The first to implement policy of forgetting
At the events held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, his major legacies were said to be Greece’s exit from its dire economic state in the 1950s, the reinstatement and consolidation of democracy after 1974 and Greece’s entry into the European family. Do you think he would agree with that assessment or was there some other achievement that he may have deemed equally significant? Throughout his life, before and after 1974, Karamanlis always had clear, specific goals. And those were: economic development to take the Greek people out of their age-old poverty, establishing a normal, stable democratic life and consolidating national security. I think he achieved all of them to a large extent. He believed that was the only way to alter the destiny of Greece’s destiny, to stop it from being seen as a poor, unstable and unsafe Balkan country. And I think this was the greatest service he did this country. But apart from that, he believed deeply in the need to forget. He detested the divisiveness that he saw as one of the principal causes of the tribulations Greece had suffered. And he was the first to put the policy of forgetting into practice, by putting an end to the execution of communists, by freeing political prisoners and by legalizing the Communist Party of Greece. I would say that he put an end to divisiveness in a wider sense. Many people do not realize that those divisions derived from Greece’s foreign policy. In WWI, whether we would go with the Allies or Germany; in WWII and after, whether we would go with the Western or the Eastern bloc. By his European choice, Karamanlis definitely solved that question, since, after all, we are nearly all Europeans. Nowadays, despite the initial disagreements, political forces representing almost 90 percent of Greeks support Greece’s European direction. Critics of Karamanlis say he could never accept the concept of defeat and so never sat on the opposition benches. Do you agree with that view? He never sat on the opposition benches for a very simple reason. He won all the elections, except for one in 1963. He left for France then, not because he couldn’t bear defeat but because he believed that if he remained in Greece it would lead the country to further division. In order to avoid that, he chose self-exile.
