1. Introduction

Revisionism is one of the most contentious words of the 20th c. For many scholarsnowadays this concept has become meaningless or unpalatable so much so that theyrefuse to treat it as an analytical tool of the social sciences. This disinclination to con-front straight on what may lie behind the concept and how it has been abused in thepast transpired even in the recent 2007 original theme issue of History and Theorywhere five contributors out of seven naturally chose to speak of ‘revision’ as opposed to‘revisionism’, deeming as in the words of Gabrielle Spiegei that this latter concept“(fell) outside the precincts of normal historical activity.”1 This reluctance is however aretrospective stance strongly influenced by the successful capture of the word by Holo-caust deniers. Beneath this reason is buried yet another, perhaps more deep-seated. Fromits origins in the Bernsteindebatte, the word has carried a negative political chargewhich renders its use problematic for historians who usually work on the premise thatto defend the authority of their discipline they need to use scientific arguments only andoperate a definite separation between knowledge and polemics. The perception subsiststhen that to allow in ‘revisionism’ amounts also to admitting that there may still be frus-trating gangplanks between politics and history. Thus the transfer of this problematicconcept to historiography did not diminish this political dimension; on the contrary itreaffirmed it since we will see that the fears of internal critique and of fragmentation ofgrand narratives that led Marxist or Nationalist political orthodoxies to criticize harshlyrevisionist views, are also strong characteristics of latter-day historiographic controver-sies. Hence despite the confusion surrounding ‘revisionism’ nowadays, which encom-passes categories as diverse as New Left historians questioning Cold War verdicts of uni-lateral responsibility, social historians contesting the power of the totalitarian model toexplain all aspects of Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia or even postmodernists exhortinghistorians to reach higher levels of reflexivity, what strikes the observer is how little thecriticisms leveled against it, have changed over the years.

Discussioni e ricerche

WHAT IS BEHIND THE CONCEPT:FRAGMENTATION AND INTERNAL CRITIQUE

IN THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND

1 GABRIELLE SPIEGEL, “Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiogra-phy”. Theory and History Theme Issue, in ‘Revısıon and History’, 46, December 2007, p. 2.

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This article is devoted to showing, notwithstanding the differences in context, thisabiding entanglement of historiography with political language in a field where the‘scientific’ sophistication of the attacks and counterattacks is often a deceptivescreen. Furthermore it is based on the observation of a generalization of epistemo-logical change in historical interpretation since the late 1970s and wishes to test therelevance of the ‘revisionist approach’ in this process. Indeed since the end of theCold War era, ushered in by the collapse of Communism, the dawning realizationof the inadequacy of the nation-state to satisfy unique historical situations, and theever stronger influence of postmodern theories in social sciences, approaches tohistorical-writing have changed. There has been a growing interest in discontinuiste,anti-Manichean, non-teleological, pluri-disciplinary and sometimes iconoclastichypotheses of the past. Nowadays more than ever before history elicits fierce differ-ences of opinion in which both ‘revisionism’ and ‘postmodernism’ stand mysteriouslyin the dock. This is most pronounced in countries convulsed by anti-colonial strug-gles, foreign occupations and civil wars that have irreversibly stamped collectivememories and continue to have strong repercussions in the public arena. Howeverthe current lack of any adequate comparative model to help one set straight whatessential attributes enter into the composition of a revisionist construal only fuels avery random subjectivity. This subjectivity is dangerous because it tends to dismissall new hypotheses as ‘revisionist’ – to be understood here as pro-fascist or pro-colo-nialist – and inhibits serious thinking on the dynamics and modalities of changeinside historiography and on the possibility that revisionism may not just correspondto an old tactic of political excommunication but also to a specific intellectual andscientific moment. This deficit in comparative historiographical thinking all toooften leads to the hasty conclusion which betrays in fact an old reflex of the histor-ical profession that revisionism cannot be generalized and theorized because itsmeaning, impulses and character change from one country to another. This essay rep-resents a first attempt to bring the lie to this assumption – notably through the sin-gling out of two case studies, the Irish and the Greek, and the way these maydiverge in some respects and yet overlap in other more significant ones. It thereforeproposes a more cogent definition of revisionism as representing a paradigm shiftoriginating in what I have called elsewhere an “internal critique”; understood hereas a patent disinclination of some historians to play the partisan game by refusing tosilence facts that can be compromising to a cause they had hitherto espoused or beenlargely in sympathy with and fınally their readiness to criticize openly the contem-porary decisions of their party.2

2 EVI GKOTZARIDIS, Trials of Irish History. Genesis and Evolution of a Reappraisal. 1938-2000, London,Routledge, 2006, pp. 17-29.

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2. Revisionism in Greece

In Greece the fear of dissolution of the grand nationalist narrative is very old, goingas far back as the 1920s and the original offensive then came from the Greek Marx-ists, that is from historians who were at once actively involved in the formative battlesof the Left and assumed unapologetically the role of public intellectual. The firstnoted advancement of an alternative version of Greek history took place in the 1920s.Giannis Kordatos analyzed the Greek Revolution of 1821 from a Marxist standpointand came to the conclusion that it had social wellsprings but was eventually carried outand controlled by a bourgeoisie. Thus its fundamental character became early onconservative. Giannis Kordatos was a pioneer of the Communist movement in Greeceand among the communists who were imprisoned during the Metaxas dictatorship andthe German Occupation. He published a book entitled ‘The Social Meaning of theGreek Revolution’ in May 1924 which detonated like a bombshell in a then over-whelmingly nationalist historical profession. Kordatos wrote: “national uprisings are notindependent from the material factor…The Revolution of 1821 albeit national was alsosocial. Unfortunately it was betrayed by the townspeople. Slowly they aligned them-selves with the Kotzabasides (proto-aristocrats who were perceived as mimicking theways of the Turks), thereby adulterating the content of the struggle and preventing itfrom flowering into its finished form. This is the only historical truth.”3

Here it is obvious that Kordatos was not just proposing a new historical method butalso importing a new fighting instrument. Indeed, he saw himself engaged in a pro-found reappraisal of Greek history that had the potential to shake radically the foun-dations of the nationalist canon, as immortalized by the 19th c historian, KostantinosPaparigopoulos. His interpretation was not a verdict on the past only but an intima-tion that the time had come to finish the revolution by giving its leadership back towhom it naturally belonged, i.e. the working class. Where the 19th c historians werewont to ask who were the progenitors of the Greek nation, Kordatos saw as moreurgent to ask who were the progenitors of the Greek state, namely what strata of soci-ety assumed power and on what legitimate grounds and means. Before this historio-graphic moment, the dominant view was that history is the handmaid of the nationas opposed to society in its various ethnic and class expressions and that the role of his-tory is to shape and reinforce this harmonious equivalence. Throughout the 19th c allthe efforts of Greek historians were geared precisely towards the fashioning of a senseof continuity and a coherent national character. The interpretation advanced byKordatos according to which the 1821 Revolution had social roots but was hijackedby the bourgeoisie is not new in any absolute sense. Indeed, Georgios Skliros argued

3 GIANNIS KORDATOS, The Social Meaning of the Greek Revolution of 1821, Athens, G.I. Vasiliou, 1924,Introduction, p. V.

90 EVI GKOTZARIDIS

already along those same lines as early as 1907 in a book called, ‘Our Social Question’.4Yet Skliros’s book received a hearing only from a tiny fraction of the Greek intellectualavant-garde and it took four years to sell the 500 copies. On the contrary, Kordatos’book provoked impassioned responses from within the political and religious estab-lishments as well as the scientific community and there even was a proposal to excom-municate him, which however was not acted upon. The book which was publishedwith an initial run of 3000 copies got sold out in six months and was immediately re-issued. The general response to Greek Marxism then was not to deny the social com-petition and conflict which characterized the Revolution but to contend that peopledo not rally behind classes but behind the nation. Thus the real lever of history is notthe class struggle but the survival of the nation. The same line of argument wasadopted in 1907 and 1924. However 1907 and 1924 were very different epochs andas result the two books did not stir up the same alarm, nor did the old argument pre-sented above carry the same force.

