Perkins Gilman must have been not as a possession: what I have in mind well aware that there was no need for ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mary Beard is widely regarded as Britain’s is the ability to be effective, to make a another sequel. Any reader in tune best-known classicist. A Professor of difference in the world and to be taken with the logic of the Western tradition Classics at the University of Cambridge, she’s the classics editor of The Times seriously, together as much as individuwould have been able to predict exactly Literary Supplement and author of the ally. It’s power in that sense that many who would be in charge of Herland in blog “A Don’s Life,” which appears in The Times as a regular column. women feel they don’t have – and that 50 years’ time. they want. Why the popular resonance That boy.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

Although nationalism is at present the dominant global ideology, it wasn’t so in the past and there’s no compelling reason to think that it will remain so in the future.

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he world is changing in radical ways: perhaps no platitude is more hackneyed than this one. In reality, the world is always changing, always in flux. Yet there is an important difference between world-systemic shifts, such as the Industrial Revolution, and more common, quotidian types of change – and there are many indications that the type of change taking place today falls into the first rather than the second category. Hence the question posed in this brief essay: how will the technological revolution currently underway affect the political organization of the world? Put otherwise, is nationalism on its way out or, on the contrary, is it on the rise? Discussing nationalism is complicated by the fact that it is, in fact, a concept with multiple meanings. Let me point to four such distinct, yet inter-related, dimensions to the term.

Nationalism is a system of global political organization that entails the parceling of the earth into distinct nation-states. Borders separating these states are meant to be permanently fixed and stable, while sovereignty within the states is considered inviolable. Irrespective of whether authority is democratic (i.e., conferred via free elections) or not, it is always exercised in the name of the nation.

A young supporter cheers and screams along with the adults around him during a rally for Donald Trump at the Grand Junction Regional Airport, Grand Junction, Colorado, Oct. 18, 2016.

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A little boy waits for the start of a rally with U.S. President Donald Trump at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. March 20, 2017

But what is the “nation” exactly? Nationalism also refers to an exclusive relationship between the state and a community of people (the “nation”), whose membership confers certain rights and obligations that differentiate members from non-members. The nature of this community, its features (e.g., language) and origins (e.g., common ancestry), as well as the criteria for inclusion in it, vary across states (and also within the same states over time). What remains constant is the fact the nation is considered the supreme community, in whose name the authority of the state is exercised.

A third aspect is that nationalism is based on the conception of a single identity that supersedes all other individual identities within a state’s boundaries. For example, an individual in the USA can be simultaneously Christian, African-American, and a woman. Nevertheless, her most important identity is American. This identity is endowed with a set of legal characteristics that define a broad set of crucial attributes, such as the right to live and work in the United States.

Lastly, nationalism is an ideology stating that all previous 96

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dimensions (global political organization, community and identity) are both natural and the only ones possible. Indeed, it is very hard to even conceive of a different system of global organization, a different type of community linked to a state or a different overriding identity. One of the things that makes the claims of an organization such as the Islamic State so foreign to most people is not merely their extreme violence, it’s their objective of establishing a state that would be based on the Ummah, the community of all Muslims, as opposed to the current nation-states of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and others.

However, there’s nothing natural about nationalism. Although it is at present the dominant global ideology, it wasn’t so in the past and there’s no compelling reason to think that it will remain so in the future. The crucial question is, therefore, this: how does technological change impact nationalism?

In his important book “Nationalism and Social Communication,” first published in 1953, the American political scientist Karl Deutsch argued that nationalism was directly connected to the shape and range of the means of communication, a

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Globalization is speeding up communication capabilities and the transportation of people, ideas and goods, rendering national borders more and more permeable and less consequential. This is an ongoing process that seems irreversible.

power in many more places. The obvious outcome of such a point echoed in a different way by Benedict Anderson, also development will be their inability to deliver on their promisa political scientist, in his groundbreaking book “Imagined es. Populism is a protest movement and lacks a constructive Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Napolicy agenda. It certainly can’t turn back the clock. One postionalism,” published in 1983. sible outcome of their failure to achieve goals might be furIf their arguments are right, the more interconnected the ther social unrest, perhaps escalating into major international world becomes, the less politically fragmented it will be. In crises. other words, states will merge into larger entities, a process In the second scenario, once populist governments realize we are already witnessing in the greatest political experiment their inability to deliver, they will execute a U-turn, become of our time, the European integration process. In a parallel mainstream and, like any mainstream government, adjust to way, the process of globalization is speeding up communicathe changes. The world will grudgingly but peacefully adapt to tion capabilities and the transportation of people, ideas and the new circumstances. Nationalism will fade away. goods, rendering national borders more and more permeable Lastly, in the third scenario, major new technological adand less consequential. This is an ongoing process that seems vances will produce huge productivity gains and spread their irreversible. benefits among broader segments of the population, helping Inevitably, change causes discontent and produces losto generate a virtuous cycle whereby technology and politics ers. At the same time, it undermines established ideas, will march hand-in-hand – picture, for instance, the way since these no longer correspond to the surrounding reality countries have moved out of poverty. Political change will be and fail to make good sense of the world. These two impliswift (remember the end of communism) and nationalism will cations of change, the material and the ideational, feed congive way to a new system of global political organization and a flict. Seen from this perspective, political developments such new corresponding ideology. as the election of Donald Trump to the helm of the world’s In all three scenarios, change will happen, but with varying sole superpower or Britain’s decision to abandon the Europedegrees of accompanying conflict. It is natural to expect that an Union can be interpreted as populist revolts arising from the current way of global organization based on nation-states uncertainties brought about by rapid and disruptive change. will be fundamentally revised. Existing states will merge into Clearly, the question is whether these kinds of political and larger and perhaps overlapping entities. Inevitably, the meansocial reactions can stem the tide of change. In the medium, ing of citizenship will change to reflect and certainly the long term (short of an these tectonic shifts. This doesn’t mean unforeseen disaster of global proporcurrent national identities will vanish; tions), the current trend of technolograther, they’ll take on a different staically fueled globalization appears untus and function within the new order. stoppable. There’s just no way to undo Politically, the world will move to retechnological innovation, very much in semble something like modern India the same way that the invention of, say, where strong sub-national identities writing was irreversible, despite its ABOUT THE AUTHOR (e.g., Tamil) based on distinct languagtremendous and extremely disruptive Stathis N. Kalyvas is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale es, local traditions, and self-identificasocial impact.

University and author of “Modern Greece: tion coexist with an overarching Indian But how about the short term?

What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is Director identity. If my analysis is correct, the Looking at the near future, it’s possible of the Program on Order, Conflict and current resurgence of nationalism as we to sketch out three different short-term Violence and Co-director of the Program in Hellenic Studies, both at Yale. A fellow know it today is only an indicator of its scenarios. of the American Academy of Arts and eventual demise. What remains uncerIn the first one, populist reactions Sciences, he specializes in the study of civil conflict and political violence. tain is the pace of change and the level grow exponentially and escalate into of conflict that we will encounter. violent conflict. Populists come to G R E E C E IS

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan poses with children after a rally on April 15, 2017, in Istanbul, on the eve of the constitutional referendum.

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“Children of Zeus” An unfolding Turkish tragedy.

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By Sezin Oney

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ormer Turkish justice minister and current government spokesman Bekir Bozdağ recently declared that “There is not one child of Allah who has been arrested because of a tweet in Turkey.” Atilla Taş, a pop singer in prison since last year because of his newspaper column and social media posts, poked fun during his trial, held a few days after Bozdağ’s declaration: “But, I am under arrest for my tweets: Am I the child of Zeus?”

There are many children of Zeus in Turkey. Independent news site Diken has calculated (using the interior ministry’s own data) that approximately seven people per day are taken into custody for their social media posts. As in the case of mythology, there are many diverse types of children of Zeus. Unlike Taş, most of the recently detained “social media criminals” are just regular folk – not popular figures. It is as if a Bermuda Triangle constantly relocates itself with100

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in Turkey, sweeping in new “criminals.”

They are “criminals of thought,” to use a term from the past. I used to wonder what that meant when I was a kid. My aunt, Sevgi Soysal, a prominent author and journalist in Turkey in the 1970s, was a “criminal of thought.” She was imprisoned and exiled within Turkey for her writings as a feminist and left-wing activist, and also as a vocal critic of the army. She “thought too much” for the taste of the military junta of the time.

She died when she was 40, falling ill a few years after she was released from prison. That was before I was born and now I have a reply to my childhood puzzle: what on earth is a criminal of thought? As I approach 40, I finally do have the privilege of grasping what it means.

A criminal of thought is a person who thinks and expresses these thoughts – and these thoughts are not liked by the “reigning Gods of the times.”

Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge on July 16, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey.

The “Gods” have changed but there are still “criminals of thought.”

In the 1960s, 70s and 90s, it was the army that was “the God.” That “divine influence” continued well into the 2000s. But, there were many who aspired to become Gods, just as in mythological tales. None of the aspirants actually wanted to change the status quo, the rules of the game where the winner takes all. And they put the blame on mortals, the mere passersby, whose actual crime was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And they were also – God forbid – thinking!

“Under normal circumstances,” Turkey had strong reasons to both mourn

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Around 200,000 people have been purged from their jobs in the state – they are called the “civilian dead” as their citizenship numbers have been blacklisted and they cannot have access to any state services, or even find a job.

and celebrate together in the aftermath of the coup attempt of July 15, 2016: to mourn the 259 victims and that a coup attempt could still occur in 21st-century Turkey, but also to celebrate that, once and for all, a coup could finally be averted in Turkey because of popular consent. Nevertheless, old and new “Gods” think alike and the new ones had other things in mind in the aftermath of the coup attempt than reinforcing Turkey’s democracy.

The state of emergency declared on July 20 has been continuously extended. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signaled that there may be no end to it until the presidential elections in 2019. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government frequently cites France as an example of a democracy that lives under a state of emergency for the sake of ensuring security. But what goes unmentioned is that France’s state of emergency is nothing like Turkey’s.

Confiscating private property, cancelling passports, jailing newborns with their mothers right after labor and incommunicado detention have become common practices. No wonder Turkey ranked 99th out of 113 countries in the 2016 Rule of Law of Index of the World Justice Project, topped by Myanmar and followed by Kenya.

In total 60,000 people have been imprisoned, accused of “coup links” and “links with terrorist organizations.”

Around 200,000 people have been purged from their jobs in the state – these bureaucrats are called the “civilian dead” as their citizenship numbers have been blacklisted and they cannot have access to any state services. This means their passports have been cancelled, they cannot access health ser-

vices and because they are “marked,” the private sector will also refuse to employ them.

There is no shortage of stories of rights abuses to write about. However, the number of active journalists needed to ask these questions and do investigative journalism keeps dwindling.

According to P24, an independent journalism network based in Istanbul, there are 171 journalists in prison across Turkey. It is difficult keep track of the exact number of detained and arrested journalists under the draconian judicial and security measures imposed by the state of emergency; and it is even more difficult to monitor the detention and imprisonment conditions of these journalists. Journalists in Turkey have always been the “usual suspects”; their jobs are de facto the definition of “a thought crime” because they write, report and reflect.

Recently another profession started to come under fire: human rights activism. As the anniversary of coup attempt approached, ten human rights activists were detained. Eight of them, including Amnesty International’s Turkey director İdil Eser, have been in prison since July.

Among them, Peter Steudtner, who is German, is reportedly passing his time teaching yoga to other inmates after an initial period of solitary confinement, and Ali Gharavi, a Swede, is being denied access to his homoeopathic medicine. Yoga and homoeopathic medicine are quite alien concepts in Turkey’s prisons, especially since the state of emergency was declared. Another German citizen, journalist Deniz Yücel, correspondent of Die Welt in Turkey, has been in prison since February 2017, in solitary confinement.

According to Bundestag data, 44 German citizens are in prison in Turkey on various politically related charges. Every other day, Chancellor Angela Merkel is portrayed as a Nazi by pro-government media while top political figures accuse Germany of plotting coups against Turkey. But Germany happens to be one of Turkey’s main trading partners and the two countries share decades-long, close diplomatic bonds.

A NATO member, a European Union candidate, a strategic partner of the United States, putting more journalists in prison than the rest of the world and rounding up citizens of its closest allies on charges of espionage. That’s an anomaly. An oxymoron. But that’s today’s Turkey.

On the government front, there is lots of doublespeak. President Erdoğan and all leading figures of the AKP reiterate that Turkey’s democratic credentials far surpass those of western countries. And that there are no journalists in prison – only coup plotters and terrorists. And that systemic transition to “presidentialism, alla Turca,” namely a “Turkish type of presidentialism unique to Turkey, tailor-made for Erdoğan,” will strengthen parliament and democracy. Meanwhile, the education system is silently being degraded, with the concept of “jihad” introduced to and the theory of evolution ousted from secondary education.

Beyond “crimes of thought,” “Children of Zeus,” a true Turkish tragedy, is unfolding day by day. It is impossible to predict the finale of this tragedy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sezin Öney is a journalist and a political scientist from Turkey, based in Thessaloniki and Istanbul. Formerly, she was based in Budapest, where her key interest in populism was sparked about a decade ago. She studied international relations, nationalism, Jewish history and comparative politics.

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Fresh Voices From Greece to Tanzania, 10 post-millennials take a stand on political participation, freedom of expression and the guiding principles of democracy.

By Va s s i l i k i m a l o u c H o u & Daf ni par asc hi

Aahil Velani | Tanzania Aahil has just finished high school and will start studying Aerospace Engineering. He lives in a country where power has remained in the hands of the same ruling party since independence from colonialism. Political participation is restricted to voting, and any form of protest and expression is prohibited.

“For me, democracy is a system whereby the majority of the population in a group, organization or country elects a person of authority who then makes the decisions for the members.�

Is there a political participation crisis in your country?

Tanzania has been ruled by the same party since independence in 1953, and the most recent elections, in 2015, were believed to have been manipulated. Whenever the public tries to speak against the government, or get involved in decision-making, they are faced with severe consequences.

What alternative forms of political participation would be more appealing to young people?

Social media is a very powerful tool that is available to us, and establishing platforms to use it to influence (perhaps through online protests) the politics in the country is something that has always appealed to the youth. However, once again, in a country where saying something against the government can land you in tons of trouble, people have never really thought of moving forward with the idea.

Are people your age angry about political decisions and actions being carried out by the older generation?

Most certainly. The decisions of yesterday have consequenc-

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es today. Take, for instance, the principles of our constitution; when it was made years ago, no one thought of the implications for the present-day world. By law, the president of the country selects the chairman of the national electoral commission, who has ultimate power over the elections in the country and can nullify election results and ask for recounts without being questioned.

Αre women and men treated and represented equally in politics in your country?

This is something Tanzania has been quite good at. There is a balance between men and women in the country.

Currently, we have a male President and a female Vice President.

Š Marcus Walters, Twitter: @mrmarcuswalters / Instagram: @marcuswalters / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

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SIMONA POCIUTE | LITHUANIA Simona, 22 years old, is currently pursuing her Masters’ degree in European Affairs in France after having obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science. She is from Lithuania, a country with a young parliamentary democracy that was established following independence from the USSR.

“To me, the meaning of democracy lies in the rule of the people, by the people and for the people.

The essence of democratic rule is that it should bring out as many voices as possible.”

Do you believe there is a crisis of political participation in your country?

