Isabelle Calleja Ragonesi, Democracy in Southern Europe. Colonialism, International Relations and Europeanization from Malta to Cyprus, hbk ISBN 9781788312578, 81 GBP, London and New York City, I.B. Tauris (an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic), 304 pages.
At a 2008 conference on Comparative Education in the Mediterranean, I heard Isabelle Calleja Ragonesi deliver a keynote on the teaching of history on both sides of the Cyprus divide in front of many Greek Cypriot scholars and Turkish ones, the latter from Boğaziçi Üniversitesi (University of the Bosphorous, Istanbul). I feared beforehand that this would be an ordeal.
To the contrary, her detailed and fair presentation, that day, turned this into one of the best plenary talks on the subject I have ever heard and, in my book, the conference highlight. There was a general consensus among both the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish scholars present that she provided a very rigorous analysis of the situation.
This episode made me eager to read the book under review. It is a comparative study dealing with Cyprus and Malta in the context of democratisation in Southern Europe where most nations emerged from periods of either colonialism or authoritarian dictatorships and engaged in a process of Western-style representative democracy.
As far as Malta is concerned, the book dwells, among other things, on periods marked by legitimation crises of state and government. These include the discussions around the independence constitution, from which the Malta Labour Party was left out, the church’s meddling into politics to prevent the ushering in of the MLP’s ‘project of modernity’ centring on six electoral points and later the ‘perverse’ 1981 election result and its fall out.
The book however also underlines moments of democratic consensus involving foreign and local players such as: the post-Integration decision involving members on both main sides of the legislative assembly with regard to Mintoff’s pursuit of a complete break with Britain; the MLP’s 1969 agreement with the Holy See which brought the Church’s interdiction regarding the MLP to a close: the two-thirds majority supporting the constitutional change in 1974 for the country to become a Republic: the constitutional amendment which allowed for a change of government in 1987. These were the result of various negotiations with more moderate segments of the opposition and foreign players to provide, in several cases, strong examples of consensus politics.
One also needs to add the momentous closure, in 1979, of UK military bases on the island, in keeping with the government’s and Labour Party’s non-aligned status, a foreign policy shared with Makarios’ government in Cyprus. The termination of UK military bases in Malta occurred eight years following the closure of NATO’s HQs in Malta and dismissal of Gino Birindelli, chief of the Mediterranean Command of the NATO Fleet in Malta, declared a persona non grata.
Regarding the closure of the military bases on the island in 1979, UK Labour MP, Michael Foot played an important mediating role at a delicate moment when all pointed to a Thatcher-led Conservative victory in Britain. This, of course, came to pass later in the year.
The book does not disappoint as it provides detailed accounts of setbacks and breakthroughs in the two countries’ struggles for transitions from colonial to Western representative democratic politics. There were advances and retreats, with violent periods and episodes along the way, violence being infinitely more widespread in the Cypriot case.
Once one negotiates the heavy theoretical opening (the key themes might, alternatively, have been wormed into later chapters) explaining the various players involved in both cases, the detailed forays into the political trajectories of the two islands make for compelling reading. Needless to say, though the Malta account highlights a history involving consensus and also conflict over perceived and actual undemocratic practices, secular or ecclesiastic, it marks a path towards democratisation that is infinitely less tortuous than that of Cyprus.
The two islands always struck me as providing convergences and divergences for a comparative study, the divergences in Cyprus of course centring, for the most part, on the ethnic divide involving the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish- Cypriot communities.
The book outlines the strife-torn path that the East Mediterranean island had to tread before one segment, the Republic of Cyprus, was absorbed into the ‘supranational state’ that is the EU. This passage was marked by a struggle for enosis resulting in guerrilla warfare by EOKA-B exponents and executions by the British – recalled in the Museum/Cemetery of ‘the Struggle’ in Nicosia.
It was also marked by a civil war barely three years after formal, but one can say hardly actual and concrete, ‘independence’. Of course there was the well-remembered (to people of my age at least) Greek-Cypriot military coup, involving implanted Greek military personnel, against Makarios, led by EOKA-B’s Nikos Sampson and instigated by the Greek colonels of the Papadopoulos and Ioannides regime, at the behest of the CIA and Harry Kissinger.