Indeed in 1907 the working class movement was very weak and thus no strong oractive vehicle was here to harness the ideological weapon that was being offered.Inside most Greeks minds, the fight for independence was not over yet. The ‘MegaliIdea’ or the irredentist goal of establishing a Greek state that would encompass all eth-nic Greeks was very much on the agenda of foreign policy and few Greeks were indoubt of its fundamental righteousness. So Greece was preparing itself to confront newmilitary challenges and the latter required masses to fight and powerful ideas to gal-vanize them. Thus by the time of the publication of Skliros’ book, the national idea hadcompletely outflanked the social idea. However by 1924 none of these conditionsobtained any longer. The Greek working class movement had gained undeniablenumerical and organizational strength.5 In Russia, the historic rights of the workingclass seemed vindicated with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Following the stagger-ing defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and the population exchangeagreed at Lausanne in 1923, Greeks had to reconcile themselves to the irrevocabilityof the territorial limits of the state. From then on, the focus shifted to creating a cli-mate conducive to a domestic peaceful coexistence between three very different pop-ulation groups: the inhabitants of Old Greece, the inhabitants of the new territories(mostly Macedonia, Epirus and the Aegean islands) and the refugees from Anatolia.The need for a historical discourse that would consolidate a unitary consciousness or

4 ANTONIS LIAKOS, The Construction of National Time: The Making of the Modern Greek HistoricalImagination, in JACQUES REVEL (ed.), Political Uses of the Past. The Recent Mediterranean Experience, Lon-don, Frank Cass, 2002, pp. 37-38.

5 The Greek working class party was founded on 4th November 1918 as The Socialist Labour Partyof Greece (SEKE). At the Second Congress of the SEKE, in April 1920, the party decided to affiliate tothe 3rd International. A third Extraordinary Congress of SEKE in November 1924 led to a renaming ofthe party. It became KKE (the Greek Communist Party of Greece) and adopted the principles of Marx-ism-Leninism.

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 91

assist the assimilative fusion of this extremely heterogeneous population became as aresult more pressing than ever. Given that Marxism was a discourse with the potentialto inhibit this course, it had to be checked by all means particularly when it wasattemptying its confident entry into a very sensitive ideological field; namely history.6Still it is important to bear in mind that Greek Marxism was never a monolith not evenat the time of its confident assertion inside Greek political life. In this respect, Gian-nis Kordatos revealed to be not only a formidable opponent of the Right through hiscritique of nationalist historiography but also a fearless opponent of the Left as hebecame the most important theoretician of Greek Marxism to dissent early on fromthe Party. Indeed he withdrew from the Communist Party in Oct 1924 because of hisdisagreement over the Party’s line on the ‘Macedonian Question’. More preciselywhen the Comintern pressed for the creation of a united and independent state ofCommunist Macedonia and Thrace from the territories of Greece, Serbia and Bulgariaallegedly in order to fight imperialism and safeguard the right of self-determination ofthe oppressed minorities in the Balkans, Kordatos argued that the ethnic synthesis ofGreek Macedonia had irreversibly changed since the arrival of the Anatolian refugeesand he warned the Greek Communist Party that support for this idea would alienatethe anatolian refugees vote. He also contended that there was no internationalist rev-olutionary organization in Greece prepared to fight in the name of a hypotheticalMacedonian pan-national identity. However in Kordatos’ opposition one could discernan even more fundamental reason that sprang from a form of eurocommunism avantla lettre not unlike the one we will encounter later with Nikos Svoronos: he was anx-ious to condemn the increasing bolshevization of KKE as he would later the increas-ing stalinization of KKE.7

In the 1950s in the uneasy peace of the post-civil war, censorship, anti-intellectu-alism and rabid anti-communism were again common. Historians could bring legalprocedures with punitive outcomes and even forced exile upon themselves if they daredto suggest that the notion of Hellenic continuity was partly an artificial constructionof nationalism. This is what happened to Nikos Svoronos, a leading specialist ofGreek society under Ottoman rule, when he published Histoire de la Grece Moderne(1953) from Paris; not only was his book condemned for presenting political eventsafter the Liberation in accordance with ‘communist propaganda’ but he was also vili-fied by the authorities as ‘a very dangerous element able to denigrate and harm hishomeland’. He also became the target of the rightwing press. An anonymous articleentitled ‘The Work of a Traitor’ and published in the daily Kathimerini on 7th July1953, described his book as a libel on Greece and its political regime. As a result in1953 Svoronos’ application for a visa was turned down and in 1955 he was officially

6 RENA STAVRIDI-PATRIKIOU, Oi Fovoi enos Aiona, Athens, Metaixmio, 2007, p. 255.7 ALEXANDROS DAGAS, GIORGOS LEONTIADIS, “Comintern and Macedonian Question: The Greek

Background, 1924” (greek research paper online).

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stripped of his Greek citizenship. The readiness of the Greek state to suppress freespeech to police the notion of an uncontamined identity with a glorious pedigree sig-nalled the authorities’ blatant determination to keep history the exclusive property ofthe nation-state. The irony is that Svoronos managed to infuriate also KKE (Com-munist Party of Greece) because “he put in the same basket England and Russia in1821”. Unruffled he replied: “if some (Greek) communists consider they are thedescendants of Romanov, I for one am not.”8 He even went to the subversive extremeof declaring that he could not understand why the party had launched the Civil War.Taking a typically Marxist distance from essentialism, Svoronos had opined in anotherwork published posthumously that “the nation too is a historical category. No seriousresearcher is satisfied any longer with the romantic perceptions which present thenation as a transcendental entity assumed from the start, outside space and time, anexpression of a people or a group of kindred peoples, or of a metaphysical popularspirit, a ‘soul’”9 When KKE split in August 1968 over the Soviet suppression of thePrague Spring, Svoronos joined the ‘eurocommunist offshoot, the Communist Partyof the Interior; that is those who condemned the decision, wanted to free themselvesfrom the stifling control of the Soviet Party, and embraced the idea of socialism witha human face. Svoronos was a precursor of the historiographical Renaissance whichtook place in Greece after 1974. His 1953 book was the first Neo Marxist short his-tory of Greece. He inspired a new generation of scholars who happened also to be inParis; personalities such as Constantine Tsoukalas, Spyros Asdrachas, and VassilisPanayiotopoulos. Furthermore his work on the Turkokatria (Greece under OttomanRule) was equally original because it operated a thematic shift from an earlier empha-sis on the political and cultural events of the Greek Revolution to the social and eco-nomic realities of the period which preceded it.

The next attempt to engage with real history of a scientific derivation as opposedto the old teleological and Manichaeist version begins in the mid-1960s and moremethodically in the wake of the Junta’s fall, as late as 1974, partly because it made pos-sible a return of historians who had been forced to political exile, men like NikosSvoronos or Serafim Maximos. If in Ireland the traumatic and catalytic event whichpushed historians to probe seriously the contradictions and deceptions of Irish nation-alism were the Northern Irish Troubles, in Greece this event was the experience of theColonels Dictatorship between 1967-1974. What set the few historical accounts pub-lished in the mid1960s apart was precisely their attempt to put into words the extentof the violent persecution and social discrimination suffered in silence by the Left; areality that the whole of Greece was then experiencing as something private andunspeakable. Nikos Margaris’s History of Makrónisos, published in 1963, was such an

8 NICOLAS SVORONOS, Sygxrona Themata,Vol. 35, December 1988, p. 51.9 NICOLAS SVORONOS, To Elliniko Ethnos: Genesi kai Diamorfosi tou Neou Ellinismou, Athens, Polis,

2004, pp. 22-23.