People my age are disappointed when they try to come into the system and change it for the better; they face staunch resistance because the system (as it is) benefits the incumbents.

In Lithuania, as almost everywhere else in Europe, people are looking for alternatives to the mainstream parties. In last year’s election, we elected the Peasants’ Party and nearly half of the Members of Parliament were first timers. Although only 13 percent say they trust the Parliament, people still vote in order to voice that distrust.

Are men and women treated and represented equally in the political sphere in your country?

How, if at all, does education in your country encourage political participation, and in what ways?

Many voters believe in stereotypes and are misinformed about the LGBTQ community.

Only one openly gay Member of Parliament has ever been elected.

The youth programs of most political parties are open to all young people. However, formal education does not encourage political participation since, in the official curriculum, there is little space for it. © Jack Bedford, Instagram: @jackbedford_ / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

How do people your age feel about the political decisions and actions being carried out by the older generation?

Women are not equally represented; the dialogue about gender equality is non-existent.

Do you believe that the LGBTQ community is treated and represented equally in the political sphere in your country?

Has globalization reduced your personal impact on political outcomes in your country?

As a student studying abroad, I believe that I’m on the winning side of globalization. In Lithuania, international experience is valued: globalization has made my young voice more resonant and respected than it would have been had I studied at home.

Sotiris Tsitos Greece Sotiris is a high school student living in Elefsina, a suburb of Athens.

He has participated in a number of political protests in the context of the ongoing economic crisis in the country.

“Democracy for me equals freedom. It’s the best way to make decisions in a social group. Young people, however, appear to be ignoring the power of the ballot and are remaining politically inactive, a trend which can clearly be seen in election statistics. As for me, I welcome taking part. If elections were called today, I would be more than proud to vote, as I have decided on a direction in which my country should go. I think the main problem today is the resentment that younger people feel towards the older generations, especially when we consider that these people have left our economy in a vicious cycle of debt which may affect not only us but our children as well.”

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Š Hannah Warren, Twitter : @_hannah_warren_ / Instagram: @hanwarr / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

JUSTINE PÉDRON | FRANCE Justine, 20 years old, studies Economics and Law in Paris. She is from Bretagne in Northern France, a region with an active independence movement. Following the recent election of Emmanuel Macron, France is in the midst of renewed debates about its role in the EU and terrorism.

“Democracy is the idea that individuals living in the same society are free to make decisions about their own future and that of their community by confronting different opinions and beliefs.”

Do you believe there is a crisis of political participation in your country?

Personal experience and turn-out rates in the last elections indicate that there is indeed a crisis of participation in France.

People are rejecting traditional parties and criticizing the political “elite” and its ability to improve people’s lives.

If I were to give you a ballot paper right now, could you vote responsibly?

To vote responsibly, it’s necessary to learn about the agenda and the personality of the candidates. I think the problem in France is that the media tend to provide largely subjective information, which make it harder to become well informed.

Does education in your country encourage political participation and, if so, in what ways?

In French schools, there is a class on our political and legal institutions and the rights and duties of citizens. However, it is quite superficial and is not considered as important as other courses. The content of the course isn’t extensive; it doesn’t even explore the EU system.

Do young people find traditional ideologies and institutions such as political parties and unions appealing?

I think there’s only a minority of young people still engaged in political parties and unions. Most young people participate in discussions on the internet or sign petitions.

Moreover, traditional ideologies of left and right are being replaced by oppositions between conservatives/progressives or anti-globalization/pro-globalization groups.

What alternative forms of participation would be more appealing to young people?

I think everything linked to new technologies, like online voting or online discussions with governmental institution, is more appealing to young people.

Are people your age resentful of political decisions and actions being carried out by the older generation?

It’s not just an older generation, it’s the same politicians who always come back (among them Sarkozy, Juppé, Cambadélis and the Le Pen family). There is little in the way of renewal or fresh ideas. Macron embodies that desire for fresh ideas and to change old concepts.

Are women and men treated and represented equally in the political sphere in your country?

Gender discrimination has been reduced through laws and through evolving mentalities. However, we are still far from equality, as women are relegated to areas considered “womanly,” such as education or health.

Do you think that the LGBTQ community is treated and represented equally in the political sphere in your country?

Heterosexuality is still the norm in France, even if, legally, the LGBTQ community is more protected than before. They still represent a minority in politics, even if mentalities are changing somewhat.

Has globalization reduced your personal impact on political outcomes in your country?

Governments are no longer the only relevant actors in politics; they need to contend not only with other governments, but with multinational companies and other entities as well. In this sense, the personal impact of a citizen through national elections is lessened. However, globalization has also created nonconventional modes of participation, such as transnational activism.

FLORIAN MARTINY GREECE Florian, 22 years old, was born in Lebanon of French and British parents but grew up in Greece. Currently enrolled in Film Studies, he couples his interest in the arts with socio-political action.

“Democracy is a system which provides all citizens with equal rights and which allows them to choose their future. In Greece, there is a crisis of political participation, of democracy and of sovereignty. I believe this is due to a gap between the choices of the politicians and the wishes of the citizens. What’s more, globalization has weakened our personal voices; decisions are being made by foreign technocrats. Neither high schools nor universities encourage political participation. It is, however, crucial that young people engage in politics.

Things will only change if our generation realizes the dangers of global warming, excessive consumption and social inequality. It’s up to each individual to become informed and to take action. We need to change our habits and behave more responsibly ”

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GEORGIA COVILL | UNITED KINGDOM Georgia is a university student about to start studying History at the University of East Anglia. As a high school student, she participated in a number of politically related activities, including the Model United Nations program. Across the UK, the Brexit Referendum has changed the political landscape.

“Democracy is participation at all levels of political life. It does not just entail voting in an election; it’s also about being able to take part in the available political platforms within your country and choosing to do so.”

Do your peers care about socio-political events, and are they able to participate politically in an informed and responsible manner?

The majority of the people I know don’t really take time to learn about socio-political issues. I think that, if they were brought into a conversation about these matters, they would probably become more interested, but it would be more a case of learning about the issues than participating in an informed and responsible manner.

Does education in your country encourage political participation? If so, in what ways?

Increasingly. There are clear attempts within schools to promote “British Values,” one of these being the exercise of the right to vote. I also know that a majority of schools hold mock elections when a big vote is coming up, which does help to encourage participation.

Are traditional ideologies and institutions (such as political parties and unions) attempting to appeal to young people?

(and thereby become appealing) without people really noticing. It’s clear that parties have now realized they need to reach out to younger generations to get votes. I also think that most young people do still subscribe to one political ideology or another.

Are people your age resentful of political decisions and actions being carried out by the older generation?

Definitely. Just look at the reaction of young people in the UK towards the Brexit vote; I know that a majority of my friends felt betrayed by the vote, as did I.

Do you think that the LGBTQ community is treated and represented equally in the political sphere in your country?

For such a large country, the UK has very little representation at the elected level, although I think that the treatment of the LGBTQ community is improving and I do feel that those within it are treated equally within the political system.

Has globalization reduced your personal impact on political outcomes in your country?

No, it has made my personal impact larger.

So much focus is on foreign policy that the way in which you vote has a large impact on the global community. Globalization has also increased the impact on the people of those political outcomes themselves; Brexit is a case in point.

I think that they are constantly modernizing

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ATA KOLDAY | TURKEY An International Baccalaureate student who hopes to study engineering, Ata lives in Izmir, Turkey. Political power there is in the hands of an increasingly authoritative regime led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the result that public political participation is limited, as is freedom of expression.

“Democracy is a functioning system where all individuals of a certain nation can exercise their right of freedom of speech equally; it is this ability which forms the fundamental bedrock of a contemporary civilization.”

Do you feel there is a crisis of political participation in your country?

Because of the recent crisis in Turkey regarding voter fraud, a lot of people do not believe their voices are being heard equally in the voting process; therefore, there is a surge in the non-participation movement all across Turkey. This was true even in the most recent referendum, which was set to change the way we are governed.

© Alice Mollon, Twitter @alicemollon / Instagram @ajmollon / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

What alternative forms of participation would be more appealing to young people?

Petitioning the government, boycotting certain acts by the government, and non-violent rallies by people who just want to get their voices heard are some of the alternative forms of political participation that appeal to the young. People should be able to make their voices heard in any way they choose to do so.

Are women and men treated and represented equally in politics in your country?

There are currently 546 MPs in Turkey and only 78 (14.29%) of them are women. That is a very low number, and the fact that 43 out of 81 cities in Turkey only have male MPs in the Grand National Assembly is also noteworthy. I do believe that there is a bias against women in the elections, but it is also about women not getting the education they need to pursue a political career in government.

Will your generation be able to change the political landscape in your country for the better?

After the April referendum, a significant amount of hope seems lost because, as of 2019, nearly all of the ruling power will rest solely with the will of the President. The referendum got rid of our checks and balances; because of that, a lot of people think that by the time we grow up, there won’t be anything left to save.

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JASON MARKATOS | GREECE Jason just graduated from the German School of Athens and will go on to study Civil Engineering. Politics and social studies have been of interest to him for a long time; he has participated in numerous high school activities aimed at enhancing political participation among today’s youth.

“For me, democracy is something more than a political system, it is a way of thinking, a way of life. It influences our everyday life, from the workplace to social relations.

It is also dynamic in the way it can and should change and evolve constantly.

I see democracy as a socio-political system that has the capacity to evolve according to the people’s will.”

movements than in the past. The general population is both afraid and disappointed.

In your opinion, is there a crisis of political participation in your country?

What alternative forms of political participation do you think would be more appealing to young people than the traditional political institutions we have now?

One needs only to see the statistics from the 2015 elections: only 56% participated in the elections. It is not a matter of perspective; it is a fact. You see fewer and fewer protests or mass

If I were to give you a ballot paper right now, could you vote responsibly?

Although I cannot answer with certainty which party I would support, I do believe I have enough information about each one of them, and I also possess an ideological guideline to assist me. So, to answer your question, with the right amount of research before the elections, yes, I could.

The protest has always been the best example of the power of the people.

Throughout history, it was the power of protest that had the ability to bring about change, not the traditional voting system.

Today, protests are being suppressed more and more by a government fearful of them turning either violent or too influential. Young

people could also organize themselves in groups and associations not related to the major parties. All of this is in fact already happening, although it is actively discouraged by the government.

Do you think globalization has reduced your personal impact on political outcomes in your country?

Generally, that is what globalization does. It deprives people of their free will and makes them feel powerless against a globalized market and the major companies. People lose hope and dedication, and so they fail to participate in politics and hence have no impact whatsoever on the political sphere. Personally, as a Greek graduate student who has just finished the long and arduous task of studying for and taking my national university exams, there has been no time at all for me to take any action or be influential, apart from my participation in some Model United Nations conferences. I cannot, however, blame that on globalization.

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© Ben Javens, Twitter: @BenJavens / Instagram: @benjavens / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

Do your peers care about socio-political events, and are they able to participate politically in an informed and responsible manner?

Unfortunately, I have witnessed a lot of ignorance and lack of interest. Our educational system does not focus on informing and helping teenagers shape their own opinions; it is based on memorization and the reinforcement of a way of political and social thinking which, instead of being unique, mirrors that of the majority of the population.

Are traditional ideologies and institutions (such as political parties and unions) appealing to young people?

GEORGE BANOS | GREECE George was born on Corfu and is currently living in Athens with a view to studying abroad. He has been involved in many exercises in political participation, including the Model United Nations program and a number of forensics and debating activities.

“Democracy is nothing more than freedom. Freedom of expression, of belief, but most of all the freedom of each and every individual to participate in the political life of their country.”

Is there a crisis of political participation in your country?

Yes, there is. Following the failure of our political system and the beginning of the economic recession, people have lost faith in both the system and the parties that represent it.

They don’t believe that their vote will change anything.

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you vote responsibly?

Yes. I have a genuine interest in politics and economics and I care deeply about the future of my country.

For me, however, the main issue is that I don’t have a specific party which adequately represents my political ideology. At this point, I think that I would vote, not based on ideology, but rather based on which party I think has the honesty and dedication to move this country forward.

I think that traditional ideologies will always be the core of politics and will always appeal to certain social groups, including young people. However, I also believe that, during a harsh economic crisis, there’s no room for ideology or political dogma. These turbulent times require political maturity and bipartisan initiatives. This is, unfortunately, something that I think the younger generation has not yet understood.

What alternative forms of political participation would be more appealing to young people?

I think that one of the most neglected sectors of our political system is the local sector. National politics require the ability to understand the bigger picture,

to look far into the future.

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GEORGE EVGENIDIS | GREECE George holds a Political Science degree from Freie Universität Berlin and is currently working as a political correspondent for Greek media.

He participated in the Youth Parliament in Greece, serving as the Prime Minister.

“When talking about democracy, what I would say is that it is a political system in which individuals function within a framework of rights and obligations. The problem with Greece, and with political participation in Greece, is that people feel like their participation in elections or other political processes will change nothing in the course of things.

Thus, they opt out of participation. It’s not that they don’t care; they just feel like the state of play is pretty much defined already. Political participation isn’t really encouraged by the education system, either, although there are some opportunities at university level. However, even these are flawed.

“Political institutions themselves operate in a rather unattractive fashion and do not fully correspond to the new demands of society. Nonetheless, the ideological battle between what you support and what you don’t is always present, and I think that most people do have a particular ideological background and approach. I don’t think there’s any need for new forms of participation. We need instead to work with what we already have but update it, using, for example, the opportunities that social media offer us. Opting for direct democracy here is not the answer; it would create chaos.”

Definitely. Greece’s political past from the beginning of the 1980s onwards has not been something to be proud of. Politics were based on lies and deception. This is partly the reason why we ended up in our current financial situation. I believe that young people do have the right to be angry. Our job opportunities are few, and low salaries will fail to provide for our families.

Many young people today are forced to move abroad for a better quality education and for job opportunities. We are the generation of Greek economic migrants; this proves that our past political leadership has failed us. However, at some point, anger should be replaced with a fighting spirit, a willingness to change things and to help rebuild our country. Young people are angry, but it’s time for that anger to transform itself into hard work.

ABOUT THE AUTHORs

Vassiliki Malouchou studied political science with an emphasis on Euro-American relations at Sciences Po Paris and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in media and communication. Dafni Paraschi is an International Baccalaureate student and aims to study Political Science in the United Kingdom. She has taken part in numerous Model UN conferences as a Student Officer.

ILLUSTRATIONS TURN UP

The illustrations used are part of the #TurnUp campaign, organized by UK party-neutral democracy movement Bite The Ballot and the illustration agency and production company Jelly London, to get more young people to register to vote in the 2017 General Elections. The campaign contributed to an unprecedented youth voter turnout – the highest in over 25 years.

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© Mister Phil Instagram @misterphildraws / @BiteTheBallot @JellyLondon

Young people, however, who cannot see changes in their everyday life, want faster results. Local politics and local initiatives can help change communities and neighbourhoods and can significantly improve the day-to-day lives of their citizens. Ι believe, therefore, that young people would find participation in local politics more appealing, and our political leadership should, in light of this, increase their support for local actions and campaigns.

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EU democracy is complicated thankfully After five years of filming in the corridors of power in Brussels, documentary maker David Bernet emerged with renewed respect for the bold political experiment that is the European Union.

