Shifting borders and moving goalposts mark Greece and Turkey’s latest diplomatic dance

Since its foundation in the 1820s, Greece’s borders have always been a movable feast. In particular, the Balkan wars of 1912-13, which many historians see as a dry run for the first World War, saw the first signs of dismantling the Ottoman Empire which still stretched across southern Europe. Greece gained substantially, especially at the expense of Bulgaria and the newly formed Albania.

In 1920-22 a colossal diplomatic and military blunder, backed in principal but not in fact by Britain and France, saw the Greek invasion of western Turkey and its humiliation at the hands of the young Turkish leader, Kemal Atatürk.

The peak of Greek territorial expansion came in 1947, with the acquisition of the Dodecanese islands, with Rhodes as their capital, but excluding Cyprus which remains an international nightmare after the 1974 Turkish invasion and division of the island.

All these events continue to haunt Greece today, because shifting borders are still in dispute.

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Last month, Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis convened a meeting of heads of states in the western Balkans which have ambitions to join the EU. It was notable for two reasons: first, the surprise attendance of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and second, the absence of the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama.

Southern Albania is heavily populated by ethnic Greeks, due to the haphazards of history. On May 12th, in the city of Himare, where he was standing for mayor in the election to be held two days later, ethnic Greek Dionisios Alfred Beleri was arrested. He was subsequently elected mayor, but as he remains in prison without trial he missed his swearing-in ceremony and accordingly is deemed not to be mayor.

The non-invitation of Rama to the Balkans summit was the latest move by Athens to draw attention to the continuing imprisonment without trial of Beleri, and the message Albania is sending about its attitude to the ethnic Greek minority on its southern borders, who have seen their churches destroyed by arson and many of their people beaten up.

The row highlights the continuing vulnerability of peripatetic peoples such as the Roma or Vlachs or the transhumant shepherds who, like the Sámi of northern Scandinavia, do not know the meaning of frontiers.

The situation deepens in significance when, after their respective re-elections, Mitsotakis and his Turkish counterpart, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made an unusually sincere show of entente when they seemed to agree on a joint submission to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. I say “seemed” because there was immediate disagreement as to what, precisely, would be submitted for arbitration. Would it be the entire issue of the Dodecanese islands, which itself centres on the question of Turkey’s and Greece’s respective continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone? Turkey ideally wants the return of the islands, which it lost in 1913. Or did it concern only the “demilitarisation” of some of those islands in which Greece maintains a border watch on Turkish military activity?

[ In the environs of Greece, cultures and ethnicities know no borders ]

As soon as the idea of The Hague was publicised, Erdogan began his familiar painting of grey areas with which he covers the ultimate ideal (for him) of a “blue homeland” stretching across the Aegean. It’s difficult to see any tangible result of what is in effect window-dressing by both sides, since Erdogan can move goalposts faster than Erling Haaland can score goals.

All this reminds me of a no doubt apocryphal anecdote: going into the peace conference at Versailles in 1919, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, was heard to ask one of his secretaries, “Please remind me, which are we giving away, Upper Silesia or Lower Silesia?” The ability of the great powers to play chess games with the lesser powers has not diminished. At that same peace conference, the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, was quite prepared to bargain. He went in demanding the incorporation into the busily enlarging Greek state of all ethnic Greeks in the region, but, observing the art of the possible, he was quite prepared to “give away” large areas of ethnic Greekdom to get what he really wanted.

As Hungary’s foreign minister, Miklόs Bánffy, observed at the time, redrawing the map of Europe meant that the League of Nations (the precursor of the UN) was “an association of the victorious powers” which could offer “no protection to a small nation when their interests conflicted”.

Mitsotakis’s attempt to place Greece at the centre of an evolving Balkans – and, by extension, the Levant or Middle East – must be seen in the light of the fact that the fortunes of Kosovo, Serbia, Molodova, Bosnia, Montenegro and North Macedonia (all of whom attended the Athens summit) must be seen in the larger picture of an evolving Europe. They are subject on one side to today’s “great powers” and on the other to the cultural lifestyles of its disparate and often undefinable peoples.