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attempt, as were two books by Spyros Linardatos on the Metaxas dictatorship. Dur-ing the junta, Constantine Tsoucalas’s The Greek Tragedy, published in London in 1969,recounted historical developments from the creation of the modern Greek state to thedictatorship of 1967 while emphasizing the measures that were taken by the state toeliminate all critical political discourse.10 Indeed, Greek democracy had already seri-ously been weakened in the 1950s since under the façade of a parliamentary regime,an unrelenting repression of the left was pursued with the aid of an ‘emergency’ leg-islation which allowed the government to outlaw whoever it considered a danger tonational security. Hundreds of Communists were sent to prison camps in islandswhere they were subjected to a daily regime of torture and humiliation until they signeddeclarations of repetance in which they publicly recanted their communist beliefs. Thepolitical murder of the inspirational voice of the Opposition, the EDA deputy Grig-oris Lambrakis, in May 1963 by some individuals belonging to a neo-fascist paramil-itary organization with the active complicity of the police showed the lengths a certainRight was prepared to go to thwart the advances of the Left as well as the government’sembarrassing impotence in the face of such happenings.

Given the weight of this recent tragic history, it became urgent for the ‘new histo-rians’ of the post-dictatorship era to comprehend how authoritarian, neo-fascist andincreasingly totalitarian groups and practices were able to nestle and thrive unimpededin the heart of a democracy. From then on it became quasi impossible to look uponGreek nationalism with the old wide-eyed liberality especially when one bore in mindhow the discourse of glorious origins and continuity with Classical Antiquity had beenmisused in the dreadful concentration camps of Macronisos. Indeed with this famil-iar narrative Makronisos ‘re-educated’ left-wing dissenters and some ethnic and reli-gious minorities in the national dogmas and then sent them in the mountains ofNorthern Greece where in a tragic irony, they had to fight the side that they had pre-viously belonged to or sympathized with. The architects of this crude experiment inindoctrination constantly compared the Classical ‘miracle’ (the Athenian ‘GoldenAge’ of the 5th c B.C) with the ‘miracle’ of Makronisos and forced prisoners to buildimitations of the Parthenon until they realized the incompatibility of their ‘racialpsychology’ with communism, and the fact that “the Civil War was just another re-runof the millennia-old national drama wherein Hellenism fights its “others”.11

Thus, with the arrival of the ‘new historians’, there is a noticeable shift towards a his-toire-probleme, especially with Philippos Iliou (1931-2004). Like his eminent prede-cessor Nikos Svoronos, Philippos Hliou was the embodiment of the ‘historian-citizen’.In the trajectories of both personalities one observes an a-priori antithetical yoking ofpartisan engagement and critical historical enquiry. A tireless researcher who chose to

10 NENI PANOURGIA, Dangerous Citizens. The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, Fordham Univer-sity Press, 2009, p. 14.

11 GIANNIS HAMILAKIS, ‘The Other Parthenon’: Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos, in “Jour-nal of Modern Greek Studies”, Vol. 20, 2002, pp. 307-338.

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stay out of academia and a man imprisoned for his leftwing convictions at Makronisos,Iliou dared to venture for the first time into hitherto taboo areas, such as the historyand historiography of both Greek Communism and the Civil War.12 For him free accessto the archives of KKE on the Resistance and the Civil War was a fundamental pre-con-dition if the history of the Leftwing movement was to cease being used as a ‘chamber-maid of expediencies’ and if the new generations were to discover how and why the Lefterred into the deadlock of the Civil War. When on August 29 1989, the 40th anniver-sary of the Civil War’s official end was celebrated by burning all the police files of thepostwar period in the name of national reconciliation, Iliou had denounced the deci-sion as an act of historical vandalism. For him “knowledge of one’s history belonged tothe citizens’ fundamental human rights”, that is why he devoted the last twelve yearsof his life to the setting up of a new archival depository in Athens, called Archive ofContemporary Social History which opened officially in 1992.

In this respect, Iliou’s long-standing preoccupation with archival organizationwhich he saw as prerequisites for the initiation of a real democratic dialogue betweenRight and Left and the consolidation of an ‘open society’ to use Karl Popper’s famousphrase, calls to mind the efforts of his older Irish counterpart, Robert Dudley Edwards.Indeed the latter founded in 1971 the important University College Dublin archivesand in the 1950s he had been the prime mover behind the construction of an oralarchive composed of the testimonies of key actors and witnesses of the Irish War ofindependence and Civil War. The story of how his original project was derailed oncehe and his team decided to enlist the financial and institutional help of the Bureau ofMilitary History has been uncovered by this author elsewhere.13 Iliou also stood outas a most percipient theoretician of history who reflected on its deontological princi-ples as a means to accomplish a separation between history proper and its ‘ideologicaluses’ in the hands of the Greek orthodoxs, nationalists, populists and the political par-ties of all colours. He described the historian as a man without abode, a perpetual exile(the exact phrase is a man without city), who struggled to preserve his autonomy fromthe encroachments of polyonimal endogenous and exogenous powers. He added:“the historian does not stand outside the problems of his time, of course. He partakesin these. But his partaking does not amount to the harnessing of historiography for thepurpose of usurping the historical past. This belongs to the ideological uses of history,which the historian must examine but also reject as adulterations.”14 That said, all post-dictatorship historians are agreed on one epistemological principle; their rejection ofthe ideological use of history. Like their Irish counterparts they declare emphaticallythat their role as professional historians is to weed out ‘ideological myths’ from history.

12 PHILIPPS ILIOU, O Ellinikos Emfilios Polemos. H Embloki tou KKE, Athina, Themelio, 2004.13 EVI GKOTZARIDIS, Revisionist Historians and the Modern Irish State, in “Irish Historical Studies”,

Vol. xxxv, n. 137 (May 2006), pp. 99-116.14 Philippos Iliou cited in DIMITRIS ARVANITAKIS, O Politis-Istorikos, Ta Nea, 20 October 2007.

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Later Greece followed the historiographic path of Eastern Europe by initiating anew revisionist debate after the collapse of Communism, in practice in 2000. In it theissue of the fragmentation of the research agenda was central and often stood as aeuphemism for what critics saw as the dissolution of the grand narrative of the1940s.15 This latest challenge came from a fringe group of young scholars broadly com-ing from the Left who participated regularly in the annual conferences devoted to the1940s organized by the Civil Wars Study Group. For many years the only acceptablegenre had been political or diplomatic history with its clear-cut dichotomies of occu-piers and collaborators on the one hand and resistant fighters and patriots on the other.What distinguished this fringe group was its readiness to employ new methodologicaland theoretical trends. These included the tools of political science, sociology, anthro-pology, oral, micro or local history. However this pluralism was soon rejected as a man-ifestation of a baleful form of postmodernism that sought to chip away the heritage onthe basis of which the intellectual ‘children’ of the Greeks who were persecuted as com-munists, had rested their prestige inside Greek society. George Margaritis16, Professorof Contemporary history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, denounced therevisionists for “using alleged methodological and theoretical constructions as analibi”. In their hands “oral history tends to become a curse, instead of being a valuableauxiliary tool” because “on these fragments they build whatever they want.”17 The tear-ing into pieces of the Civil War pushed research into a “cul de sac”, to “derailment” and“complete misconception” for “when the unity of the subject is lost, the soundness ofthe interpretation is also lost”.18

Stathis N. Kalyvas, Professor of Political Sciences at Yale University and the mostarticulate representative of the Greek revisionists lost no time and denounced the disin-genuousness in the criticism. He declared: “It is clear that the most vehement reactionsare voiced by those who are not afraid by the new methodology per se but rather byits findings.”19 Another Greek critic Athanassios Alexiou, lecturer in sociology at theUniversity of Aegean, described revisionist argumentation as “a fragmentary contem-plation of historical reality” which derives from “the radical hermeneutics of struc-turalism, the ‘end of the great narratives’ of postmodernism, the ‘end of social classes’,and the ‘end of history’”. According to him, these new approaches “weaken the causalrelation between things and replace it by a multi-causal explanation in which everythingcan be deemed true or valid.” This relativism which “claims to be as many historical

15 GIORGOS ANTONIOU, The Lost Atlantis of Objectivity: The Revisionist Struggles between the Acade-mic and Public Spheres, in “History and Theory”, Theme Issue 46, (Dec 2007), pp. 92-112.