© Indi Film/Dieter Sturme

BY DAV I D B E R N E T

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Five years in the making, the documentary “Democracy” is, according to The Guardian, “a subtle, human, optimistic, sensual portrayal of something that, for most people, couldn’t be further from those descriptors: dataprotection reform.”

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our story. It was about a future market and lots of money, but also about a central principle of liberal democracy: the protection of privacy.

The notion of fundamental rights rests on their inviolability. So even if a prevailing, technology-inspired mainstream demands the abolition of all barriers on privacy, for example, on the grounds that data freedom fuels the economy, the EU institutions are obliged to defend that fundamental right. In democracy, majorities emerge from the decision-making processes; being dynamic, they can go one way or the other. Fundamental rights, however, are carved in stone. They ensure that

conflict, we hoped to get a picture of the way in which modern democracy works at a time when it is defending its very foundations. We wanted to immerse ourselves in the intricate decision-making structures of the European Union, which a large majority of the European public considers less a democracy than a kind of technocratic machinery mostly controlled by lobbyists. Or, if not that, then at least an abstract monster, whose decisions are unfathomable to ordinary people.

I repeatedly encountered this “monster” during and after the making of the film. After the premiere of Democracy in November 2015, when the film was

Our ambition was to get a close-up view of how political representatives, diplomats, lobbyists and civil rights groups behave at the European level when it comes to making important decisions regarding the future of the EU. The particular subject was the reform of European data protection law. The law is based on the fundamental right that guarantees individuals control over their personal data. Over the last two decades, personal data has become a hotly coveted resource, if not the fuel, of the digital economy. Therefore, it was to be expected that any effort to protect this fundamental right with a new regulation adapted to the digital world would trigger an extraordinary conflict. That was the starting point of

minorities and individuals are protected from whatever a particular majority wants at any given time. Therefore, the negotiations on the data protection law were about much more than data. The question was how resilient the fundamental right would prove in a social environment that prioritizes the rationality of the free market and the promises of technological development. The mainstream says: “I don’t care about my data. I’ve nothing to hide.” So how would it be possible to defend this fundamental right against a careless majority, to preserve it for future generations who might need it when the digital world turns into an instrument of gloomy surveillance capitalism?

When we undertook to cover this

being shown in cinemas in Germany, Britain, France and elsewhere, I had many speaking engagements. One media interview that I remember in particular was an appearance on a BBC early morning radio show, a few days before the Brexit referendum. One of my co-panelists was an American living in the UK, who turned out to be an EU hater. I’ve forgotten his name. It seems to me that he later gained ambivalent glory as a candidate for a diplomatic career in the Trump administration.

His only criticism of the EU was the well-known persistent allegation that it’s “undemocratic.” The EU administration, according to this argument, makes decisions behind closed doors without having to justify itself in a sys-

© Indi Film/Markcus Winterbauer

hen we decided a few years ago to shoot the documentary Democracy, we were aware that we were taking on a complicated task. We were setting out to film an EU legislative process. So, not only were we taking on the risk of getting lost in a political process of indeterminate length, but we were also stepping into a cinematic setting unlike most. I had to tell my team that, instead of spending months in a South American jungle, on the Siberian steppes or in other picturesque places, they would have to move around the carpeted corridors, offices and negotiating rooms of the European Union institutions in Brussels.

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goes with reduction of complexity. How can one grasp the workings of a system that is about ruling complexity? How much of this complexity must be sacrificed to make understanding possible?

While working on the documentary, I spent years inside this system. As a filmmaker and a political layman, I became an intimate companion of political actors who worked in Brussels on the legislative reform process for new data protection rules. Thanks to the openness of our protagonists and of the institutions, we were able to film the negotiations, which usually take place behind closed doors. I can claim to have seen “Brussels” from the in-

ported or furthered those very same decisions. And the fact that there are only national publics and no EU public makes it all the easier to keep conjuring up this monster.

The “EU monster” highlights a central deficit of the EU – the EU lacks democratic prestige. It has a problem with democracy. Not because it is undemocratic – that’s nonsense. But because it is a modern democracy; a complex, supranational, democratic system whose success is due precisely to its complexity. It’s a system, and systems, faceless as they are, are close cousins to the monstrous within the symbolic order. This is what makes it so hard for us media professionals or filmmakers to fathom their reality. Understanding

side. I took part in the political process over a long period. I immersed myself in the details. I was curious. And I became increasingly intoxicated with the stunning complexity of the process: Brussels is the arena for a truly democratically based dialogue involving thousands of people, stakeholders of all kinds. The goal of this dialogue can never be anything but compromise, as the sheer complexity of the issues prevents the one-sided dominance of individual interests. But what has emerged in Brussels is a new form of democracy, a supranational democratic platform for representatives of interests from every corner of Europe (and from a variety of legal cultures) to meet to find solutions for the future of the continent.

Often, when I left the negotiating chambers after some intense filming and mingled with people in the streets of Brussels, I thought about that “monster,” the monster that Europeans despise because it is so difficult to grasp.

In fact, they’re at the mercy of a tragic misunderstanding, expecting simple answers from a system whose real achievement is its complexity. Complexity protects democracy, the dialogue of a thousand tongues.

Thus, I also discovered the real purpose of the film that I was making.

Apart from the huge question about the survival of privacy in the digital world, the most important idea I had to deal

© Indi Film/Adrian Stahli

© Indi Film/Markcus Winterbauer

tem of checks and balances. In short, the EU is an abstract monster that has evaded any political control and is ultimately committed only to protecting its own political power. Uncontrollable.

Dangerous.

How this British version of the EU monster came about is well known. It served as an excellent scapegoat when they needed to blame the EU for all the mistakes of the last 40 years in British politics. And other EU member states are doing the same. They are engaged in a game of political pass-the-blame where national governments present the EU as responsible for decisions even when they themselves have sup-

with in this film, and one which I had to translate to the audience, was that many things are complex, but sometimes they are that way to benefit us, not to harm us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Bernet grew up in Rheineck, Switzerland, studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy in Vienna and Berlin, lives in Germany and works as director, author and producer for documentary films.

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The Future of Polling Can technology be the catalyst for transforming democracy and strengthening the relationship between citizens and their representatives?

Š AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani

By Antonio Mugica

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“Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

- Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947.

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even decades after Churchill uttered those words, the world seems to be still debating the point. According to the 2016 Democracy Index published by The Economist, today we live in a world where half of all countries could be considered democratic. Yet, an increasing number of people who live in democracies are feeling disengaged from their political system. In 2015, a Pew Research Center survey found that across 31 emerging and developing nations, a median of 52% were dissatisfied with their political system, while only 44% were satisfied.

Democracy is at a crossroads. The democratic wave that saw the number of countries with electoral democracies rise from 39 to 118 between 1974 and 1996 has receded in the last two decades. Since then, at least 27 countries have seen a breakdown of their democratic regimes. This phenomenon calls for the reinvigoration of democracy. It’s time to find new and better ways to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their representatives. Greater government accountability and citizen engagement are logical objectives that we should embrace.

Recognizing that technology can be the catalyst for the transformation that democracy needs would be a first step.

Technology and the elections of today Elections are crucial to any democracy. Any effort to bolster democracy should not only embrace innovation that

empowers voters, but also the technological advancements in security measures that ensure results are as legitimate and credible as possible.

Unfortunately, most of the crucial processes of elections – voting, counting, producing election returns, canvassing and tallying – are, in the majority of countries, still mostly done manually. Only one-third of the world’s voting population uses technology to count their votes. This leaves room for all kinds of problems (e.g., ballot stuffing, voter impersonation, inexact counts, ballot destruction or returns forgery). In most cases, these problems are not even detected, ultimately perverting the ideal of democracy.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed firsthand how technology makes election administration more efficient and transparent. I am proud to say that Smartmatic, the company I lead, has helped election commissions enfranchise millions by building more inclusive and accurate voter registers. Our voting solutions have allowed citizens from five continents to cast their ballots easily and securely. Whether in the Philippines, Belgium, Uganda or Bolivia, technology has enabled us to assist authorities in delivering better elections.

To guarantee successful elections, free from any intervention, we combined several security mechanisms and protocols such as multiple distributed records (electronic and paper), strong audit trails impossible to circumvent, encryption, security codes, digital signatures and asymmetrical keys. This has allowed us

A woman exits a voting booth before casting her ballot in the first round of parliamentary elections, in Lyon, central France, June 11, 2017 (Lyon, France).

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Only one-third of the world’s voting population uses technology to count their votes. This leaves room for all kinds of problems.

to process over 3.7 billion votes without a single spoiled vote.

However, when it comes to elections, securing the votes is not enough. All stakeholders need to be able to verify that the results are legitimate. This is why we recommend that election commissions invite political parties to audit our source code and participate in as many audits as allowed by the system. Hence systems that are designed from the ground up to leave strong audit trails every step of the way are of paramount importance. Auditability is key to transparency and, in turn, key to building trust.

Despite the progress some countries have made by automating their elections, there is still a long way to go. The challenge ahead is monumental. Not only are the majority of countries still holding manual elections, but the context in which elections occur has grown incredibly complex. This is true even in the United States – one of the world’s most iconic democracies – where the recent general elections serve as a perfect case in point. Eight months after these elections, controversies about supposed intervention by foreign agents are still making headlines.

Broadly speaking, it is possible that local or foreign agents may have interfered in the US elections to sway voters one way or another. Since the election, we have learned that hundreds, if not thousands, of fake news websites were 120

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created to influence the opinion of American voters. The social media networks that we normally use to exchange pictures with acquaintances and find out what’s going on in the world worked as perfect tools to amplify “fake news.”

Voters were inundated with false information that may have affected decisions they made.

Big data, which allows major consumer brands to power their marketing strategies and maximize their return on investments, may also have been used by foreign or local powers seeking to push candidacies that better suit their interests. In addition to these forms of intervention, we might also wish to consider the hacking of emails and voter databases – which according to the US intelligence community did indeed take place – as another form of intervention.

However, we must clarify that whatever intervention did occur took place completely outside of the core voting systems. No intervention successfully compromised any of the critical processes of casting, counting and tallying the votes.

Like it or not, hackers, big data, “fake news” and other trends are all part of the political landscape in which modern-day elections are held. This is definitely something we are going to have to deal with in the near future.

Nonetheless, this should not make us wary of technology in elections. Quite the opposite: better and more robust technology is needed. α matter of trust The topic of discussion today should not be whether or not to use technology to improve elections, but rather how we can use it to bolster democracy and make societies more inclusive, representative and fair. Besides improving critical processes, such as registering voters and counting votes, we must leverage technology to fight disengagement and the lack of trust in democratic institutions.

Certain countries are already leading the way in terms of citizen engagement. Australia, Scotland, Germany

and the United Kingdom have implemented petitioning systems to amplify the voice of their citizens in pressing government for action. In the UK, gathering 100,000 signatures can now initiate a parliamentary debate. Technology is actively enriching democracy by making these kinds of discourse much more commonplace.

Through frequent voting – on average, citizens vote four times a year on a range of issues at national or local level – Switzerland closely monitors what matters to the average person. Online voting is making this process much more efficient.

Recently at Smartmatic, we helped two communities in Chile decide how to allocate public resources. By using our online voting system and polling-place electronic voting, citizens were able to convey their priorities to authorities. Not only is technology such as this facilitating effective change, but it is ultimately empowering people.

These successes are inevitably leading towards a future where voting becomes more commonplace.

Empowerment through technological innovation is the future of polling.

We the technology developers must devise new tools to enable people and organizations to think, decide and act together. Solutions to the world’s most pressing problems start with engaged citizens that take an active role in shaping their future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Antonio Mugica, an Electronic Engineering graduate from the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, co-founded Smartmatic in 2000 with the aim of creating technology-based solutions that could have a profound social impact.

Under his leadership, the company has grown from a small startup to become a world leader in election technology.

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Democratizing Food Why sustainable prosperity depends on a radical rethink in our approach to agriculture.

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Can Africa’s fertile farmland feed the world? Award-winning New Zealand-born photographer Robin Hammond traveled through six sub-Saharan African countries for National Geographic Magazine in search of an answer. Seen here, a farming family harvesting wheat in the Ambalage Mountains in Tigray Province, Ethiopia, one of the hardest-hit provinces during the 1984-85 famine.

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H

ave we reached “peak democracy?” Certainly, if we look at some global measures of democratic societies, it looks as though progress has stalled – and perhaps even gone into reverse. The Economist Intelligence Unit, the research and analysis unit of the Economist magazine, made waves earlier this year when it downgraded the USA to a “flawed democracy.” With record low levels of trust in government and widespread political disenchantment, the world’s most powerful country is judged to have joined other advanced economies like Japan and Italy in the second tier of democratic societies globally.

Many others fared no better. In fact, looking at the map, “full democracy” seems to be very much a minority pursuit.

The lack of democratic advancement on the ground seems jarringly at odds with the principles outlined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The aim of Goal 16 is to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” And bear in mind that these goals are meant to be achieved only a dozen or so years from now.

Democracy can, of course, take many forms. But at its most basic, it involves active participation by people in determining their own destinies. It means having a say and the ability to effect change. If we take that as a yardstick, it’s clear that many people lack the agency they need to influence their circumstances and create sustainable prosperity for themselves and their families. This lack of control is perhaps at its most extreme when it comes to the most basic requirement we have for our survival – food.

No matter where we live in the world, as urbanization intensifies, food production has become alien to us; we’re cut off from processes that would have occupied almost the entirety of our ancestors’ time and labor. But even for

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Earlier this year, UK supermarkets had to ration lettuce, due to poor weather conditions in southern Europe.

No matter where we live in the world, as urbanization intensifies, food production has become alien to us.

those who still derive their livelihoods from growing crops or raising animals, food has become just another industry, with manifold pressures to maximize profits by producing as much as possible for a minimal cost. As with other industries, the beneficiaries are all too often those at the top – the landowners, commodities traders, processors and retailers who control the means by which food gets from the fields to our plates.

For many producers, especially those in the Global South (who are typically small tenant farmers and smallholders), freedom of action is limited by outside forces compelling them to exploit their land to its utmost to satisfy the demands of international markets.

What this means in practice is a restriction of the “democratic” nature once integral to the communal approach

to agricultural work, from narrowing down the variety of crops grown to a few in-demand staples (such as maize, wheat and rice) to privatizing formerly shared land and water resources and controlling the cost of inputs such as seeds and fertilizers.

It’s little wonder, therefore, that the issue of “food sovereignty” has become a hot topic in recent years. Following the landmark Nyeleni Forum, held in Mali in 2007, the 500 delegates drawn from a range of global campaign groups produced a declaration that defined food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”

It’s a concept that goes far beyond established notions of “fair trade,”

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with its modest aim of giving farmers a greater share of profits from conventional cash crop production. Food sovereignty amounts to a radical prospectus of reform for our entire agricultural system.

This ethos provides the philosophical basis for the numerous grassroots movements that have sprung up worldwide to advance the food sovereignty agenda. In the Global South, some of these groups have become very large and influential indeed: La Vía Campesina, founded in 1993 and describing itself as an “international peasants’ movement,” comprises 164 local and national organizations in 73 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, representing about 200 million farmers.

Its influence has been credited not only for spurring national policies enshrining food sovereignty in countries including Ecuador, Bolivia, Senegal and Nepal, but also for prompting the UN’s Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO) to embrace its central tenet: the importance of sustainable, environmentally friendly methods of agriculture grounded in traditional practices, referred to collectively as agroecology.

