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Eirini Karamouzi, Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974-1979: The Second Enlargement. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Pp. xi + 258. Cloth £60/$90.
Given the current controversy over Greece's relationship to the European Union, a book examining the deliberations, negotiations, and issues involved in Greece's accession to the then-European Economic Community (EEC) could not be timelier. For its detailed historical analysis, as well as the fascinating insights that it offers about Greece's longer-term place in the EU, Eirini Karamouzi's new book is very welcome indeed.
Based primarily on recently opened official archives, Karamouzi's study is the first comprehensive history focusing on the internal deliberations within the EEC and on the negotiations between the Nine (the EEC member states at the time) and Greece. Karamouzi concentrates specifically on the years between the restoration of Greek democracy and the reactivation of relations between Greece and the EEC in 1974 and the signing of the accession treaty in Athens in 1979.
The book begins with an analysis of the push for EEC membership by Constantine Karamanlis. Having become prime minister again on the collapse of the military dictatorship in July 1974, Karamanlis made membership in the EEC a primary goal. With anti-Americanism in Greece running extremely high (given perceptions of US complicity in the dictatorship and anger over US foreign policy towards the Turkish invasion of Cyprus) and with the newly restored democracy still fragile, Karamanlis saw Greece's entry into the EEC as a critically important element in stabilizing a pro-Western orientation in Greece and, most significantly, in cementing the new regime as a consolidated European democracy. The key to EEC membership, Karamouzi argues, was "the overriding importance of the democratisation factor in Karamanlis' quest for Europe" (15). As if to illustrate the linkage between the new democracy and EEC membership, Karamanlis lodged Greece's application with the Community the very day after the newly...