16 GEORGE MARGARITIS, Istoria tou Ellinikou Emfiliou Two volumes, Athens, Vivliorama, 2000.17 GEORGE MARGARITIS, I dekaetia tou 1940: mia istoriografiki proklisi, O Politis 104: 28-34.18 GEORGE MARGARITIS, The Greek Civil War and Its History. The Commemorative Year 1999, in

“Archiotaxio”, 2 (2000), pp.137-143.19 STATHIS N. KALYVAS, Emfilios polemos (1943-1949). To telos ton mithon kai I strofi pros to maziko

epipedo, in “Epistimi kai Koinonia”, 11 (2003), p. 55.

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realities as there are ideological camps and social identities” instills the notion that“there can be no historical subject or collective action”, referring to the structures ofsociety (such as exploitation, war, occupation or resistance) and therefore “no legit-imization of any action falling under the remit of any such abstraction”. He concludeswith a characteristic reproach when he impeaches the ‘new history’ for its alleged adop-tion of Foucault’s theory of horizontal or capillary diffusion of power, “a fact which ren-ders indistinguishable or changeable the relation between powerful and subjugated orexecutioners and victims”.20 Interestingly enough, in both the Irish and Greek debates,the words revisionism and postmodernism are used almost interchangeably and equallydenounced as latter-day manifestations of relativism. This relativism is allegedly usedwith calculation either to tone down or else shift around historical responsibilities,according to critics. Hence Seamus Deane held revisionism guilty of underplaying theoppression the 1916 Rising sought to overthrow and upgrading the oppression the Ris-ing itself inaugurated in the name of freedom.21 He concluded: “Revisionists arenationalists despite themselves; by refusing to be Irish nationalists, they simply becomedefenders of Ulster or British nationalism, thereby switching sides in the disputewhile themselves believing to be switching the terms of it”.22 Daltun O Ceallaighaverred that the revisionist tendency to linger on the sectarian undercurrents in Irishnationalism hid hypocrisy because “presumably the same type of critic, confronted withNazi crimes in the Germany of the 1930s, would have been quick to opine that theThird Reich was not without its Jewish bigots”.23

The danger of fragmentation and de-contextualization being brandished by Greekcritics hides that the revisionists do not engage in this exercise for its own sake. The newtrends are in fact undergirded by different epistemological principles. What they prac-tice, is a historical interpretation no longer subordinated to a sort of reasoning whereeach component is seen as a mere reflection of the whole but one shaped dialecticallyon the basis of the evidence found; an evidence which is not always acquiescent to thedemands of the initial hypothesis. They do not deem the grand narrative of the 1940sa closed academic issue but a case in which one still lacks important information; untilit is all gathered in a systematic way, they feel it is premature to draw final conclusionsabout the general picture. Hence Kalyvas notes that “many of the ideas that are pro-jected as ‘main mast’ of the existing historiography are arbitrary and obsolete con-structions with strong mythological aspects where often the empirical substantiationis absent and an anachronistic and teleological reading of the past is prevalent.”24 Hisreflections echo those of the sociologist Kostas Tsoukalas when referring to national-

20 Athanassios Alexiou, “Opposition to revisionism”, Ta Nea July 31st - August 1st 2004.21 Seamus Deane, “Wherever Green is Read”, (1994): 241.22 Seamus Deane, “Wherever Green is Read”, (1994): 242.23 DALTUN O CEALLAIGH, Reconsiderations of Irish history and Culture, Dublin, Léirmheas, 1994, p. 15.24 Stathis N. Kalyvas, (2003): 54-5.

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ist historiography, he explained that “the meaning of the component is abducted by thesequential and teleological causal narration of the meaning of the whole.”25 Thus thetug of war is always between a holistic discourse with absolute claims and a discon-tinuiste discourse which strives to bring to light the awkward details; those which donot conform to the claims of the former and are usually elided by it as expendable.

So what new fragments do the new methods reveal which antagonize the critics somuch? Undoubtedly the most vexing discovery is the extent of the “Red Terror”26 exer-cised by the Left (the National Liberation Front - EAM - and the Communist Partyof Greece - KKE) during the troubled decade of the 1940s. Kalyvas and NikosMarantzidis, Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Macedonia,have questioned the most axiomatic and hegemonic assumption in the study of theCivil War since the fall of the Junta in 1974; chiefly that the Left was the main if notthe only victim of violence. It was an assumption which could gain credence becausethe Left had lost in the Civil War and suffered heavy persecution in its aftermath – pur-sued with renewed vigor during the regime of the Colonels (1967-1974) – but alsobecause references to Left-wing terror were often dismissed as an appalling lie cookedup by the Greek Right. Hence Kalyvas conducted the first systematic and large-scaleempirical investigation on violence by concentrating primarily on the region of theArgolid and in the adjoining areas of Korinthia and Arkadia in the North-Eastern Pelo-ponnese. His findings based on comprehensive interviews across the entire ideologi-cal spectrum and extensive archival evidence led him to the conclusion that contraryto the opinion that hastened to “posit its limited, insignificant or exceptional charac-ter”, leftist violence was instead “a centrally planned process” pursued consistently.Another revisionist hypothesis is the placing of the start of the Civil War in the win-ter of 1943 during Occupation as opposed to 1946 as previously claimed by the Left.According to Kalyvas in the winter of 1943-44 on the orders of the KKE leadership,EAM initiated a formidable terror campaign to thwart the decision of the Athens col-laborationist government to raise the number of auxiliary Security Battalions. The lat-ter’s function was to help the Germans police more efficiently the territory given thatthe countryside had passed under EAM rule.

This new approach, shedding light on the violence perpetrated by the left is at onceintriguing and controversial; indeed it silences the asymmetric power relations largelyfavorable to the German-collaborationist camp. Yet its most convincing argumentpoints at the fact that the bloodiest fights during the Axis Occupation did not takeplace between Greeks and foreigners but rather exclusively between Greeks. It alsomeant that these early tragic clashes not only prefigured but influenced decisively the

25 KOSTAS TSOUKALAS, I Eksousia os Laos kai os Ethnos, Athina, Themelios, 1999, p. 355.26 STATHIS N. KALYVAS, Red Terror. Leftist Violence during the Occupation, in After the War Was Over.

Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960, ed. Mark Mazower, Princeton: PUP,2000, pp. 142-181.