In simple terms, agroecology takes into account natural ecosystems and uses local knowledge to plant a diversity of crops and to manage water responsibly in order to boost soil health, supporting the sustainability of the farming system as a whole.

The need is certainly there. The past 70 years have seen a steady industrialization of farming practices across the world. The so-called Green Revolution saw techniques from the Global North transplanted to the Global South, with vast tracts of land turned into monocropped green deserts, ostensibly to allow poor farmers to escape poverty by supplying global markets. This approach, however, taking little account of different climatic conditions and soil types, has wreaked havoc on fragile ecosystems.

One expert survey found that 65%

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of soils on agricultural lands in Africa have become degraded since the middle of the 20th century, caused by water and wind erosion, nutrient loss from overuse of chemicals and pesticides, and overgrazing. With the global population hurtling towards 10 billion by mid-century – with much of the increase forecast to be in the poorest nations of Sub-Saharan Africa – and climate change increasing the frequency of droughts and floods, the International Panel on Climate Change has estimated that crop yields in Africa could fall by 22% over the same period.

But the impact on human health from “mainstream agriculture” also manifests itself in the falling nutritional value of diets stripped of their former diversity. It’s why we can simultaneously have malnourishment at both extremes – among the 1.9bn overweight and obese people in the rich world and the 795m hungry in the poor world.

A criticism often leveled against agroecology is that the natural methods it entails simply cannot produce the yields needed to sustain a still-growing world population.

But there’s increasing evidence putting paid to that notion. For instance, in Burkina Faso – one of the world’s poorest countries – an NGO, Association Nourrir Sans Détruire (ANSD), has led efforts to improve livelihoods, concentrating on 125 villages spread across three districts. Working with farmers and drawing on their expertise, they’ve been able to scale practices proven to aid soil health and water retention. The results are impressive: yields have increased between 40% and 300% compared to earlier methods.

But an important dimension of this and countless other projects is democratic decision-making: in nearly all of the villages that have embraced new methods, agricultural committees have been set up, involving thousands of people and promoting joint action plans.

Increasingly too, such democratic forms of food production pioneered in the Global South are being embraced by

those in the Global North, especially in the emerging area of urban agriculture.

In London, for instance, the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity has launched a project titled (Un)Urban to examine the use of green space in the traditionally deprived east of the city, including possibilities for creating local food supply chains to boost health and wellbeing. Fundamentally, such efforts are as much about civic engagement and participation as they are about the raw mechanics of food production; they point the way to an active, “daily democracy” of common endeavor towards shared goals.

Johan Rockström and Pavan Sukhdev from the Stockholm Resilience Centre have demonstrated how food connects all the Sustainable Development Goals. Food, they argue, isn’t just a matter of production per hectare. It’s also a billion jobs, culture, nutrition, health and wellbeing.

At the same time, food is also inherently political. Its production forces us to confront sometimes difficult realities regarding our economic systems, competing priorities for land use and ownership, environmental sustainability, access to nutrition and much more.

Focus on food, and you create a space to examine so many of the factors affecting human prosperity.

So, in trying to kick-start a reinvigorated democracy globally, the best route to the heart of the matter may be, as the saying goes, through our stomachs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor Henrietta Moore is Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL (www.igp.ucl.ac.uk), where she also holds the Chair in Culture, Philosophy and Design. A distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, her work focuses on notions of a global sustainable future.

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Lies, Tricks and Flattery Duping people with lies or seducing them with promises has always been at the heart of politics.

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rom Eve’s temptation to Twitter, humanity has always been at the mercy of tricksters and liars.

When it is not a supernatural force doing the damage, as with the serpent in Eden, or an ideology, it is people who mislead people, usually to the benefit of the few and the burden of the many. In our turbo-charged news cycles, lies and tricks are so prevalent that they are no longer weighed in moral terms – it’s not cheating when “everyone does it.” Lies are taken for granted and seen as an integral part of the democratic process.

Even cries of “fake news” are a tactical weapon, often deployed by those who themselves practice the dark arts of deceit. This raises two practical questions that are free of ethical baggage: Can elections be won without lies? Are lies enough to govern?

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of politics where we are not overshadowed by our illustrious forebears.

Modern Greeks are just as vulnerable to lies, flattery and bribery as the ancients were. And though the latter invented democracy and highlighted its strengths, we still share with them its weaknesses. Greece remains a vibrant laboratory of politics’ virtues and vulnerabilities.

Greece’s SYRIZA was elected in January 2015 on the strength of lies and on the public’s weakness for them, surging from the radical left fringe with promises to reverse austerity and undo the reforms which the country’s creditors demanded in return for further loans. It formed a coalition with an extreme right-wing party – Independent Greeks – which shared SYRIZA’s rejection of the bailout deals. Like the Brexiteers, SYRIZA and Independent Greeks made impossible promises, such as pro-

viding assurance that they would keep getting money from creditors without fulfilling the conditions that the latter demanded. Midway through 2015, the coalition announced a referendum on what it said was a new bailout deal offered by Greece’s EU partners – and campaigned for its rejection. However, when voters voted against the deal, and Greece was on the brink of bankruptcy and exit from the eurozone, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reversed course and caved. He was forced to accept an even harsher deal that the EU partners proposed. A couple of months later, in September, SYRIZA won snap elections, returning to power with Independent Greeks. The electorate, in other words, approved both of the lies that got SYRIZA elected and the sleight of hand after the referendum. This betrays a deep familiarity with deceit and self-deceit as part of the practice of politics.

© Helder oliveira

Lies, tricks, smoke and mirrors, straw men and false divisions: Greece today is an encyclopedia of tactics devoid of strategy. After reaching the cusp of power on false claims (“illusions,” as Mr Tsipras called them coyly), SYRIZA denied its own DNA by allying itself with the Independent Greeks. And it has since maneuvered even more cynically to keep itself and its partner in power. SYRIZA has proven to be a survivor. This, however, does not mean that it is governing – at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Its policy is defined by doing what the creditors demand while, at the same time, going to great lengths to undermine this.

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Current events in Britain and the United States reveal the power of lies to corrupt even paragons of rationalism, to undermine even the most mature liberal democracies.

and was suppressed for decades until the collapse of a right-wing military dictatorship in 1974. SYRIZA’s other main argument is that it is not responsible for the mess that Greece found itself in in 2010 and, therefore, anything it does (or does not do) is better than what any other party may do.

Current events in Britain and the United States, the two countries that modern Greeks have looked up to as models of social and political maturity, reveal the power of lies to corrupt even paragons of rationalism, to undermine even the most mature liberal democracies. In both cases, flattery, fear-mongering and false promises exploited a widespread feeling of personal and national insecurity caused by globalization, immigration and growing inequality. Grandiose claims and simplistic solutions unleashed emotions that few believed were so close to the surface, opening rifts between social and political groups, encouraging further populism and division. But the lies were effective: even as the pursuit of restored “greatness” in Britain and the United States leads to both countries appearing smaller and meaner than many of their citizens and foreign friends would like, the British government insists on going through with leaving the European Union, while many American voters continue to support Donald Trump, despite an almost daily litany of presidential lies.

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with promises. At other times, voters may be in on the trick and, as they are trained to do in modern Greece, will vote for the lies that they like the most, while expecting that the candidate will be more responsible after being elected. A classic example of this are the voters who backed Trump as he attacked Obamacare while hoping that he wouldn’t destroy their own health insurance. Think, too, of the many who voted “No” in the Greek bailot referendum and “Leave” in the British referendum who simply wanted to vent their anger, not reap the eventual outcome.

There’s no remorse greater than that of the foolish voter, and no hope more vain than that liars and cheats will become saints in office.

The ancient Greeks knew this well.

In his brilliant satire on demagoguery, The Knights (produced in 424 BC), Aristophanes pits Paphlagon (who represents the populist warmonger Cleon, a powerful political figure at the time) against a sausage seller in a contest to flatter and bribe Demos, the vain old man who personifies the electorate.

Demos is delighted: “Get going then, you two, because to the one who treats me best I will award the reins of power.” The chorus of aristocratic young cavalrymen comments that, although everyone fears Demos “like a man with tyrannical power,” he is easily led astray. “You enjoy being flattered and thoroughly deceived, and every speechmaker has you gaping. You’ve a mind, but it’s out to lunch,” they charge. Demos declares that, on the contrary, he has everything under control. “You consider me stupid; but there’s purpose in this

foolishness of mine,” he says. “I pick one thieving political leader to fatten; I raise him up, and when he’s full, I swat him down.” In a race to the bottom, the sausage seller outbids Paphlagon, who knows he is beaten. “He is even more shameless than me!” he cries. Selected

by Demos, the sausage seller catalogues Paphlagon’s corruption (“But I stole for the good of the city,” the loser claims).

This prompts Demos to acknowledge “I’m ashamed of my former mistakes,” implying that he will mend his ways. In this rich mix of satire and desire that works so well on stage, Aristophanes holds out the promise that maybe both the voter and the political leader will be different this time. “The blame’s with those who deceived you this way,” the sausage seller declares.

Even as he points out that the most shameless candidates win, Aristophanes holds out the forlorn hope that this particularly shameless one will use his power in the service of the public good and not for his own enrichment.

The play won first prize. But this meant little: shortly afterwards, Cleon, who had already taken Aristophanes to court for his attacks on him, was elected to the powerful post of strategos, or general. The peace that Aristophanes argued for throughout most of his work was a long time coming. The war with Sparta, already in its seventh year when the play The Knights was staged, wouldn’t end until two decades later in 404 BC. Athens lost.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Νikos Konstandaras is Managing Editor and columnist for the Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times International Edition and the founding editor of Kathimerini English Edition.

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George Orwell believed that every joke was like a tiny revolution. With the current political stakes so high and the partisan divisions between people so deep, can laughing help us let off steam? Can satire save democracy?

Charlie Chaplin pokes fun at totalitarianism in his 1940 film The Great Dictator.

BY CHRISTOPHER BEANLAND

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atire is the revenge of the intelligent on the privileged – it is there to prick pomposity and to check power. As the late Molly Ivins once said: “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.” It is, in this sense, a true expression of democracy – a way for the people to have their say.

On the other hand, perhaps joking distracts us from getting up and enacting concrete political changes. “I think it does and it doesn’t,” says Mickey Noonan, editor of Standard Issue Magazine and long-time comedy critic.

“Comedy is a great attention-grabber: people like to laugh, particularly when times are dire. Get us interested with some funnies and we’re more likely to listen to a message as well. And right now, I think satirical programs – This Week Tonight With John Oliver, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, The Mash Report – are covering the current political sh*tshows on either side of the Atlantic in a more engaging and engaged way than the mainstream media. So I’d say satire is vital; it’s always vital. But if you need people to engage and then follow through with some sort of call to action, it can backfire. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes it works. But sometimes it feels that laughter is the action and so there’s no follow-through.”

Today’s political landscape is chaotic, but chaos and politics go together like burgers and fries. What’s different now, though, is the way politics, the mass media and burgeoning social networks have evolved this symbiotic relationship which has produced some often bizarre results. Even the notion of reality itself seems more fluid, less set in stone. What is the truth anymore? “I do at least think that, in an age where legitimate news sources are being cast into doubt, satire can be useful in confirming to an audience that what’s going on is really going on,” says Nick Doody – who’s written with Armando Iannucci and Rory Bremner, and for the TV shows Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week.

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based on the failings of the real world, but today what’s real and what’s fake have themselves become hot topics.

Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin and Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump are better than the real thing, more accentuated than the originals. “Fake news” has been President Trump’s rallying call on Twitter against almost any criticism. On Facebook during the last American election, a large number of Americans appeared to have been taken in by falsified “news” created for financial profit by small “online factories” in FYROM. But real satire isn’t just “fake news.” It’s deliberate, purposeful and – if done well, of course – very funny. The wonderfully surreal satirical headlines of The Onion or The Daily Mash have taken on a new piquancy. “Maybe there’s an argument that laughter helps to expose lies,” says Doody. “It’s a natural reaction to obvious untruth. But it didn’t stop Trump getting elected. That said, authoritarian regimes tend to be very sensitive about satire, so maybe there is something in laughter... something they’re afraid of? I’m not hugely hopeful at the moment, though; I feel that if comedy or satire had ever brought down a regime, I’d have heard about it.”

Helen Lewis agrees about the sensitivity of those in power. “Authoritarians hate satire because it makes them look ridiculous – and the whole aesthetic of most tyrants is dangerously close to laughable in the first place. Think of Kim Jong-un’s ludicrous parades, or of the Hitler salute. In 1941, the Nazis got all worked up about a dog that used to raise its paw in the air, which tells you a lot about their lack of a sense of humor. In 2008, the Burmese government locked up a cartoonist and comedian

called Zarganar because they hated his puns so much.”

Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman Magazine, for which she has written satirical pieces, and she has appeared frequently on political programs on the BBC. She also recently interviewed Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, for the Geddes Memorial Lecture at Oxford University. During that exchange, Hislop said: “You should be able to laugh at anything... at anything grim. It’s a both a release and a way of defying it.” He has a point. Indeed we’ve been laughing and defying for millennia. Satire has trickled through time, its highpoints lasting for centuries and its entertainment and enlightenment always in sharp contrast to the darkness and the political proclivities of the periods it was created in. Aristophanes was writing satirical works in ancient Greece before the word “satire” had even been coined. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Bulgakov’s “The Master & Margarita” stretched satire into a high literary form set against a backdrop of human callousness. Today Jonathan Coe’s books (“What A Carve Up!” and “Number 11”) are the inheritors of that baroque sensibility on the page, turning rage into art.

Think of satire today, though, and you think of great modern American television programs like The Daily Show. But there’s always been a huge range of satire on offer – from the relatively slapstick-based humor of Spitting Image, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and the cartoons of Charlie Hedbo or those in numerous daily newspapers around the world to the more cerebral efforts like those of The Onion or the

“In an age where legitimate news sources are being cast into doubt, satire can be useful in confirming to an audience that what’s going on is really going on.” ― Nick Doody, comedian-writer

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Five-time Emmy Award winner John Oliver brings a no-holds-barred approach to all the major issues on his Last Week Tonight show airing on HBO.

Alec Baldwin has out-Trumped the US President with his impersonation on Saturday Night Live.

works of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci – like The Day Today, Brass Eye, The Thick of It and Veep. The most talented satirists hit their subjects with withering accuracy – but the best satire also exists in a world of self-reflection and self-awareness. And the best satirists aren’t just attack dogs; they’ll mock themselves and the medium they work in, too, like Charlie Brooker does in Black Mirror and Newswipe.

Some satire, however, overtly tries to affect tangible political changes.

Mark Thomas had a long-running UK TV show where comic stunts were used, but the show’s end goal was policy changes. And on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver starts campaigns and tries to get viewers to put their pizza down and go out and do something.

Can talk show hosts criticise power and wake us up more effectively than political parties of the opposition? Can laughter bring down a bad leader and expose a populist? “There’s a danger that satire becomes a release-valve, a substitute for justified anger,” says Helen Lewis, “which is then seen as some134

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how uncouth. In Britain, our political cartoons are more often cynical than savage, and that can create the feeling of an in-joke between politicians and commentators.” In the US, this was keenly felt by many Trump voters who believed that the satirists (as well as the entire East coast “media elite”) were laughing at them, not just the man they had voted in as president.

