Mediterranean democracy, Year 2 Athens, 10-11 January 2014

Discussion:

Michalis Sotiropoulos noted that national lands were used to guarantee foreign loans, esp. by the Bavarians. He wondered if that was why it was policy to retain the lands. Or did the Bavarians just not want to mix with such a potentially difficult issue? In the 1850s, he thought it was de facto an issue, because everyone was thinking about it, in the context of financial and economic squeezes. There was pressure to make it easier for land to operate as a commodity through registration.

Socrates said that he didn’t want to get into the matter of the loan guarantees. He didn’t think the protective powers were really too concerned about the debt: they just used it as a way of gaining leverage over Greece.
Joanna Innes had been interested in what he had said about Kapodistrias and the link between property ownership and voting. She wondered if that was still something people were thinking about in the 1840s. She also wondered if there were domestic issues about borrowing on the strength of land, and resulting creditor/debtor relationships.

Socrates said that Kapodistrias was a rigorist: he thought citizens needed to have land in order to have the right to vote, though he also aimed to make the legislature no more than a consultative body. Under the Regency, the primary concern was to establish a strong municipal system, in which 10-15% of the population would be able to vote to choose a shortlist of 3 candidates for mayor, from among whom the government would choose one. This system continued until the 1870s, when MPs started to become more important than mayors. A PhD shortly to be defended (by Stavroula Verrarou) offers an account of municipalities in the Peloponnese. In 1844, it was from the ranks of these provincial elites that the first parliamentarians of the national assembly were drawn. People were not bothered by the co-existence of two different voting systems. At this period, the government always won parliamentary elections – though we don’t know the election results in detail.
Several questions were collected:
Mark Philp asked how non-Christian peasants were dealt with: did they get the right to vote?

Stella Ghervas added, what about remaining Turkish landowners?

Ioannis Tassopoulos asked whether issues about land distribution were caught up with populism, clientilism etc.

Maurizio Isabella asked about the relationship between the landowning system and the war of independence.
Socrates said that Muslims were excluded form ownership and political participation. In 1687 when the Venetians occupied the Morea, the Muslims left, or had to convert. After the Greek revolution, non-Christians who wanted to keep their land needed to convert. The property of Muslims was confiscated and turned into national estates – and similarly those who sided with the Ottomans lost out. There were some small Catholic communities whose property was respected. Jews didn’t in general hold land, but those surviving the war were given full rights of citizenship. Only Muslims converted to Christianity were able to remain in independent Greece.

Peasants took up arms in the hope of gaining land, so the war did involve a land question, but not explicitly so. It was understood that Christians would take over Muslim land.

On populism and clientelism: he thought that issue was constructed in the 1950s and 60s, in relation to the use of clientilist models, which were projected backwards. Maybe that is how things worked, but since we don’t know how people voted that’s just speculation.
Round Table: Andrew Arsan, Peter Hill, Gianluca Fruci, Caitlin Gale

Andrew Arsan: said that he had found the workshop very stimulating. His expertise was in the Lebanon. He had been struck by both parallels and contrasts. In the Lebanon too there was a historiographical legacy of debates about failed modernisation.

One hypothesis to test was that democracy was born out of crisis. In the Lebanon, civil strife in 1860 led to the enactment of a règlement organique: the hope was in this way to reinvent the body politic. Issues of popular representation and sovereignty were bound up in this; also questions about landholding and the place of the church. The consultative assembly established by the règlement was seen to express the will of the people, though in fact it did so only very indirectly. The same notions were at play though in other contexts: tax rolls, court rooms.

In relation to the notion of a national church: from the 1830s and 40s, Maronite clerics began to present themselves as forming a national church, despite the religious mix present in the Lebanon. This however was a very ad hoc development, with no historical roots. C18 it had not been supposed that only Muslims could represent Muslims, non-Muslims non-Muslims, but this came to be argued C19.

In relation to the land question, he thought that the way practice was or was not imbricated in language presented an interesting issue in terms of the social history of political thought.

It was an interesting question how Greece and the Lebanon should be conceived in relation to eachother and to Europe. And was the best framework for considering them together Ottoman or Mediterranean? Both had long histories of broader, mercantile contacts with southern Europe.