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evolution of the situation after Liberation. Finally it also opened the path to a seriousre-examination of the extent to which the Communists were already bent on seizingpower either through political or revolutionary means, but effectively through both.More precisely the emphasis shifted on the “structure of Red Terror”, its bureaucraticcharacter, the arbitrariness of some of the violence inflicted on civilians, the high lev-els of intimidation, KKE’s centralized decision-making and its regionally organizedstructure which enabled directives to be conveyed at all EAM village committees,including everything pertaining to the implementation and monitoring of terror.Kalyvas may have overplayed the unity and coherence of the leftwing ELAS, as moststudies underlie the fierce independence of its kapetanioi, or local commanders; but hisresearch led him to the important – if perhaps extrapolated conclusion in view of hismethodology relying on microanalysis – that there was a concerted plan on the partof EAM/ELAS to seize power in the aftermath of the war. Furthermore, Kalyvas’insistent appeal to the sociology and dynamics of internecine violence and the phe-nomenon of collaboration with the Axis occupiers could not but reveal traumatic topost-1974 generations who were raised to believe that Greeks were simply victims,either of Stalin’s imperialist ambitions or of the scheming imperialists of Whitehall orWashington. Indeed one needs to replace the debate initiated by Kalyvas in the polit-ical context of Greece following the fall of the military junta in 1974.

As this article has already shown, prior to that date, the official history in Greeceuniformly besmirched leftwing intelligentsia as stooges of ‘soviet communism’. Inthe aftermath of the junta, leftwing voices were given a new credence and manyexiled or imprisoned historians entered the academia, thereby initiating their own ‘revi-sionism’. It is in these specific circumstances that Kalyvas and his colleagues, sensingthat this old ‘revisionism’ had turned into a new orthodoxy, decided to question theportrayal of EAM as a benevolent State of the mountains ensuring the physical pro-tection of its humble citizens and generously bestowing on them the treasures of a newegalitarian culture. Given the speed in which the discussion became passionatelypoliticized, there is no doubt that the revisionists hit a raw nerve. The impression wasthat they were damaging the idealized image of the heroic resistance fighter anddestroying the moral capital of the Left. The guardians of the leftwing heritage ripostedinstantly by accusing the revisionists of repetition of Right-wing propagandist argu-mentation and of methodological and political bias in the data handling. They alsochastised them for putting on a same moral footing the defensive violence of the Leftand the aggressive violence of the collaborators and the Axis powers and thereby gen-erating a dubious relativism through the use of alleged “pseudo” quantitative and sta-tistical tools.

But this reaction was not altogether credible for in keeping with most European his-toriographic traditions of the past, the most prominent being the Marxist School of theFrench Revolution as represented Mathiez and Soboul, the Greek anti-revisionistsresorted to the ready-made formulae of the mitigating circumstances and the unfor-tunate skidding off from an otherwise irreproachable origin to justify the violent acts

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 99

of EAM/KKE and demote them as derivative. Finally they objected to “body-count-ing” as a legitimate method. What must be underlined here is that the Greek revi-sionists were not alone in delving into the horrors of vicious internecine violence orinsisting that the repetitive clashes between Greeks right in the middle of Occupationcould not be dismissed as mere ‘isolated incidents’ as the Nationalist/Leftist official vul-gate had once dictated in the school textbooks. Other eminent predecessors, histori-ans such as Robert Paxton, Henry Rousso or Denis Peschanski in France and Renzode Felice or Claudio Pavone in Italy, more recently Stanley G. Paine in Spain and JanGross in Poland had also contended that this was a phenomenon of truly national, eventrans-national magnitude and with such long-lasting consequences that it actually qual-ified for the epithet of European civil war.27 Undoubtedly the young Greek scholarswere right to argue that the old explanation about these clashes was weak. It is also totheir credit that in contradistinction with scholars of other countries, they can boastof a commendable knowledge of this European-wide dimension of historiographicaltransformation which they seem to use creatively to throw light on the Greek experi-ence.28 Hence they have invoked as a direct inspiration the work of Pavone on the Ital-ian Resistance, for his honest dissection of its social dimension too often neglected infavour of its ideological dimension and his showing of the sometimes shadowy trans-actions of resistance violence. Yet this emphasis on a European Civll War bristles alsowith serious difficulties. Indeed if its conclusions are stretched, as they have in the writ-ings of Ernst Nolte, the threat posed by German Nazism is minimized, the antifascistalliance is seen at best as a small mistake or at worst as a cunning manoeuvre on thepart of the Soviet Union to assert its hegemony over Europe and finally Nazism andCommunism become twins of a same totalitarian threat against liberal democracy.

3. Revisionism in Ireland

Ireland presents a trajectory different from that of Greece. Whereas the Cold Warcongealed further Greece’s fortress mentality, Ireland through its decision to remain neu-tral in the Second World War, outwardly escaped the human cost of those Continen-tal fault-lines. But what is overlooked here is that it chose to do so in a large part forfear of exacerbating its own deep-seated ideological divisions. If inside Irish politics thetraditional cleavage between Right and Left never took root, the country was theplace since 1922 of a very claustrophobic Split which ran right through the political and

27 Nikos Marantzidis, “Collective Memory and Public History of the Second World War: Greecethrough the European Perspective”, 12. Talk given at a conference entitled, “Revisionism in European His-toriographies of the 20th Century: Dangerous Hermeneutics or Experiments in Objectivity”. Held at theEUI on 9-10th November 2006. Organized by Evi Gkotzaridis and George Antoniou.

28 NIKOS MARANTZIDIS, Nees Taseis sti Meleti tou Emfiliou Polemou, in “Ta Nea”, 20th March 2004.

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military movement of anti-colonial nationalism and caused a bitter civil war betweenerstwhile comrades in arms. The dispute which tore historic Sinn Féin in two, did butconceal another one, potentially more dangerous because it was sectarian in character;the ancient enmity between Protestants and Catholics. This background permanentlycondemned Labour to political marginality since its leadership decided that its inter-ests had to take a back seat until the goal of the Irish Republic was accomplished. Per-haps it is worth noting that there are important factual differences between the Greekand Irish Civil War. Despite its comparatively small dimensions, the Irish Civil War puta definitive stamp on Irish Southern politics and left in its wake a legacy of extreme bit-terness if one judges by the long lull of seventy-five years that had to pass before his-torians could feel confident enough to approach it with some detachment. That said,a semblance of political normality returned relatively early in Ireland since Fianna Fail,the party which had grave constitutional and ideological objections to the Treaty of1921 made a remarkable return into electoral politics as early as 1925 and secured amajority of the vote by 1932. In Greece on the other hand, since the end of the CivilWar in 1949, the persecution of the Left had been unrelenting and political normal-ity only returned after the collapse of the Junta, in effect in 1974 when KonstantinosKaramanlis passed legislation to legalize again the Communist Party.

Furthermore in Ireland, all intellectual and political thought pivoted for a long timearound the central notion that its skidding off was provoked by external pressures,mainly the divide and conquer tactics of England which pushed the native bourgeoisiesto betray the ideals of the Irish revolution and reduce the dreamt Republic into twopuppet regimes, one in the North and another in the South, submissively doing the col-onizer’s bidding. Thus, if over eighty years after the Ulster Volunteers took up arms toresist the break up of the Union and their integration in an independent state parti-tion still existed, it was because the British continuously plotted to keep it intact. Thisproposition ran contrary to the convictions of early proponents of an internal critique,public intellectuals like Sean O’ Faolain, Hubert Butler, Owen Sheehy Skeffington,Father Francis Shaw and Conor Cruise O’Brien who already in the 1950s and later inthe 1970s chose to insist on Irish mistakes and put the onus for change squarely onIrish shoulders. They were soon joined by a new generation of historians R.D. Edwards,T.W. Moody, J.C. Beckett and D.B. Quinn who pioneered a ‘new history’ by inte-grating as a key epistemological rule the notion that historiography ought to find themethods to distance itself from the totems and myths of the nationalist and unionisttribes, that indeed it should not connive with any tribe.Thus the first stimulus for areappraisal often came from non-specialists if we exclude Cruise O’Brien who trainedas a historian before he joined the civil service.