But maybe the satirists need the politicians – and the politicians need the satirists? Comedians certainly need source material from somewhere. The 45th President of the United States hasn’t always been happy to play that role. At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Seth Myers was

on fire with lines like: “Donald Trump often appears on Fox – which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump’s head.” Throughout the ribbing, Trump sat stone-faced. Perhaps it was the gibes that night which helped him decide to make his presidential run. The now-president Trump famously failed to attend this year’s Correspondent’s Dinner, where he was roasted in absentia by The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj. Minhaj quipped about how many people had declined to host the dinner with the unforgettable line: “Don Rickles died just so you wouldn’t ask him to do this job.”

Was the election of Donald Trump an embarrassment of riches for satirists? “As for the notion that come-

Satire is something we need as a part of the democratic process. Governments come and go, but the jokes they inspire linger longer in the collective memory.

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Stephen Colbert has made mocking the Trump presidency a staple part of his daily routine on CBS’ The Late Show.

dians are glad to have Trump for the material,” says American comic Megan Ford, “I think it must only be extremely privileged people that feel that way. I had enough material for political satire before – ya know, centuries of white supremacist patriarchy will give you plenty to work with. Trump has contributed to a culture in America right now where I have friends and family that are afraid every time they leave the house that they might get harassed or even killed, so the idea that comedians... [are] pleased ... they have more material is actually really offensive.” She adds: “I pretty much lost my sense of humor completely by the middle of 2016, so I’m finding it really difficult as a comedian these days. It’s also a strange time for political satire, because it’s very hard to heighten the truth right now. It’s already ridiculous and there’s nowhere to take it.”

Nick Doody agrees that the surreal is the new normal: “One issue with the current situation in the US is that the administration is in some ways so ridiculous that pointing at it and laughing seems superfluous. People already know

Trump is ridiculous, and the people who don’t see it will keep on not seeing it.

It’s only worth pointing out flaws when the flaws can be corrected. I liken it to pointing out that someone has spinach stuck in their teeth: you point it out because you assume they’re not aware of it and would like to remove it. But if they’re completely covered from head to toe in spinach, you probably shouldn’t bother pointing it out; that’s obviously the look they’re going for.”

The thing is, in the past the President did seem capable of laughing at himself. The 2015 episode of The Tonight Show where Jimmy Fallon impersonated Trump and interviewed the real Trump as if he was interviewing himself in the mirror (if you follow us) was a truly daft moment. The real Trump quips: “Me interviewing me? That’s what I call a great idea!”

If the satirists need the politicians, we, the public, need the satirists even more. They don’t just entertain us, they can enlighten us, too. “In the States, the reasonable news networks are now having to try to be neutral about a guy

whose views they could dismiss as radical and dangerous 18 months ago,” says Simon Hawkins, prolific comedy reviewer and interviewer. “It’s the TV satirists – and that includes everyone from The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight to the regular chat-show opening monologists – who are giving the more appropriate responses... Comedians are the only people with a voice who are able to give this stuff the ‘WTF?’ analysis it deserves.”

You’d think it was a boom time for satire. But perhaps harsh new realities are catching up with us. Hawkins notes: “It’s not always fun for the satirists – suddenly their audiences are divided down the middle. People think this must be boom time for comedians, but it’s bloody painful for everyone. But the news is so bewildering every day that it seems odd for any comic not to come out and address it.”

Clearly, satire is something we need as a part of the democratic process.

Governments come and go, but the jokes they inspire linger longer in the collective memory – and those jokes are enduringly popular. If you don’t believe that, just take a look at the readers, viewers and audience members enjoying satirical comedy – it’s the politicos, lobbyists, journalists and backroom advisers who love and consume satire perhaps more than anyone else.

They love to have their egos flattered by being talked about – even if negatively – although, of course, the heartiest laughs are reserved for jokes at an opponent’s expense.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Beanland lives in London and writes about architecture, culture and the arts for newspapers (including The Independent, The Guardian and The Telegraph) and various magazines around the world. He’s also written two novels.

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the sharp pen The nationally-syndicated veteran political cartoonist and two-time Pulitzer winner says that his job is not to make fun of politicians but to criticize them when they fail in their duties.

INTERVIEW BY GIORGOS TSIROS

Self-caricature by Jim Morin.

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of jim morin

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“You can disagree with something I do, or you can agree with something I do.

If it inspires you to start talking about it or to start caring about it, then I’ve done my job.” Jim Morin

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ou might know Miami Herald’s editorial cartoonist Jim Morin as one of those die-hard satirists whose humor has spared no important political figure, from Richard M. Nixon to Donald J. Trump. An avid cartoonist from the age of seven, he was inspired to begin his journey by Saturday morning television. He cut his teeth on the Watergate Scandal, publishing his first political cartoon while still in college. Among other achievements, Morin boasts two Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent one having been awarded to him just this year for his satire on the 2016 presidential campaign and other important issues of the year, such as racial tensions, gun violence, and of course “fake news.” A prolific artist, Mr. Morin draws some 250 cartoons every year. As he himself says: “The only thing I’m after is to find out something that’s wrong, some injustice and put it out there, stir up the pot and inspire debate.”

What makes a good political cartoon?

A good cartoon takes a stand on an issue and evokes a reaction from the reader, hopefully encouraging debate.

Does satire thrive in times of turmoil?

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stand the cartoons. In quieter times though, when we focus attention on an issue that isn’t being talked about, that’s when our work is more important because then we can help change the status quo.

Do you consider yourself and your peers to be of service to democracy?

When democracy is threatened, then yes, I think we do serve a higher cause.

Ordinarily, though, I don’t think about this. I concentrate on stating my case concisely and hope to at least sow a seed of doubt in those who disagree with the point I’m making.

Can a political cartoon go “too far?”

The danger is that the term “goes too far” has a different meaning to different people. If you put limits on commentary, you get dangerously close to a slippery slope.

Is laughter stronger than hatred?

Yes, absolutely. Hating your enemy is not nearly as useful as ridiculing them and making others laugh at them with you. Dictators go after cartoonists and satirists because they fear them most for that reason. Laughter is contagious.

And dangerous.

Is ignorance unbeatable?

No. A good education can beat ignorance. Civics is not taught in our public

Can the pen change a voter’s mind?

Yes, if the reader’s mind is open. I’ve met members of my audience who have assured me my cartoons have caused them to re-think an issue.

Is it hard to keep up with Donald Trump?

Does it feel like reality has become more surreal and hilarious than even the wildest satire?

No. I don’t make fun of politicians.

I criticize them for what they say and do.

Trump is a great subject because he is a great hypocrite. Hypocrisy is the bread and butter of satirists.

Some claim that the fact that Mr. Trump has been under constant fire from the so-called media establishment has actually helped him win. Do you see any truth in that?

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schools anymore. American History is not a required course as it should be. As a result, there is little understanding of how our constitutional democracy works.

That is part of the reason why we are in the state we are in.

No, not at all. Some voted for him due to dissatisfaction with the status quo in Washington. Some were attracted to the TV personality they saw on The Apprentice. Some believe in his platform. Some are attracted to his racism and bigotry. His voters are actually a diverse collection of people.

Do you feel that a large part of the American public won’t “get the joke” no matter what?

That’s a possibility since we’ve become a compartmentalized society. We do have our detractors, though, who communicate their disagreement in letters, posts and tweets.

Which US president was the most difficult to make fun of? And which one do you miss the most?

I don’t make fun of presidents. I criticize them if they don’t serve the people of our country properly. As for favorites, Trump is the most massively incompetent and seriously dangerous threat to our country and our world in our lifetime, by far.

All past presidents have been a joy and challenge to draw but I do not miss any of them!

Jim Morin won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning “for editorial cartoons that delivered sharp perspectives through flawless artistry, biting prose and crisp wit.” He also won a Pulitzer in 1996 and was a finalist in 1977 and 1990.

His sixth book, Jim Morin’s World, a forty-year cartoon retrospective, will be published soon.

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he power of those journalists who are political cartoonists lies in the establishment of a specific code of communication with part of the public. It takes time and hard work to develop that code and to give it stability, but once it’s in place the results are easily comprehensible and reception is straightforward and therefore powerful. The success of that reception, however, rests on a few fundamental presuppositions.

The language in which we cartoonists converse with our public is enigmatic, laconic, full of allusions and, we hope, witty. Our communication with the reader is instantaneous, the fruit of an everyday moment, and yet there is always the danger that it will be overlooked; that the message won’t get through. Only a particular sort of reader will luxuriate over a daily cartoon, examine it in detail and invest time in solving the riddle the cartoonist is posing (particularly if it’s trickier than usual). Most people love cartoons for their immediacy; they want a cartoon to be easy to understand. They enjoy being surprised by it in a passive sort of way – and if all these conditions aren’t fulfilled, they abandon it. If their expectations are met, however, the cartoon can become unstoppable, a way for the public to express itself, a common trope. Then it becomes a language with unspeakable power.

A cartoonist gives the news back to the reader as a funny image, a subversive point of view, a satiric commentary. He does this in a way that must be clear and uncomplicated, as easily intelligible as possible, but not in an

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Finding humor behind serious issues and events is not just hard work; it’s a necessity. Just ask a political cartoonist.

BY ANDREAS PETROULAKIS

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explanatory fashion. It’s like when someone tells you a joke: if they have to explain it to you, the joke doesn’t work.

The cartoonist should never write more than the drawing requires; he counts his words like a poet, because otherwise he runs the risk of the cartoon going soft. Comprehension is key in our work – not explanation.

Let’s pause for a moment on the term “reader.” It’s a trap for a journalist to imagine or invent a particular sort of reader, one who agrees with his own views, and to try to cultivate a consistent, steady relationship with him, in the belief that both parties will be mutually satisfied by that identification. This sort of imagined reader will lead him astray.

As we all know, a reader isn’t a collective subject; therefore, it’s impossible for him to desire any particular thing. For each person who agrees with your opinion, there is another who disagrees. Meanwhile, society is more divided than ever before, with no-go areas, fanaticisms 142

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and unlikely alliances. So which reader are we talking about? The Everyman who reads the newspaper; which is to say, a public that presumably shares similar political views and perhaps also cultural references? But every journalist’s ambition, particularly in the internet age, is to have the widest possible audience and not to be defined by the profile of the presumed average reader of the medium in which he works. This is even more the case for a cartoonist who strongly believes that a sense of humor has no limits – that, if you find the key, your work will spread and be welcomed, even by parts of the population that don’t agree with your political views.

A cartoon reflects the talent of the cartoonist, his sensitivities, his education, his aesthetics, his hard work and his instincts. The reader chooses to follow the cartoonist or cartoonists who suit him. The relationship that is forged between them over time is usually a tacit one, testified to by sharing

on social media or over email, or mentions during phone calls. On those rare occasions when we happen to meet our readers face-to-face, we realize that each of us has a readership that isn’t limited by party positions, a readership in which our efforts find a response, as does our sense of humor, our perspective, our knowledge and the aesthetics that are implicit in our cartoons. A cartoonist is closely tied to this readership, not as regards their respective political views, which can change and shouldn’t in any case be allowed to ensnare us, but as concerns a certain cultural plane and a shared taste. This is the segment of society over which the cartoonist has influence, and it is in this audience that he finds himself reflected.

A political cartoonist should never allow himself to be paternalistic or didactic. It is against the nature of his work to try to give lessons to society – he wants to make people laugh. But that laughter always springs from a sense

of some political lack, contradiction, mistake, inconsistency or subversion.

Therefore, the only way for him to operate is to make his own political and personal views his starting point. If, instead, he makes it his goal to flatter what we call common sentiment, his work will be cheapened over time and will eventually betray him. Common sentiment is, in my opinion, often just what shouts the loudest. If cartoonists allow themselves to begin catering to it, they soon find themselves simply hopping from trend to trend, losing their unique identities and becoming playthings of the merciless stream of current events. Adherence to one’s own values and beliefs should be a cartoonist’s constant guide, while the antenna of his sensitivity to social injustice should always remain raised. The dangers of populism and simplicity on the one hand and of elitism and self-isolation on the other are always there – we journalists have to keep in mind that we are neither union leaders responsible for representing a particular public nor novelists who are allowed the luxury of departing from reality. The power of our work – autonomous, unprejudiced, and mature – arises from the reasonable balance each of us must discover.

A cartoonist is constantly judged because he is entirely exposed. His readership may not know what he looks like, but the faces in his drawings are familiar and reflect him with precision.

No one who addresses himself to the public for years can keep his intentions hidden, or his cultural or educational

CARTOON BY ANDREAS PETROULAKIS FOR KATHIMERINI

A political cartoonist should never allow himself to be paternalistic or didactic. It is against the nature of his work to try to give lessons to society – he wants to make people laugh.

background, or his talent and its limitations. For many, political views play a secondary role in how they view a journalist – they pay more attention to the quality, the honesty, the openness and the validity of the weapons he uses to defend his position. Cartoonists, like all journalists who practice the satiric

arts, have one great advantage: humor.

Humor can become the passport that allows us to enter whatever political and social space hasn’t already been closed off by prejudgment. If one believes that mature individuals have the ability to make fun of themselves, then they can easily accept the satire of a third party and laugh along with him.

This is the greatest strength of the work of the political cartoonist: to break down society’s ideological and political walls, and to send his little inky people everywhere.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andreas Petroulakis is a prominent Greek political cartoonist. Self-taught, he started his career in 1985 and has been working for the newspaper Kathimerini since 2000.

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Watchdog on Duty Can a non-profit parliamentary monitoring organization help stop the erosion of democracy in Greece?

B Y T H E V O U L I WAT C H T E A M

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reece is often referred to as the birthplace of democracy, and that might well be the case. However, the country’s rich historical and political heritage should not be perceived as a de facto guarantor of its democratic future. The admirable and glorious, albeit ancient, democratic past of this land often acts as a beautifully crafted thick veil which conveniently adorns and obscures a rather problematic political present.

Democracy is not tangible; it is not a solid, fixed, inflexible mass of political beliefs set in stone thousands of years ago which today rules our everyday lives. Νor is it a blanket reform project based solely on financial and regulatory rules imposed on a country by its international lenders. Rather, democracy should be viewed as the result of progressive thinking, collective struggle, compromise and the will to constantly strive for

a more just and inclusive system of organizing complex and constantly evolving societies. Democracy is a reflection of society and its historical course and, as such, it should constantly reshape itself, evolve and adapt to the ever-changing needs of the people.

Perceiving democracy in this way is what led us, in the fall of 2013, to establish Vouliwatch, a non-profit, transparency-promoting and parliamentary-monitoring organization which ultimately – and with the help of digital technology – aims to create the right conditions for a gradual shift towards a new political paradigm.

Particularly important in light of the ongoing Greek recession, a new political paradigm characterized by transparency, openness, accountability and civic engagement should guide policy-making and put the country on a path towards a more inclusive future.

“Transparent Democracy” from the series Future Athens (2004) by Dimitris Tsoumplekas.

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DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? Greek politics and political culture have, throughout the course of the country’s modern history, been dominated to a large extent by divisions, a pervasive lack of transparency, nepotism and lack of accountability. Politicians, citizens and pressure groups alike have been operating within a political realm where some essential modern mechanisms for a truly accountable democratic system have been legislated but never implemented.