The latter would veto at least one British attempt to pre-empt a Turkish military invasion of Cyprus to protect Turkish-Cypriot interests. Turkey invoked the unilateral right of intervention under the Treaty of Guarantee regarding its Cyprus invasions.
One narrative surrounding the episode is that the USA obtained the divided island it wanted and for several reasons, not least to dampen the fire of the non-aligned politics of the Archbishop’s government favoured also by the influential Communist-oriented AKEL (Progressive Party of the Working People) and its large aligned trade union (Pancyprian Federation of Labour - PEO). Others consider this point as arguable. AKEL is a commendable force on the island and, true to its ideological underpinning, professes a politics focused on international social class issues rather than those of ethnicity.
Indigenous and exogenous players conditioned the country’s slippery road to formal part-democratisation. The country is constrained by its external players, namely Greece, Turkey and Britain. Britain’s retention of sovereign military bases on the island allows for a Brexit space within an EU territory. Then there is the USA which regards these bases as central to its geo-strategic interests in the region. In this regard, NATO, which includes Greece and Turkey, remains an important external force.
The struggles occurred not only between the two communities but also within the communities. The author provides detailed accounts of the tensions and violence within the different Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot factions: the several assassination attempts on the most revered of Greek-Cypriots, Archbishop Makarios; earlier murders by EOKA of Greek-Cypriot leftists (in the 50s); the successful murder plots of Turkish-Cypriot factions targeting those politicians from the same ethnic community who argued for a politics across ethnic lines, notably the two lawyers who set up a party advocating this politics and who were subsequently found murdered.
These are the moderates who are often swept aside when conflict brooks no compromises and extremists are difficult to rein in. The book abounds with such details that serve to underline the folly of characterising the main ethnic blocs as unitary, totalising entities.
Malta too has its variant of this struggle with its version of tribal polarisation centring primarily and historically on social class cleavage, not excluding odd cases of career opportunism. Despite this much recognised image of Maltese society, the book reminds us how moderates made their mark at significant moments in the country’s modern history. This concerns not only electoral and industrial relations but also Church-state relations.
I devote more space to Cyprus than to Malta because the detailed account of the latter tills familiar ground, once again, for people of my age. Social class was for many years, especially the post-71 Mintoff government years, the overriding issue. It stopped being so in more recent years as Labour abandoned its traditional social mooring, moving towards the centre and, in my view, right of centre. We observed and engaged in many of the struggles that are part and parcel of the perceived quest for greater democratisation in Malta, a process which is always in the making, as is that of decolonization. There is really no point of arrival in these areas. As elsewhere in Europe, Neoliberal politics hold sway smothering any left wing discourse in view of what the late Mark Fisher would call ‘Capitalist realism’ (this is based on TINA – there is no alternative). Is this the kind of realism that the EU promotes and helps it define a particular brand of democracy? Is it this that makes EU-driven ‘Europeanisation’ the panacea for the smoothening of conflicts?
The book provides a detailed account of a trajectory towards EU-driven Europeanisation. A huge majority marked the 2003 referendum result in Malta on EU accession which suggests voting across party guidelines. The portrayal of Cyprus and the EU highlights the demand by Turkish-Cypriots for accession and indicates the support that the EU provides this sector of the Cypriot population to gear up towards membership. All this seems to suggest an optimistic view, by the author, of an eventual solution to the island’s impasse in the form of federalism. Will the EU intervene in the thorny issue of compensation for lost property, among other things? The book addresses the idea of citizenship along Cypriot and EU-driven European lines and not along especially Greek and Turkish ethnic lines. This raises several issues especially for education, the breeding ground for this Pan-Cyprian view of citizenship, not least that concerning the language of instruction. Would English serve as the lingua franca for most subjects with Greek and Turkish learnt separately? Hope springs eternal, a feeling that runs through the final chapters of this well researched book. My discussion with friends on the island, Greek-Cypriot friends, many with a critical take on events, make me less hopeful. The settlement seems still light years away. And, as always, there are those, among Greek-Cypriots, who stand to benefit, commercially and in other ways, from the current impasse.
All told, this is a well-researched book where the case for further democratisation on Western and EU lines is cogently argued. I look forward to the more accessible, price-wise, paperback version. Given the current steep price of hardback versions, readers will probably have to make do with copies in libraries, important sources for the socialisation of knowledge production.
Peter Mayo is a professor at the University of Malta.