Undoubtedly the most unforgettable example of internal critique is the latter’s pes-simistic intervention in a piece which was ironically intended to commemorate the 50th

anniversary of the 1916 Rising. In “Embers of Easter” he voiced his doubts that had“Pearse and Connolly had a foresight of the Ireland of 1966”, maybe “they would [not]have gone with that high courage to certain death.” The man who denounces, also con-

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 101

fesses. He implicates himself in the deceitful enterprise of excitation of the collectiveimagination. But he indicates he has learnt from his mistakes: “The present writerblushes to recall that he devoted a considerable part of his professional activity… towhat was known as ‘anti-partition’. The only positive result of this activity… was thatit led me to discover the cavernous inanities of Government propaganda generally”. Heaccuses the Dublin Government of double standards because they “continued topropagate” a “national fantasy” while “punishing those who acted on it”.29 The per-sistence of the government in the mendacious is inexcusable first because it misled awhole youth into destruction and murder and second because no serious thinking wasever spent into creating propitious conditions for reunification. Instead of displayingvision and courage to win over the hearts and minds of the North, the government wasjust happy with thrashing about in a propagandist quagmire that was futile and hos-tile to peace. O’Brien is here mainly concerned with the means of Irish nationalismsince Southern independence but other passages suggest that he also doubts the ratio-nality and feasibility of the ends as well. The reason why this author chooses to quotethis text at some length is because fragmentation and dissolution appear to be dan-gerously close in a context like the Irish where after forty five years of self-determina-tion no official effort signaled yet any attempt to delve into the historical and theo-retical contradictions of the original nationalist Weltanschauung.

In the language of historical scholarship, fragmentation assumed another tone, nodoubt more polished and nuanced, more factually informed, but no less radical. Revi-sionist historians, from T.W. Moody, J.C. Beckett, down to Roy Foster questioned themythological conception of Irish nationality which postulated that the same impulsewas at work between 12th c resistance against the Anglo-Normans and 20th c opposi-tion to the Black and Tans and that the Irish ancient civilization was essentially non-sectarian, classless, or at least exceptionally egalitarian and therefore by implicationremarkably progressive compared to others.30 They did so essentially by analyzing polit-ical discourse from the vantage offered by what the famous American anthropologistClifford Geertz later called a “thick description”31 or what Michel Foucault called a “dis-continuiste method”.32 To purge the past of all present-day imperialism, Irish revi-sionists stopped unwinding the thread of time and started breaking it in order to teachtheir readers not to look in 18th century colonial patriotism for the origin of 20th cen-tury separatism. Contrary to their habitual vocation which was to bring out the mem-ory of the past, they now shielded it from the grip of the citizen. They underscored the

29 CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN, The Embers of Easter. 1916-1966, in 1916: The Easter Rising, eds. OwenDudley Edwards, Fergus Pyle, London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968, pp. 227-228.

30 ROY FOSTER, Anglo-Irish Relations and Northern Ireland: Historical Perspectives, in Northern Irelandand the Politics of Reconciliation, eds. Dermot Keogh, Michael Haltzel, Cambridge, CUP, 1993, pp. 31-32.

31 CLIFFORD GEERTZ, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973,pp. 3-30.

32 MICHEL FOUCAULT, L’archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, pp. 16-17.

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caesurae separating them by stressing the distance, temporal and conceptual, therebyfrustrating all desire to project onto the past present expectations. Finally, they dissolvedthe supposedly solid bases of a kinship that served to confer legitimacy on the Provi-sional IRA. At its best Irish revisionism has stressed how unique was the country’s colo-nial experience in its longue durée notably by showing that from 1801 the unforeseenimplications of the Act of Union and its operation, which meant that British admin-istrative values and criteria were sooner or later applied to Ireland, permitted a slow butsteady transfer of power from the Protestant back to the Catholic majority. Further-more the Union increased anglicization and this facilitated the spread of the Irishnationalist message; thereby enabling it to secure by the late forties a stable, homoge-neous and neutral Irish Republic.

The critic Seamus Deane was quick to find fault with the longue durée approach ofthe Union. He wrote: “The nationalist rejects revisionism because it is an institutionthat reproduces as history a form of knowledge that denies the atrocities of colonial-ism in order to defend the state as the outgrowth of colonialism rather than theachievement – however flawed – of nationalism.” But what Deane did not see in hishaste to deploy a hermeneutic of suspicion over Irish revisionism or accuse its repre-sentatives of neo-colonial sympathies, is that one can derive another conclusion fromthe new interpretation. The accomplishments of Irish nationalism are all the moreexceptional for having succeeded – through efficient organization and propaganda –in defeating the hidden dynamic of the 1801 Union, the effect of which was to mol-lify the hostility of Irish society to its existence. Roy Foster, Oliver MacDonagh, andscholars less ‘revisionist’ like the political scientist Tom Garvin or the historian GeorgeBoyce have all called attention to how ambivalent the Union turned out to be. To arguethat the English did not know what they were committing to with the Union, that itrevealed an unpredictable mechanism forever more shackling them from arbitraryaction and betraying their rationale of absolute domination, does not mean necessar-ily that one is passing a judgment in favour of the Union. One can be in principleopposed to the Union, its underlying motives and important aspects of its operation,especially the catastrophic handling of the Famine, and still recognize a degree of uncer-tainty in the period it opened.

Revisionism thus has shown that in some important respects, the story of Irishnationalism is one of success no least because Ireland presents none of the structuraldevastation, political chaos, internecine war and economic bankruptcy which arecharacteristic of some former colonized countries. Where revisionism has cast a muchmore skeptical glance is on the democratic and social record of Irish nationalismsince independence as well as on the absence of imaginative and courageous leadershipfrom the Irish Government on the sensitive issue of the Northern Irish Conflict. Theimperative to finish the Irish Revolution once invoked both by Nationalists andMarxists and endorsed by the Government when it launched its vociferous anti-par-tition campaign in the 1940s all too often simply meant the end of partition andinstant re-unification without giving a serious thought to the laborious social, ideo-

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 103

logical and political re-adjustments which the welcoming of one million Protestantswould have necessitated. Francis Mulhern, a New Left literary critic seemed to echothe revisionist objection when he offered his opinion that the continuing use of thepost-colonial epithet to explain Irish culture and society three generations after inde-pendence was tendentious because it was tantamount to suggesting that its nobility andpolitico-cultural elites were not to be blamed for the forms of exploitation and oppres-sion they had maintained since. With its prolonged use, latter-day Irish nationaliststried to force the hands of radical critics to acknowledge a continuing, mitigating‘national’ ordeal.33

Against the sophistication of revisionist analyses, anti-revisionism has insisted onsqueezing the itinerary of Ireland in the confines of a dualist postcolonial paradigmwhich has long been contested and superseded by such diverse thinkers as BenedictAnderson34, Ranajit Guha35 or Homi Bhabha.36 No doubt the most original voice inthe group of the Subaltern Studies is Sumit Sarkar who argued that Edward Said’s influ-ence on the thinking of that school had been constrictive for their analyses tended toreproduce the imperial mould in their insistence on the decisive rupture caused by colo-nial rule. For Sarkar, the problem with Saidian postcolonial discourse was that it wasbecoming increasingly a mirror image of imperial discourse because where the latterwas prone to view colonialism as having brought civilization to the natives and fun-damentally altered for the better the indigenous order, the former hastened to char-acterize colonialism as the imposition of absolute Western power on a supposedly ‘egal-itarian’ society that knew little of exploitation and oppression before.37 The fact thatanti-revisionism in Ireland was also heavily influenced by Said should come as no sur-prise at all.