This in turn has contributed towards the establishment of a problematic relationship between the state authority and its citizens, one characterized by mistrust, favoritism and a distinct lack of legitimization of institutions and the rule of law. The ongoing economic crisis has further aggravated the pre-existing crisis of representation and created more tensions, as critical pillars of national sovereignty (such as the nation state’s fiscal powers) were delegated to non-accountable international institutions. Failed leadership and socioeconomic tensions gave rise on the one hand to extremist political movements and, on the other, to political apathy and a widespread sense of resignation.

Our experience over the past three years has also revealed a series of more tangible and immediate issues regarding Greek democracy which, through our daily work, we are trying to bring to the foreground and tackle.

I. OVER-REGULATION At the Ministry of the Interior, a committee has begun proceedings to address the issue of legislative fragmentation and over-regulation, the roots of which are naturally to be found in the parliamentary legislative process itself. We still don’t know if they’ll come to any conclusion, but the effort highlights a key problem of the parliamentary system in Greece. According to official data, some 1,500 laws have been passed in the last 15 years. In order to implement them, around 20,000 146

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authorizations are required in the form of ministerial decisions and other acts, while the real chaos is to be found in connection with the regulatory-administrative instruments needed for their implementation, which entail in excess of 40,000 authorizations!

II. “BAD” REGULATION Over-regulation is unfortunately not the sole problem facing the legislative branch in Greece. Over the past years, largely because of the need to implement fast-track regulations often dictated by bail-out agreements, we have witnessed a worrying trend in the

legislative process which hinders transparency and raises questions about the law-making process as a whole. More often than not, draft legislation introduced to Parliament is adorned with numerous last-minute (and, in many instances, unrelated) amendments from ministers or deputies, which not only dilute the core nature of the law at hand but also fuel suspicions about their purpose. In a recent statement by the Parliament president, we were informed that a staggering 578 such amendments had been incorporated in 168 pieces of draft legislation in the past two and a half years alone.

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According to official data, some 1,500 laws have been passed in the last 15 years. In order to implement them, around 20,000 authorizations are required in the form of ministerial decisions and other acts.

bodies to determine political and especially criminal responsibility has been manifest. In recent years, no criminal responsibility has been attributed to ministers or members of government in a series of matters. In all recorded cases, committees of inquiry published as many findings as political parties were represented on the committee.

Not even in instances where there had been public admissions of squandering public money could a joint conclusion be reached by even two of the parties on the committee!

III. INQUIRIES WITHOUT RESULTS The ability of Parliament to investigate issues of concern to the public through the scrutiny mechanisms provided for in parliamentary regulations and in the Constitution has proven to be the “Achilles heel” of the institution.

Since 1986, when a committee of inquiry was set up to probe the issue of responsibility for the invasion of Cyprus, right up to the recent committee investigating the series of events leading to Greece’s submission to the memoranda, the inability of such government

REBOOTING DEMOCRACY At Vouliwatch, we believe that this stagnation and gradual erosion of democracy has to and can be broken once and for all. Rebooting democracy is obviously a long-term process which will require significant effort, plus a degree of consensus and commitment on the part of all stakeholders. However, it is imperative that the seeds of change are sown and the right conditions created for a gradual shift towards a new and more open political paradigm. In order to achieve this, Vouliwatch focuses its work around: • Bridging the gap between citizens and politicians by creating innovative and transparent channels of communication between the two via the organization’s web platform; • Restoring the legitimacy of Parliament by monitoring and highlighting its work and by pushing for improvements in the legislative process as well as in its culture of transparency; • Increasing citizen participation by

providing people with all the necessary tools to adequately monitor parliamentary activity and to communicate their ideas, suggestions and concerns to their elected representatives; • Fostering transparency and accountability by campaigning for the advancement of open government and transparency in the disclosure of the financial interests of the members of parliament, as well as in the decision-making processes.

The task at hand is by no means an easy one. Creating the right conditions for rebooting democracy in Greece requires commitment, perseverance and clarity of vision. Above all, however, it requires strong synergies across the political and social spectrum so that citizens can truly occupy the center stage of public life, disproving the notion that democratic reform is a project best determined and run by external experts. After all, democracy works best when people claim it as their own.

ABOUT THE AUTHORs

Vouliwatch is a non-profit monitoring organization that engages Greek citizens with legislative politics and grants them the opportunity to communicate with, evaluate and hold accountable their elected representatives in the Greek and the European Parliaments (www. vouliwatch.gr). Seen above (L-R) Stefanos Loukopoulos (Managing Director), Konstantinos Mentzelos (Content Administrator), Maria Nathanail (Head of Communications), Panagiotis Vlachos (Co-founder, Head of Strategy).

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THE GREEK EXPERIENCE Does a problematic democracy have the strength to defend itself against animosity, (self-)destructive impulses and hi-tech twaddle?

By Christos Chomenidis

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n the first 17 years of the 21st century, Greece has found itself not once but twice at the center of worldwide public attention.

The first time was in 2004, when the country held the summer Olympic Games. Despite the expectations that had been systematically cultivated among Greeks, their success in organizing the world’s foremost sporting event

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did not prove to be the start of a glorious new era. The stadium floodlights went out. The facilities that had been built in record time fell into disuse and neglect even more quickly. The unprecedented performances of the national team were not repeated. The Olympic Games of Athens had all the sparkle of a wedding reception, but lacked the duration and fruitfulness of a successful marriage.

In 2010, Greece again became the focus of international news media. The extremely severe economic crisis that had begun in the United States and quickly spread to Europe found the country completely unprepared and shook it to the core. Other countries in Europe – including Ireland, Portugal and Spain – were also rocked by the financial tsunami. But only in Greece did

the crisis – which marked the end of massive external borrowing, as markets stopped supporting the state – threaten to sweep away everything in its path: ordinary people, political parties, institutions, even the polity itself, along with the country’s strategic choices since the end of the Second World War. On April 23, 2010, when suspension of payments was only a matter of time

for the Greek state, the then prime minister, George Papandreou, announced the signing of the first memorandum.

European institutions in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund would offer assistance by providing the country with massive – by its standards – bailout loans. In return, Greece undertook the obligation to rehabilitate its economy. This meant slashing deficits,

reducing the size and cost of the public sector and achieving significant internal devaluation in order to make its economy once again manageable and productive.

George Papandreou presented the first memorandum not as a last resort solution but as the start of regeneration.

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Pro-government protestors in Syntagma Square backing efforts for bailout debt renegotiations; photo taken February 15, 2015

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Proponents of the YES vote gather in front of the Parliament building a week before the Greek Bailout Referendum held on July 5, 2015.

persisted for decades, indeed centuries.

The more outspoken of his inner circle went even further. “The memorandum is a blessing!” asserted one longtime – and untiring – minister. “If there were no memorandum, we would have to invent one,” said another, paraphrasing Voltaire.

One year later, Greece was rocked by demonstrations. Citizens had set up camp in most squares around the country, cursing gods and demons but above all the “establishment,” the “system” and the political old guard that had ruled since 1974. Protesters torched shops in the center of Athens. They tried to force their way into Parliament; they gave it the Greek equivalent of “the finger” and referred to it as a brothel. Government buildings were frequently the targets of petrol bomb attacks and the policemen guarding them often responded with ex150

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cessive force. The cycle of violence was refueled daily, providing TV stations with dramatic footage. Hotels in Athens were filled with foreign reporters and camera crews. “Where are they breaking heads right now?” one Spanish female correspondent asked me in a busy café.

“I don’t think they are breaking heads anywhere today,” I replied, only to be met by a look of real disappointment.

Like any other self-respecting European capital, Athens has a long tradition of demonstrations and riots. The idea that whenever a government becomes tyrannical or proves to be incompetent, the people (must) go out on the streets and overthrow it, is deeply rooted in Greeks. “The voice of the people is as strong as the wrath of God!” runs the proverb. Besides, the final article of the Constitution appoints citizens themselves as the ultimate guardians of democracy. Conscience-shapers, from primary school teachers to radio journalists, frequently like to point out how a revolt in 1843 forced the country’s first king to moderate his absolutism. And that a student uprising in 1973 marked the beginning of the end for the military

dictatorship. Resistance, both as a duty and an honor, is deeply ingrained in the Greek psyche.

In light of the above, what happened in 2011 was probably only to be expected, the natural reaction of a society whose normality, the circumstances on which it relies, was abruptly overturned.

When faced with such a situation, one inevitably turns against the guiltless and the guilty alike.

But with one crucial difference: during the first year of the memorandum, relatively few Greeks experienced its harsh consequences at first hand.

For although George Papandreou had agreed with the “troika” and legislated even the most painful of the measures included in the loan agreement, he then hesitated and significantly delayed their implementation. The wage and pension cuts, the increase in unemployment and the downturn in economic activity during the period 2010-2011 were nothing compared with what was to come.

What’s more, the government went to great lengths to assure citizens that the memorandum represented a completely temporary phase. Greece would, they

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Demonstrators gather on July 3, 2015, in Syntagma Square to voice their support for a NO vote in the Greek Bailout Referendum.

insisted, soon return to the markets.

So what caused all the indignation and why was it manifested in such a violent manner? And why, when a subsequent government slashed the incomes of working people even more dramatically, did the Greeks accept it almost without protest?

The historian of the future will no doubt investigate and elucidate. We, in the short time that has passed, can only make conjectures.

First Conjecture In the 36 years between the collapse of the junta in 1974 and the bankruptcy of the Greek state in 2010, parliamentary democracy in Greece had operated undisturbed. Structures and institutions were modernized and the real economy grew at a very strong pace. In 1981, the country joined what was then

the EEC and, in 2001, the eurozone.

Greece was, at that point, among the 30 most prosperous countries in the world.

However, not for one moment did the political system stop being based on the interchange between state and citizens, with the intermediation of their elected leaderships.

Voters rewarded at the ballot box (just as their great-grandparents before them) those members of parliament who had served them personally with appointments, promotions and interventions in administrative matters, even in the administration of justice. Labor unions of all kinds, from industrial workers to film directors, pressed for and received constant pay rises, favors and subsidies. Entrepreneurs largely relied on the performance of public works for their turnover.

In a nutshell, beneath a veneer of egalitarianism, justice and capitalism (usually behind a social-democratic mask), Greek society was organized along corporatist lines and was generously provided for by the state. The bankruptcy of the state, its inability to borrow any more from international

markets and share those loan proceeds among its favored groups, caused shock and awe. The Greeks became indignant with their politicians the moment the country lost its creditworthiness. Even before they felt it in their pockets, they realized what the tutelage of the troika would mean.

Second Conjecture On December 6, 2008, a high school student was shot dead by a policeman in the center of Athens. Clearly, it was not premeditated murder but the criminal act of a law enforcement officer who overstepped all bounds of authority in a democratic state.

For the next month, the capital was literally ablaze. Young people, the majority of whom had until then been completely apolitical, expressed their general discontent in the most extreme and lawless way. They torched hundreds of stores, stormed into public buildings, and destroyed part of the university library.

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In the squares of “indignation,” a post-modern type of “leftist” was shaped: stubbornly uneducated, incurably wrathful, and hopelessly out of touch.

to further inflame passions. No one was tried for what happened to Alexandros Grigoropoulos, to the detriment of Athens. SYRIZA – then a small party with Eurocommunist roots and leftist political leanings – all but gave its blessing to the upheaval. Popular journalists and comics praised those who had wreaked havoc, making the outrageous argument that youth is always right.

The rioting in December 2008 was not motivated by any specific political demand, did not give rise to any clearly identifiable leadership, and led nowhere. It simply rechristened havoc as revolution and blind aggression as political duty. In this sense, it laid the foundations for the “Indignant Citizens Movement” that would appear two and a half years later.

Third Conjecture Roughly speaking, the “indignants” of 2011 belonged to one of two ideological currents. On one side, there was the radical Left, expressed in party terms

by SYRIZA. Opposing them was the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. In fact, at times Syntagma Square was literally split in two, with the leftists occupying one part and neo-Nazis the other.

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on the Internet in order to disseminate their messages and do battle around the clock with their “enemies”. The then new social media – Facebook and Twitter – served as propaganda platforms with astonishing penetration rates, especially among younger people. And thanks to smartphones, strike teams could be put together and unleashed against targets almost instantly. I shall never forget one 18-year-old hairdressing student excitedly telling me how the previous night she had participated in a yogurt attack against the Minister of Education. “But how did you know where she was?” I asked in amazement. “The minister was eating at a taverna, next to a friend of ours. He sent a message and we ran there!”

There were, of course, also major differences begtween the camps.

Golden Dawn had taken it upon itself to protect – in return for their allegiance – vulnerable groups of ethnic Greeks who lived in deprived neighborhoods and felt under threat (whether real or imaginary) from foreign migrants.

Groups of neo-Nazis, many of whom had criminal records, accompanied the elderly from home to the bank to collect their pension. “Militiamen” – generally bodyguards and bouncers by profession – “guarded” city blocks, organized food kitchens and blood donations for Greeks only. Through such artifices, Golden Dawn massively increased its share of the vote from 0.01% to 7% and became the third-largest party in parliament.

SYRIZA clearly abhorred such tactics. However, it had no problem immediately admitting to its ranks anyone that approached the party, even if they held the most puerile or bigoted beliefs. In the squares of “indignation,” in the midst of clashes with the police, a post-modern type of “leftist” was shaped: stubbornly uneducated, incurably wrathful, and hopelessly out of touch. There, many of those who would later become ministers of SYRIZA introduced themselves to public opinion, winning over their audience with conspiracy theories and empty talk about the write-off of all debts – public and

private – and the establishment of a revolutionary regime of direct democracy.

There, lastly, the mechanisms for manipulating public opinion were perfected which today are enabling SYRIZA to implement the third – and harshest – memorandum without so much as a whimper in Greece.

The conjectures offered above can function in combination and/or cumulatively.

In my view, they trace a political process; one which may have mass participation and may sometimes be legitimized in elections, but is far from what is defined as democracy. To be precise, it constitutes a sharp reversion to pre-modern ideas and beliefs, which are being widely disseminated thanks to technology, and which become popular thanks to their simplicity.

It would be extremely useful to compare the Greek experience with the “Arab Spring,” which began with such promise and ended up promoting Islamism. It would be even bolder to identify and highlight the similarities between the “indignants” and the mass totalitarian movements of interwar Europe.

Nevertheless, no matter how many discussions we have, the burning question will continue to be: does a problematic democracy – and which democracy does not suffer from inherent problems?

– have the strength to defend itself against animosity, (self-)destructive impulses and hi-tech twaddle?

I cannot say I am optimistic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christos Chomenidis studied Communication in Leeds and Law in both Athens in Moscow. His first novel, “The Wise Kid,” written when he was 23, became a best-seller. He has since published nine more novels and three collections of short stories. His books have been translated into many languages. His novel “Niki” won the Greek National Book Award and a stage version has met with great success.

feasts GREECE IS

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a wine that travels well The enjoyment of food and drink has always been part of Greek culture, and how and where one dines has always had political overtones as well.

Interior of a Kylix depicting Dionysus crossing the sea, with grape vines springing up around the ship’s mast, ca 530 BC. (Š Universal History Archive/UIG / Bridgeman Images)

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A Beginner’s Guide to Symposia What do the private drinking parties of Athenians tell us about ancient democracy?

© bpk / Antikensammlung, SMB / Johannes Laurentius

BY GEORGIA NAKOU

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oming together to share food and drink is a universal human way of creating social bonds. All societies have their dining and drinking rituals which bring people together in groups, large or small, and remind them of their shared values. Fifth-century BC Athens and its rival city-states had a variety of such occasions, among which the symposium, or drinking party, is the most famous.