Peter Hill said that he was interested in diasporas as points of contact between people, and in the relationship between the nahda, the Arab ‘awakening’ and the Greek ‘enlightenment’, and also in the relationship between these intellectual and cultural developments and political change. As he understand it, the intellectual movement took place largely outside what became Greece, and to a large extent among diaspora Greeks. There were obvious parallels with Arab groups in Europe, interacting with each other and with Europe – especially Christian Arabs. Originally Beirut was the place in which such developments made their chief impact within the Arab world; later Egypt.

Diasporic networks included both merchants and Christian missionaries: these didn’t have a big role in the state. Muslim Arabs however did have a role in the state: they might travel to Europe to get ideas about reforms they could promote at home. Democracy perhaps had less appeal to those already involved in state projects. And for minority-group members, the state didn’t seem to be a promising means to access power.

He wondered if before 1820 Greeks thought access to power lay through the Ottoman state, or were there other routes?

Gianluca Fruci: said that in Italy as in Greece, democracy was a fluid word and perhaps banal. As in Greece, it was often used with reference to the ancient world. There were as many enemies of democracy in Europe as among the Ottomans. To achieve more specific meaning, the noun needed to be associated with an adjective: pure, representative, liberal, social, Christian etc. Today, a particular version has triumphed, and the word seems to have a precise meaning, but then it was less clear.

In relation to suffrage, he was struck as he had said, but how early the Greeks opted for universal suffrage. In Italy universal suffrage was an idea and occasional practice from the Napoleonic plebiscites onwards. Basing municipal suffrage on limited suffrage was also a common European story. And electoral corruption could be found everywhere!

Caitlin Gale explained that she was primarily a military historian working on North Africa, and specialising in a slightly earlier period. Both the Napoleonic Wars and their ending brought turmoil to the Ottoman world: a new regime rose in Egypt; there was civil war in Morocco, and a revival of corsairing. Moreover, Malta and Minorca changed hands: all in all, the Mediterranean changed greatly 1800-30. She was struck by Greek/North African parallels in terms of this being a time of ferment, even if history took different directions. It wasn’t inevitable that Algeria should have ended up as a French colony. During the 1820s, links between North Africa and the Ottoman centre were relatively attenuated, and there wasn’t huge interest in the Greek war of independence, though previously there had been quite a lot of contact between Algeria and Greece.

Discussion:

Konstantina Zanou wondered why European powers didn’t make Greece a colony?

Caitlin said she’d been thinking rather of the reverse counterfactual: that Algeria might have obtained independence. During the war the Mediterranean had been a British sea. Disruption ensued when others were allowed back in.

Joanna Innes suggested that there were connections between what was happening in different parts of the Mediterranean c. 1830: Britain’s preoccupation with Greece helped to give France her chance in Algeria.

Antonis Anastaspoulos thought there were geo-political difficulties about colonising Greece: couldn’t be done by occupying a major port and then penetrating its hinterland.

Maurizio Isabella said nonetheless the possibility was discussed.
Stella Ghervas wondered about the periodisation of the project: it covered a very long period, and the end was very different from the start.

Also she wondered how Greece was best characterised before independence: what terminology should we use?

In relation to democracy, the main question for her was still, who is the demos? The community of Greeks? But who were they? These seemed to her central but still very open questions.

Joanna Innes said in relation to the periodisation of the project that indeed, it covered a period of significant change: that was the point.

She thought the question ‘Who are the people’ tended to arise for contemporaries at a second stage. First they fought to establish the sovereignty of the people; then they had to work out who the people were.

Konstantina agreed: when they appealed to the people, who were they addressing? They themselves didn’t really know.

1^ In chronological order and up to 1821, the year of the Greek Revolution, the following titles were published in Vienna: Ephemeris (1790), Ermis o Logios (1811), Ellenikos Telegraphos (1812), Philologikos Telegraphos (1817), and Kalliopi (1819). In addition Melissa and Athena (both in 1819) were published in Paris. In Paris also came out the short-lived Mouseion (only one issue) in 1819. Furthermore, an announcement in Logios Ermis (Issue 8, 15.4.1819, p. 307) informed readers about the forthcoming publication of a periodical that was to be printed in England. As we now know, this operation failed. [Mastoridis, p. 74]

2^ Telegrafo Greco (Missolonghi, 1824, in English, French, Italian and German) and L’Abeille Grecque (Hydra-Aegina, 1827-29).