In its turn, Irish revisionism has also drawn attention to the substitution of historicalinterpretation by vestiges of romantic nationalism. Roy Foster has shown how unre-alistic the notion of a Golden Age is. The view that past relations were equitably reg-ulated until a brutal invader arrived and spoilt everything is not historical. And yet thisis what all parties in the Irish imbroglio, even the Marxist James Connolly, commonlyalleged. The Golden Age was variously defined as the period before the arrival of theNormans, the colonial plantation, Daniel O’Connell, the Land War, the 1916 Rebel-lion, the Civil Rights marches of 1968 and before the coming of the British troops in1969. This fantasy would not be so costly if those who indulged in it were not

33 FRANCIS MULHERN (ed.), The Present Lasts a Long Time. Essays in Cultural Politics, Cork, CUP, 1998,pp. 158-63.

34 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1991), 81.35 Guha, Ranajit(ed.), Subaltern Studies I, (New Delhi: OUP, 1982), 7.36 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, in The Location

of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 125-133.37 Sumit Sarkar’s “Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies”, in Writing Social History, (Oxford:

OUP, 1999), 82-108.

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doomed to repeat an artificial society, continuously bent on excluding the Otheropinion, persuasion or man. This is as true for the Victorian landowner who pines foran exemplary estate without any land agitator as it is for the Gaelic Revivalist whodreams of a spiritual life in the West of Ireland. Even the Ulster Unionists imaginedthat the old Stormont regime had created a better society.38

Revisionism has indubitably averted its attention from the search of a sole culprit,of an overriding criminal act shaping fatalistically all the subsequent march of thenation, and this is why it is not conventionally ethical. Although the fathers of pro-fessional Irish history set out to change comprehensively both the face of historicalscholarship and teaching as early as 1938, their findings attracted a negative attentionit seems only in the 1970s, when the Northern Irish Conflict erupted. But the word‘revisionism’ was used for the first time even later in 1989 by Desmond Fennell to con-demn a historiography which supposedly “both in its ultimate thrust, and as a matterof objective fact, [stood for] the historiography of the counter-revolution” and “servedthe history needs of [an] Establishment” bent on bolstering the partitionist status quo.39

Fennell’s opinion seems skewed, even a cheap shot when one takes on board that thework of revision had been a reality of the historical profession for thirty years beforethe political commotion began. Hence the forensic re-examination of the EasterRebellion in 1916, the event from which the Provisional IRA claimed its symbolicmandate, started well before the explosion of violence in the streets of Derry andBelfast. In 1991 Michael Laffan, Professor of Irish history at UCD opined: “Histori-ans anticipated as well as responded to the problems posed by violence in Northern Ire-land. Some politicians may now share their reservations and mixed feelings about therole of force in Irish history, but it was the historians and not the politicians who ledthe way.”40 Later during a personal conversation with the author, Laffan revealed hewas still convinced of this. But he added a caveat; if the historians did play an avant-garde role, it did not necessarily mean the politicians followed the historians’ example.He conceded some took the same path but it often happened morally and politicallyfor different reasons. Thus the Irish Republic may have developed an Establishmentor orthodox revisionism out of political necessities, or because it too was concerned toaddress the discrepancy between nationalist theory and reality, especially after the col-lapse of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974, but this phenomenon should not bemixed up with the independent and critical thinking that had been blossoming forquite some time. In this regard, Greek revisionists may have a small advantage over theirIrish counterparts, in that the idea of revisionism as mere epiphenomenon of the polit-

38 Roy Foster, Northern Ireland and the Politics of Reconciliation, 31-2.39 Desmond Fennell, “Against Revisionism”, in Interpreting Irish History. The Debate on Historical

Revisionism, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), 183, 187.40 Michael Laffan, “Insular Attitudes: The Revisionists and their Critics “, in Revising the Rising, eds.

Theo Dorgan, Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 113.

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 105

ical, sounds even less convincing there, given the absence of an unresolved political con-flict in Greece and the fact that historians are now raising questions that have ceasedbeing on the agenda of discussion of all the political parties since the mid 1990s.

Irish scholars picked up rather late the issue of the Civil War. If we exclude the workwritten by Calton Younger in 1968, the first more dispassionate and systematic analy-ses were published in the 1990s, not necessarily by historians and often by Irish of thediaspora; by personalities such as Michael Hopkinson, Tom Garvin, David Fitzpatrickand Michael Laffan, the latter being a notable exception. Not surprisingly given thatthe Provisional IRA always cast a doubt on the legitimacy of the Southern State, crit-ical historiography also ended up internalizing this doubt. Hence Tom Garvin hailedthe Treatyite victory “the Birth of Democracy” whereas John M. Regan described it as“the Irish Counter-Revolution”. Moreover if one feature stands out in the work ofGarvin, Laffan and Fitzpatrick it is the determinedly anti-teleological bend of theirmethod of interpretation. Hence for e.g. the 1916 Rebellion is not the natural outcomeof the Cultural Revival but a desperate attempt to throw to halt the progress of con-stitutional nationalism.

The historian however who has spilt more ink in 1998 is Peter Hart, an outsider,political scientist turned historian, and trained in Canada and America.41 Around thesame age as Kalyvas, Hart displays also the same fascination with the violence of civilwar and a willingness to test the potentials of oral evidence, statistical data and microand comparative history in its forensic study. Like Kalyvas, Hart is not afraid of tack-ling controversial often shadowy aspects of a very recent past, a penchant which tran-spires in the use of loaded terminology such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ when alluding to cer-tain actions of the old IRA in Cork, although Hart later changed it to “ethnically tar-geted violence” against Protestants. Hart’s main objective was to trace minutely theescalation of violence in a situation of war. He did so by drawing a distinction betweentwo categories; the “combat casualties” referring to the victims of an armed and activegroup when attacked and those who were “alone or unable to fight back”. This led himto the conclusion that the violence of the old IRA initially against British forces andlater against the Free State Army had been more ruthless than previously conceded. Butperhaps his most offensive contention is his insistence on the ethnic component of theviolence perpetrated during the War of Independence, hereby blurring the neat andconventional periodization between anti-colonial struggle and a form of civil war;which according to the official story never happened or only in the North against theCatholics. Needless to say this hypothesis if corroborated by further research taints theromantic portrayal of the old IRA as a non-sectarian force, fighting with self-abnega-tion for collective freedom. Hart was taken to task for refusing to cite all his sourceswhen his opponents did. But perhaps the most important criticism came from Senia

41 Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies. Violence and Community in Cork. 1916-1923, (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998).

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Paseta who in an otherwise laudatory review remarked that “he could perhaps haverelated developments in Co. Cork to the wider Irish situation in more detail” because“Cork cannot be seen to be representative of the country as a whole.”42 Paseta was herevoicing her own apprehensions about fragmentation and decontextualization in thecontext of a micro and local history approach.

4. Parallels between Greek and Irish Revisionism

In the Greek and the Irish cases one observes – despite superficial differences – twoparallel routes to a more complex account of the past. The old Greek revisionists wereMarxists who initiated a first serious destabilization of the founding event of Greeknationalism; namely the 1821 Revolution. In spite of the ideological thrust apparentin their scholarly questioning, their contribution revitalized both history and politicalpraxis. The response to their heretic interpretations depended on the degree of pene-tration of the Left in the Greek polity and on how profoundly those interprationsclashed with the then perceived interests and imperatives of the State. However oftenthe same personalities were also dissident voices who dared to challenge the officialCommunist Party line on serious matters of strategy, ideology, identity and direction.The young Greek revisionists represent mostly a new generation who come to the mat-ter of history with a pluri-disciplinary methodology and questions born of a more rig-orous theoretical training and last but not least a salutary degree of emotional distancefrom the stakes of the Cold War. That is why the dimension of internal critique (dis-sidence) is less apparent with them than it is with those Irish revisionists who were writ-ing during the Northern Troubles in an intense climate of Cold War.