Celebrated in works of art and literature, and abundantly portrayed on painted pottery, the symposium offers a vivid

glimpse of a certain kind of Athenian at leisure. In the flickering lamp-light of a private dining room, with the accompaniment of flute music, poetry and drinking songs, we get quite a different picture of Athenian citizens than we do from more solemn occasions in the agora or at a temple, but one that is equally telling about their values and allegiances. In its own way, the symposium was one of the institutions that reinforced the values of citizenship.

The symposium was about drinking, not eating. Its very name translates roughly as “a

Wining and dining. A 5th-century B.C. Attic kylix (drinking cup) from the Berlin State Museum, showing guests at a symposium drinking wine.

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Bronze oinochoe in the shape of a young man’s head (425-400 BC. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

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drinking-together.” Although some food was served to soak up litical life in most Greek cities, and certainly in Athens, where the wine, it was probably more like present-day meze or tapas only local-born men were full citizens. than a full-blown meal: olives, cheese, onions, garlic, mashed beans and lentils, bite-size pieces of meat, followed by grapes, THE SYMPOSIUM RULES figs or honey-flavored sweets. The setting is shown in the depicA strict code of honor was enforced by the symposiarch, tions of symposia which decorate pottery drinking sets used on but one deliberately different from that governing the city as such occasions. The standard set consisted of shallow drinking a whole. Its rules revolved around private pledges and dares, cups with handles and a stem known as kylikes; a large mixing which created a special bond among the guests that would jar known as a krater, large enough to require its being carried have extended beyond the evening itself. Because of the (full) by two men; an unusually shaped container special relationships it fostered, the symposium called a psykter, which was used for cooling the was not a faithful mirror of democracy but wine with cold water; serving jugs called oia self-contained world – one where a nochoe; and plates. surviving pieces feasmall group of guests felt comfortture stylized scenes of men reclining able in banter and debate, forming on couches – having removed their friendships and alliances in a shoes and cloaks, laid down their more intimate setting than that walking sticks and tied of the open agora. up their dogs – who are There were, in fact, seen with small dishes other types of gathof tasty morcels (trageering that more dimata) placed around rectly promoted the them. Occasionally they values of citizenship are shown playing drinking games than did the intimate such as kottabos, which involved and somewhat exclusive custom flicking the wine dregs from a kylix of the symposium. Large-scale at a target. sacrificial feasts celebrating gods or But there’s a catch: in Classical Greece, goddesses or other major events in the only the gods drank their wine straight, in city were more public in nature and often the form of liquid offerings, or libations. For open to all citizens rich and poor, whatever mortal drinkers, the wine was always diluted their family background. These often foAttic red-figure kylix depicting a young with water, and to do otherwise was considcused on the sharing of meat from sacrificed man taking wine from a krater (490-480 BC, Benaki Museum, ered barbaric. The decision on how strong or animals in equal portions –­reinforcing the Athens). weak to serve the wine was made by the symvalue of isonomy, meaning equality before posiarch, the designated master of ceremothe law. nies for the evening.

PLEASURE (AND RESTR AINT) HOW MUCH WINE? The descriptions of symposia that survive in the literaThe god of wine Dionysus, appearing as a character in a ture clearly associate them with the upper echelons of soci4th-c. BC play by Eubulus, gives this rule of thumb: “For senety, but it seems clear from archaeological evidence that most sible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health, the seccitizens held similar, intimate drinking parties according to ond for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the their means. Rooms interpreted as androns (men’s banqueting rooms with sufficient space for between seven and eleven third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is reclining couches) have been found even in modest houses not mine any more – it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for excavated throughout Athens and Piraeus. While the wealthshouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is iest may have drunk out of silver cups (as Socrates is said to for fights. The eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is do in Plato’s Symposium), the less well-off could buy cheaper for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.” pottery vessels which mimicked the shape and decoration of The symposion was men-only. The only women allowed precious plates at 1/1000th of the price. were slaves, entertainers (flute-girls seem to have been parThe rules of the symposium were part of a shared knowlticularly popular) and hetairai, who were courtesans – often highly educated and renowned for their wit as well as their edge among citizens. This common reference point allows skill in the erotic arts. All were there to serve or entertain the Plato to take elements of the symposium and use them to guests. In this regard, the symposium mirrors public and podescribe more abstract concepts – for example, mixing wine G R E E C E IS

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The symposium was not a faithful mirror of democracy but a self-contained world – one where a small group of guests felt comfortable in banter and debate, forming friendships and alliances in a more intimate setting than that of the open agora.

out lithely and athletically on the covers. Then praise one of the pieces of bronze ware – gaze at the ceiling – admire the tapestries in the hall. Water for our hands! Bring in the tables! Now we’re dining; now we’ve washed; now we’re pouring libations.”

Despite Bdelycleon’s efforts, his father’s induction into high society proves an embarrassment: having eaten and drunk to excess, danced wildly and hit his slave, he rounds off his first symposium with a disgraceful drunken komos, or procession, in the company of a stolen flute girl, being chased by a neighbor seeking compensation for damages.

Suspicion towards the symposium boiled over into a major political scandal just a few years later, as Athens became more deeply embroiled in the Peloponnesian War. On the eve of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition in 415 BC, the expedition’s leader Alcibiades, scion of one of Athens’ oldest aristocratic families and a renowned symposiast, was accused of misbehaving at a symposium.

The controversial figure of Alcibiades epitomizes aristocratic licentiousness – in Plato’s Symposium, he makes a dramatic entry, gate-crashing the banquet inebriated, half-naked and draped over the inevitable flute girl to declare his love for Socrates. His reputation came very close to getting him executed, when it was also alleged that he and his fellow revONLY FOR THE “IN CROWD” elers had mocked the Eleusenian Mysteries during a private The potential for excess, combined with the private nature drinking party, then proceeded to run riot through the city, of the gatherings, helps to explain why Athenians tended to vandalizing a number of sacred boundary markers known as regard symposia with some suspicion, and as potential breedherms. As a result of these accusations, Alcibiades was forced ing grounds for aristocratic (non-democratic) values – what to abandon his post as the head of the upcoming military exwe might now call “elitist.” In Aristophanes’ comedy Wasps, pedition and go into self-imposed exile – in Sparta! His propwhich premiered in 422 BC, this social tension was expressed erty was subsequently confiscated, while he himself was tried through humor. The play pits the upwardly mobile son – an in absentia and condemned to death. The Sicilian Expedition aspiring aristocrat, who has discovered the finer things in life ultimately proved a disaster for Athens, with Alcibiades being – against his father, a simple man of the demos whose only widely blamed for it. fault is an unhealthy obsession with carrying out his civic In the twists and turns of 5th-c. BC Athenian politics, this duty as a juror. In this passage (Wasps, 1208-17), the hero was not the last we hear of Alcibiades.

Bdelycleon instructs his father PhiloAfter a few years in the “wilderness” as cleon on symposium etiquette: a military adviser to various courts and Bdelycleon: Come and lie down, cities, he was able to return to Athens and learn how to be a symposiast and and rehabilitate himself – as many a a socialite. modern politician has done – by pubPhilocleon: How do I lie then? licly embracing religion. In 407 BC, he Come on, tell me. led his fellow citizens in a procession B: Elegantly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Georgia Nakou holds a DPhil in to the sanctuary of Demeter in Eleusis, P: You want me to lie like this?

Archaeology from Oxford University. She making good with a public feast the B: Oh no. writes about culture, politics and food, past and present. wrong he was said to have committed P: How then? at a private drinking party.

B: Stretch your legs and pour yourself with water is used as an analogy for the “mixed life,” balancing hedone (pleasure) and phronesis (restraint). The use of drinking metaphors is all the more surprising for a thinker who notoriously disapproved of such frivolous behavior in most of his writing. Socrates, his teacher and the protagonist in most of his philosophical dialogues, preached abstinence and seems to have attended symposia more out of politeness than his own enthusiasm. Hedonistic pleasure, drinking to excess and talking politics were not seen as compatible with a philosophical life. In the Protagoras, Socrates scolds that “when men of education gather to drink, you will not see any flautists or dancing girls. And even if they drink a lot, they are capable of talking and listening in an orderly fashion.”

Drinking in moderation was condoned by Plato later in his career, when he described wine as an aid to learning, making men’s minds more receptive to education.

This ideal of a civilized debate among educated friends clearly contrasts with what evidently happened at many symposia. A favorite theme of Athenian vase-painting during this era is the komos – the drunken revel that follows the symposium, when revellers spilled out onto the street engaging in unruly behavior.

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Euphronios’ red-figure psykter depicting a symposium of women (505-500 BC, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). Psykters such as this one served as wine coolers; they were placed inside a larger vessel, usually a krater, filled with cold water.

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Watering the seedS of innovation NBG Business Seeds is an integrated program designed by National Bank of Greece to foster innovative and export-oriented entrepreneurship. It includes actions that aim at showcasing innovative ideas and projects, training and mentoring young entrepreneurs, and providing infrastructures, networking and financing. Through this program, the bank offers support to three Greek agri-food companies that have stood out for their entrepreneurial and innovative spirit. www.nbg.gr/english/nbgseeds

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A BALSAMIC VINEGAR PIONEER Τhe story of the company Kalamata Papadimitriou began in 1939 when Christos Papadimitriou, age 29, settled in Kalamata in the Peloponnese and began to trade and export local products: dried figs, Kalamata olives, olive oil and Corinthian currants. With the latter, in the ‘50s he managed to penetrate the challenging and demanding market of Great Britain and gradually became the second largest exporter of currants worldwide. As other foreign markets, however, began to export a similar commodity at more competitive prices, Greece gradually started losing its footing and by the ‘90s it was left outside the market. It was then that Papadimitriou’s son, oenologist Kostas Papadimitriou, having just finished his studies, combined his entrepreneurial talent with his knowledge of wine and designed a new product that took the market by storm: the first Greek Balsamic Vinegar. Nowadays, the 3rd generation of the Papadimitriou family, Christos and Dimitris have taken balsamic vinegar to a new level by creating new lines of innovative products, such as balsamic creams and Mediterranean mustards based on vinegar. Kalamata Papadimitriou is the No1 Balsamic vinegar in sales in Greece and remains a market leader to this day with exports to more than 30 countries. NBG Business Seeds supports the processing and export of traditionally produced raisin.

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by National Bank of Greece in the context of its NBG Business Seeds program.

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www.mermix.gr

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The Sharing Table A prominent expert on Greek cuisine describes the joys of meze culture and gives us the recipes to indulge in it, too.

By Aglaia Kremezi

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FOOD STYLING: TINA WEBB, PHOTOS: GEORGE DRAKOPOULOS, PROPS STYLING: OLIVIA WEBB, Utensils: Zara Home, personal collection

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either of us likes an Athenian dinner. There is a revolting quality in things Attic as in things foreign. For the cook sets before you a large tray on which are five small plates. One of these holds garlic, another a pair of sea urchins, another a sweet wine sop, another ten cockles, the last a small piece of sturgeon. While I’m eating this, another is eating that; and while he is eating that, I have made away with this. What I want, good sir, is both the one and the other, but my wish is impossible. For I have neither five mouths nor five hands...”

This scene describes the frustration we feel when we don’t get to taste all the dishes of a meze spread. It is obviously an age-old problem, as the passage I quoted comes from the comedy Centaur,

by Lynceus, written in the 4th-3rd c.

BC. This comedy is one of the many lost texts of antiquity. Only small parts of it, including this passage, survived in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae.

You may have noticed that meat is missing from the five plates just described. In antiquity, meat was a rare festive dish. The constant roasting of animals, described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, gives an inaccurate picture of the daily diet. Athenaeus had a good explanation for this. He suggested that roasted meat was the food everyone expected male heroes to eat, while fish, which often requires tedious preparation, was associated with women cooks.

The sharing of food whenever a whole family or a bunch of friends gathers around the table is typical of the traditional Greek way of life. The meal begins with alcoholic drinks and a communal course of meze (plural mezedes), little plates containing various kinds of cold and hot foods: green and black olives; feta or other local cheeses drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with oregano; raw, cured or simply cooked seafood and fish; pickled vegetables and spreads; garlicky dips; intensely flavored rice-and-herb-filled grape leaves; and vegetable or sometimes meat stews.

Offered in small portions together with

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If you plan to serve a meze course as a prelude to a lunch or dinner, choose two or three light vegetable and fish dishes, which can be set on a side table when your guests arrive so that they can help themselves. On the other hand, if you plan to make a meze meal, follow the traditional Greek custom by starting with cold vegetable dishes, continuing with the cold fish and seafood, and finishing with the warm ones – the fried vegetables, then the hot fish or maybe a meat dish.

Tiganopita me Feta

(Feta Cheese Pancake)

Makes 4 appetizer servings This easy tiganopita from Chios needs no kneading. It is a kind of light, baked omelet, made from a simple egg batter. It can be eaten warm or at room temperature, served in the pan in which it was baked.

INGREDIENTS 1/2 cup (125g) all-purpose flour 2 large eggs, lightly beaten 1 cup water 1 tbsp olive oil 1½ cups (250g) crumbled feta cheese • Freshly ground black pepper • Freshly chopped mint or dill to serve (optional) • • • • •

PREPARATION In a medium bowl, beat the flour and eggs with a whisk or an electric mixer until blended, then gradually add the water. Cover and let stand for at least 30 minutes, or up to 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Coat an 26x17 cm heavy pan, or a round nonstick dish with the oil. Stir 1 cup of the cheese and pepper to taste into the batter. Pour the batter into the baking dish and sprinkle the remaining ½ cup cheese and more pepper over the top.

Bake for 30 minutes, or more, until the top is golden brown and the sides are pulling away from the dish. Cut into squares and serve warm or at room temperature.

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pieces of fresh bread, mezedes arrive at the table together with the drinks. Each meze is something like what the French call an amuse-gueule (a taste-teaser) and the Spanish call tapas, but together, several of them can become a substantial meal.

Each participant, fork in hand, dives into the small treats that keep coming at a steady pace. Whoever manages “the quickest fork,” as the Greek saying goes, succeeds in tasting all the dishes. The temptations posed by the procession of dishes can be formidable, leaving the diners wishing they did, indeed, have “five mouths and five hands” to enjoy them all. Ouzo, the aniseed-flavored strong alcoholic drink, and raki (equally strong, but unscented) are the drinks most often served with mezedes, but wine is another very common option.

Traditionally, Greeks never drink alcohol on an empty stomach, and they always urge foreigners to take a bite together with drinks. There is even a special word for drinking that is not accompanied by some sort of food, kserosfiri, and it is always pronounced with contempt: “You can’t drink this kserosfiri!”– which, on the other hand, doesn’t mean that you can’t, or shouldn’t, drink.

It just means you should keep eating as long as the little plates with the various mezedes keep coming.

The temptations posed by the procession of dishes can be formidable, leaving diners wishing they had “five mouths and five hands” to enjoy them all.

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To Haviari tou Ftochou (Poor Man’s Caviar)

Makes 8 to 10 servings (about 21/2 cups) Inspired by a meze from the island of Syros. With olives, capers, herbs and some lemon and olive oil, everybody can create a delicious tapenade-like spread that rivals the most expensive appetizers.

INGREDIENTS 200g juicy black olives, such as Pelion or Kalamata, pitted • 200g green olives, such as Nafplion, pitted • 1 cup capers, preferably salt-packed • 3-6 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice • 5 garlic cloves • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley • 3-4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 1 tsp dried savory or oregano, crumbled • 1/2-1 tsp freshly ground white pepper • 2-3 tsp dried whole-wheat breadcrumbs (optional) • Thin slices of whole-wheat bread, toasted •

PREPARATION Rinse the olives and capers thoroughly under cold running water and drain well on paper towels. In a food processor, combine the olives, capers, 3 tablespoons lemon juice and the garlic, and process into a smooth paste. Add the parsley and process until incorporated.

Add 3 tbsp oil, 1 tsp savory or oregano, and 1/2 tsp white pepper and process until blended. Taste and adjust the seasonings, adding more lemon juice and white pepper if needed. If the mixture is too dry, add more oil; if too moist, stir in the breadcrumbs. Transfer to a serving bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least 2 to 3 hours, or overnight.

To serve, spread thinly on bread.

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The ancient dishes described by Lynceus are particularly characteristic of the mezedes served in the summer on Greek islands, where seafood plays a very important role. At seaside tavernas all over the islands of the Aegean, you are beset by tantalizing smells: of charcoal-grilled octopus; of freshly cut vine-ripened tomatoes and cucumbers seasoned with oregano; of crisp-fried zucchini or eggplants; of tiny crunchy fish sprinkled with lemon juice. Meat – never plentiful in Greece, a country that has no large plains for cattle – was traditionally reserved for special occasions. Home-cured pork used to be too precious to be served as a meze by itself, but it is often used to flavor the omelets islanders make with tomatoes and other seasonal vegetables or greens.

Other mezedes typical of the mainland and the islands include a tangy caper, onion and tomato stew. In Lesvos, you find unusual seafood such as solines (razor clams) and boiled skate wing, while raw sea urchins – the much sought-after and very expensive uni in the United States – is a common meze in Crete and other islands, as well as in upscale fish taverns around Athens.

Flavorful seasonal vegetables are served raw, cooked or pickled: fresh, green chickpeas, fava beans (split peas) and wild artichokes, as well as “exotic” delicacies, such as the bitter volvi (grape hyacinth bulbs) and kritamo (rock samphire), which often flavors salads and marinated fish.

Today, all over Greece, the meze

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spread includes things always kept in home pantries – olives, cheese, strongly-flavored tsiros (sun-dried fish) or freshly salted sardines, pickled vegetables and greens ­ – and some dishes whipped up at the last minute. These might include kolokythokeftedes (zucchini fritters); batter-fried slices of eggplant or zucchini; or omelets stuffed with cheese and almost anything available in the kitchen or harvested from the home garden. Some cooks try to keep dolmades (rice-and-herb-stuffed grape leaves) on hand – these are usually prepared once a week in large quantities and refrigerated, since their taste improves over time. They may also have some fava (mashed yellow split peas), which is served mixed with herbs and onions, and drizzled with olive oil.

“Only soup cannot be made into meze,” my grandmother used to say; everything else, like leftover spanakopita or tyropita (spinach pie or cheese pie), fasolakia (braised green beans), okra or briam (oven-baked summer vegetables), even a piece of moussaka, can be enjoyed by as part of the spread.

An elaborate meze course can take longer to prepare than a regular meal, but many of the dishes can be cooked more than one day in advance and served at room temperature. A main course may or may not follow. Some Greek mezedes tend to have strong flavors, which may overpower delicate wines. Ouzo diluted with two parts water goes well with most mezedes, as does raki; so would the old-fashioned tradi-

Ktapodi sta Karvouna

(Marinated Charcoal-Grilled Octopus)

Serves 6-8 My take on the very popular Greek meze.

It is equally delicious with fresh or frozen octopus.

INGREDIENTS •

1kg octopus (cleaned by your fishmonger), fresh or frozen

Marinade • 1 cup extra virgin olive oil, and more to drizzle • ½ cup white wine or cider vinegar • Juice of 1 lemon • ½ cup red wine • 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped • 1 tsp cumin • 2 tsp dried oregano, crumbled • 1 tsp Aleppo pepper or freshly ground black pepper • 3-4 sprigs thyme, oregano or rosemary, or a combination • 2 lemons, quartered

PREPARATION If using fresh octopus, wash it well and place in a large nonreactive pot. (The octopus releases water as it cooks, so there may be no need to add any.) Cook over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes or more, or until the octopus changes color and curls up, and is easily pierced with a sharp knife. Do not forget to add water as needed. If using frozen octopus, place it in the pot directly from the freezer and cook over low heat, turning frequently, until it curls up and is knife-tender.

Increase the heat to high and cook to evaporate most of the liquid.

Make the marinade:

“Only soup cannot be made into meze,” my grandmother used to say; everything else, even a piece of moussaka, can be enjoyed as part of the spread.

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Combine all the marinade ingredients in a blender and pulse. Cut and separate the tentacles of the blanched octopus, place in a glass or stainless-steel container, add the herb sprigs, pour over the marinade and turn to coat. Cover, let cool and refrigerate overnight or up to 4 days.

Grill (or broil) for 4 to 5 minutes per side.

Cut into bite-sized pieces, and serve after squeezing some lemon over the pieces.

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tional retsina. Retsina, in much more refined, designer versions, is trying to make a comeback, but the once ubiquitous resinated wine has lost its popularity among Greeks today, having given its place to the new wonderful Greek rosés, which pair well with many, though not all, mezedes.

When Greeks invite you to their homes for meze, the food is casual. The point for these often impromptu weekend gatherings is to have a bunch of friends around a table leisurely drinking and eating together, during a pleasant, animated conversation with uninhibited exchanges of views and ideas; in other words, enjoying each other’s company. In Greece, as in most parts of the Mediterranean, rich and poor alike invite people over all the time, sharing with them ta vriskoumena – whatever they have at hand – without thinking twice about it. We take this for granted until we spend time abroad, and realize that northern Europeans and Americans seldom decide on a whim to invite somebody to share their food.

Of course, sharing a common meze spread or eating seasonal foods by no means suggests some sort of table democracy, let alone equality; the rich have been eating better since ancient times, their larders and tables filled with all kinds of edibles, meats and fish, often imported from faraway lands, while the poor ate whatever they could forage or cultivate in their small gardens every season. But history and life often take their revenge: the poor people’s foods of yesteryear, based on the locally grown, seasonal vegetables – those peasant dishes once shunned by the rich or the urban middle class – have today become the most sought-after delicacies!

The poor now buy mass-produced foods from cheap supermarket chains, while the rich often spend vast amounts of money on locally grown organic ingredients in an effort to recreate the humble, village dishes they once snubbed.

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Kolokythokeftedes (Zucchini Herb and Feta Fritters)

Serves 6-8 (about 20 patties) There are as many different preparations of kolokythokeftedes as there are cooks in Greece – and I am not exaggerating.

In the summer, this very popular meze is served in tavernas all over the country.

The fried patties must be crunchy on the outside with a soft and fresh-tasting center and with no trace of uncooked flour, as is unfortunately often the case.

INGREDIENTS 1kg zucchini, coarsely grated Salt 1 bunch spring onions finely chopped, bulb and stem • 1 bunch of dill, finely chopped • 1 tbsp dried oregano, crumbled • 500g feta cheese, crumbled • Freshly ground black pepper, to taste • 2 eggs, beaten lightly • 1 cup dried breadcrumbs or more, as needed • ½ cup (60g) all-purpose flour or more, as needed • Olive oil for frying • Thick yogurt (optional) • • •

PREPARATION

Make a test patty

In a colander, combine the zucchini with 1 teaspoon salt. Mash and squeeze handfuls to extract most of its moisture. Transfer the zucchini to a bowl and add the scallions, dill, oregano, feta and a dash of pepper. Add the eggs and toss to mix. In a bowl, combine the breadcrumbs and the flour. Add ½ cup of the breadcrumb-flour mixture to the zucchini mixture and stir to get a soft dough – you might need to add more breadcrumbs and flour. Spread the rest of the breadcrumb-flour mix on a plate. Next, in a large deep skillet, heat about 2cm of olive oil (or olive oil and safflower oil) over medium-high heat to 175°C (350°F).

Stir the zucchini mixture, scoop up an amount about the size of a large walnut and dredge in the breadcrumb-flour, shaping it into a patty as you roll it. Place the test patty carefully in the hot oil. Fry, turning once, until browned, about 2-3 minutes. Taste the patty and adjust the seasonings in the remaining zucchini mixture, if necessary. Shape and fry the remaining patties in batches. Prepare more breadcrumb-flour, if needed, maintaining a ratio of 2 to 1. Transfer the fried patties to paper towels to drain briefly, then serve hot, warm or at room temperature, accompanied by yogurt, if you like.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aglaia Kremezi, a journalist and author, introduced Greek cooking to an American audience with her Julia Child Award-winning book The Foods of Greece (1993) and now leads her readers on a tour of the entire region with her latest publication, Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts. Her blog, Aglaia’s Table, covers food and life on the Greek island of Kea, where she lives and teaches cooking to lucky travelers.

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“Taverna” by Georgios Manoussakis, Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm (Π.3199) (c) National Gallery Alexandros Soutzos Museum, photo by Stavros Psiroukis.

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risteides Papaconstantinou opened “To Eidikon” (The Specialist) in Aghia Sofia, part of the run-down Drapetsona neighborhood of Piraeus, in the early 1920s. He sold basic groceries and had a handful of tables where neighbors could relax and enjoy a simple meal: cheeses produced at the dairy he owned along with his brothers at Gardiki in distant Trikala, a few tomatoes, some olives, tinned sardines and whatever his wife rustled up in her skillet, accompanied by a house wine. It was simple fare: whitebait, batter-fried salted cod, eggs, fried potatoes, corned beef omelet, sausages, liver. The building itself, which stood on the corner of the street, was a jewel among a haphazard medley of makeshift sheds and huts. This was at a time when a great wave of refugees was arriving on Greece’s shores from Asia Minor, with thousands moving into the neighborhoods of Piraeus and Drapetsona. It is estimated that some 250,000 refugees settled in the greater area of the capital in that period.

A few years later, in another Piraeus quarter – Kaminia – Costas and Grigoris Lambrou watched as the walls of their wine shop and grocery collapsed around them during an aerial bombardment in WWII. Both brothers sustained serious injuries but survived to rebuild their small business, which they dedicated to the Holy Virgin of the Life-Giving Spring (Panaghia Zoodochou Pigis) – just in case – in whose honor the neigh-

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borhood church was built. They sold wine made with must from the plain of Attica, along with pulses, cheeses and various salami meats. Occasionally, Costas’ wife Maria would bring a pot of bean stew or some other casserole from home so that their patrons wouldn’t have to drink on an empty stomach.

Their retsina wine and Maria’s delicious dishes soon made their store a popular watering hole, attracting a local clientele of colliers, knife-grinders and other manual workers, as well as wrestlers, rebetika singers and sundry toughs. In time, it took the official name of Oinomageirio Zoodochou Pigis.

The two establishments had much in common: they were humble, blue-collar eateries that served simple fare and doubled as a grocery and wine store.

In many ways, they were similar to the tavernas of ancient Athens, shops that peddled and served various goods such as wine and foodstuffs. What’s more, they were both located in working-class neighborhoods in the industrial zone of Piraeus and their customers were workers from the port or the factories and machine shops in the area.

As time passed, these small businesses evolved, as did other similar eateries, first into what Greeks call oinomageiria – the Kaminia establishment still bears this word in its name – where the food is all about making the drinking of the house wine easier, and then into the “regular” tavernas they are today: with set menus and the

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The humble Greek eatery known as the taverna is a part of the country’s social fabric and an important egalitarian institution.

BY ANGELOS RENTOULAS

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The wine is flowing, the music is playing and a patron gets up to dance at To Eidikon, a century-old taverna in Piraeus.

air of a bygone era that is part of their allure. No longer retail stores, they attract their customers with the quality of their cooking.

WORKING-CLASS LIFELINES To Eidikon and the Oinomageirio Zoodochou Pigis, both still run by the families that founded them, are typical examples of the classic Athenian taverna, no different from the hundreds of such businesses that opened in the capital – and later in other cities – in the years following the recognition of the modern Greek state in 1830.

A place to come together, to cultivate the spirit of belonging and shape the community conscience, the taverna is to working-class city folk what the public square and kafeneio are to the country’s villages. The domestic migrants who flocked to the capital in the mid- and late 19th century were desperate for such human contact, and makeshift tavernas popped up in basements or ramshackle huts, always in densely populated blue-collar districts, near the factories and workshops where the

The direct, unpretentious interaction tavernas offer is still the reason why we Greeks choose the taverna, often over the many other entertainment options now available. Its classless character is beguiling.

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city’s new residents earned their living.

These tavernas were where they would spend their lunch break, meet up for a bit of fun in the evening, vent their frustrations and catch up on the gossip about the neighborhood and their hometown. Wine was the protagonist – patrons could also buy some to take home – while the food itself, always simple and moderate in quantity, was a supporting actor. Nearby, there would be grocery stores, greengrocers, fishmongers and butchers that supplied the tavernas with ingredients, which would then be prepared in the same area where they were served. Only later were the tables moved out of the kitchen as these establishments became more commercial, with better food and a more pleasing ambience.

In the early to mid-1900s, newcomers from the villages would head straight to Athens’ tavernas and coffee shops to find accommodation, potential jobs and other opportunities.

They could also pick up a few goodies brought in by farmers from rural parts.

Come election time, tavernas served as campaign headquarters, platforms of heated political debate and stages for candidates to muster support. Spaces of participatory and direct democracy, on both a theoretical and practical level, tavernas still serve as a testing ground for theories and ideologies. Patrons will make or break a government (at least they like to think so), pass judgment on the country’s politicians, argue and agree. It is here that public opinion first took shape, and here that the public sphere of the working class is still formed. Back in the day, you wouldn’t find aristocrats, power brokers or bigwigs here. Tavernas belonged to the people – which is why the well-heeled middle class held them in such low regard.

The taverna’s social role was confirmed and strengthened following the

Asia Minor catastrophe. The need of the uprooted refugees for contact and communication was great indeed, and they could not entertain friends or relatives in their tiny new homes. Tavernas became the venues for all their social occasions, happy or sad.

THE TAVERNA TODAY In the decades that followed, the taverna underwent another transformation, in which the cooking started to play an increasingly important role.

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© CLAIRY MOUSTAFELLOU

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Music, too, which had always been part of the taverna experience, began to change, shifting from folk or demotic to rebetika and other urban genres. But the direct, unpretentious interaction tavernas offer is still the reason why we Greeks choose the taverna, often over the many other entertainment options now available. Its classless character is beguiling. There are no customs, formalities or hierarchies that need to be observed; everyone eats with everyone, irrespective of generation, social

class or bank balance. We are all equal citizens in the taverna. The chairs are packed closely together and the paper table covers are disposable. We still celebrate life here, ritualistically and passionately. News, theories, ideologies, inconsequential and important bits of information, idle talk – they all have a place in the taverna.

But in the end, people are here to eat. The food must be good. Above all, though, it needs to be ample and – most importantly – affordable. Democratic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angelos Rentoulas is the chief editor of Gastronomos, the leading magazine on the culinary culture of Greece, published by the newspaper Kathimerini.

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