In Ireland first generation revisionism employed essentially a good time-honouredempirical method with an overriding focus on political events or figures, strict adher-ence to official governmental sources, no appeals to explicit theory and intellectualinfluences confined mostly to England. The insights of economic, social and culturalhistory were tried out only with the arrival of the second and third generations. In 2003Roy Foster remembered: “I graduated as a history student thirty-two years ago. Fou-cault’s Archaeology of knowledge had only just been translated, but the idea of a new kindof historical exploration, that would seek to decouple rather than synthesize, rapidlyentered the historiographical world via the Annales School who – like Foucault – wereinterested in discontinuities and breaks. The historiographical New Age of the 1960swas reaching Ireland.”43

Inside Greek historiography, methodological parochialism or retardation lastedeven longer. Although Greece had some precocious revisionist voices in the 1920s there

42 Senia Paseta, Review of “The IRA and Its Enemies”, English Historical Review, 115. 460, 2000.43 R.F. Foster, “Something to Hate”, 2.

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is no sign later of an adoption of the longue duree and interdisciplinary approaches typ-ical of the Annales School and this is all the more striking as Greek scholars of the1930s and 1940s were all French-speaking. After the ideological competition betweenRight and Left culminated in the aberrations of Civil War and dictatorship, it froze theminds as it were and historical dialogue in the guise of methodological experimenta-tion had to wait the restoration of democracy in 1974 and the return of renownMarxist historians who had imbibed during their exile French intellectual develop-ments. However this sense of paralysis can be deceptive. As it was pointed out by RenaStavridi-Patrikiou, usually when two ideological worldviews are completely estrangedinevitably they start to activate their internal oppositions. In Greece this internalopposition was undertaken by such high-calibre intellects as Nikos Svoronos andPhilippos Iliou and usually it coincided with a general de-freezing of Marxist conti-nental thought. In Ireland this internal opposition flourished in the first decades fol-lowing independence perhaps because unionism once relegated beyond a physical bor-der presented no direct threat any longer and public intellectuals from within thenationalist tradition began to ponder in earnest the cost of cultural and politicalhomogenization.

Thus the contribution to historiography of this early revisionism – however epis-temologically flawed or naive it may now look – cannot be underestimated because itenabled the cultivation of a more complex problematic, the creation of streams devi-ating from the main currents, the acceptance of the multiplicity of the theories capa-ble to throw light on particular social paths and structures and the turn toward theexit.44 Thus a not so surprising thing is that when Irish revisionism was attacked in the1980s it was done in a wholesale manner as if one could discern the same method andmotives running through the work of all those historians. Could it be that a revision-ist construal is not tantamount to methodological innovation solely and that subver-sion can still take place within the limits of a conventional method and discourse, andthat perhaps it becomes all the more effective for doing so? This question becomes espe-cially relevant when one remembers that first generation Irish revisionism representedthe collective work of nationalist historians who retained a faith in the feasibility ofpolitical unity but were concerned to show that the means hitherto employed had beencounterproductive. What is clear is the catalytic effect that the onset of the Troubleshad on the next generation especially when the Provisional IRA began to claim thatthey drew their mandate from the 1916 Rebellion and their inspiration from the polit-ical messianism of Patrick Pearse. For many the realization of the implications for thepresent of this violent and sacrificial ideology grew into a dark epiphany and induceda radical doubt which this time targeted not only the means but also increasingly theends of Irish nationalism.

44 Rena Stavridi-Patrikiou, Oi Fovoi enos Aiona, 274.

108 EVI GKOTZARIDIS

Moreover in both historiographies the focus of attention has shifted from theobsessive theme of foreign interference and the clear tendency to demonize it to an evermore courageous probing into domestic discord and responsibilities. This transpires inthe new preoccupation with the phenomenon of wartime collaboration and the eventsof the civil war in Greece or the recognition in Ireland that partition had not beensomething imposed from above but a “secession” occurring because of a severe “break-down in human relations”.45 Hence in the 1980s Nikos Svoronos had warned his col-leagues that the view that Greece is “merely a stage for puppets whose strings are movedby alien lands is naïve for a historian, a mortal disease for history itself and an unac-ceptable alibi for politicians.”46 In a similar vein John Whyte had shown the distancetravelled by Irish scholarship when he wrote that “the internal-conflict approach toNorthern Ireland [was] close to becoming a dominant paradigm.”47 Thus in both his-toriographies one notes a stronger interest for the role played by local political elites ininstigating or perpetuating domestic conflict or not addressing ongoing social and eco-nomic problems. Historians such as Michael Laffan48 and David Fitzpatrick49 havestudied with a great deal of detail the capture and absorption of social dissent by mid-dle-class nationalism as well as the institutional, economic and social continuitiesthat underlay the dramatic period of the Irish revolution.

Furthermore, one must concede that the fierce revisionist debates of the 1980s and1990s of which the Irish was an original case because the cold warring there opposednationalism to unionism and its ‘crypto-unionists’ represented despite the self-reflex-ive efforts of their spokesmen, not a radical departure from ideology, but an escalationof old cleavages conducted via new methods and theories. Hence the hypothesisdeveloped in this essay that revisionism helped to pave the way for a paradigm shift isnot necessarily disproved by the contention of Domenico Losurdo that it was tangledup in serious methodological contradictions, thereby betraying its involvement inthe pragmatics of an ideological battle. Now if ‘revisionism’ has somewhat lost its edgefor younger scholars such as Kalyvas and Hart, if they express weariness at seeing theiroriginal findings being often too easily dismissed through the use of this antiquatedlabel and not being sufficiently examined on their own ground, it might well bebecause others put up a fight before, so to speak, and because they are themselves thebeneficiaries of an epistemological turn of a not negligible magnitude. In other words,they have been bathing into this new horizon of intelligibility that was brought about

45 DONALD HARMAN AKENSON, Conor: A Biography, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press,1994, p. 360.

46 NICOLAS SVORONOS, Greek History, 1940-1950: The Main Problems, in JOHN IATRIDES (ed.),Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, London, University Press of New England, 1981, p. 2.

47 JOHN WHYTE, Interpreting Northern Ireland, Oxford, Clarendon, 1990, p. 203.48 MICHAEL LAFFAN, Labour must wait, in “Radicals, Rebels and Establishments”, Historical Studies,

n. XV, pp. 203-222.49 DAVID FITZPATRICK, Politics and Irish Life 1913-1921, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1998.

THE REVISIONIST DEBATES OF GREECE AND IRELAND 109

by the initiation of an internal critique inside both Nationalism and Marxism and thatis why sometimes they sound unsuspecting of the remarkable break it represents fromthe past.

5. Concluding Remarks

The aim of this article was to look at revisionism with comparative lenses and togive, however varied the specifics of contexts and the forms of expression, a firstinkling into the enduring characteristics of revisionism; fragmentation of the Nation-alist or Marxist grand narratives and internal critique initiated by historians who afterregistering the shock of tragic events (i.e. the Lausanne population exchange, theSoviet repression of the Prague Spring, the Greek Junta of 1967-74, the Northern IrishTroubles) revisit a dominant historiographical tradition or their own ideological andtheoretical matrix with a view to reassess the former or the latter’s means and sometimesalso its ultimate ends. Revisionism appears to be first and foremost a new sensibility;the tentative and perilous exercise of creating the conditions for a degree of reflexiv-ity in Western historiography and by extension in political praxis. Revisionism has hon-orable origins developing as it does from an old tradition of Western critique designedto probe the complex rapport between ends and means or narrow the gap betweendogma and reality; thus it is an aberration to identify it with Holocaust denial. Thisarticle has also shown that the character of revisionism has changed many times overthe past. At times its derivation was narrowly political or ideological as when Kordatoswas importing the materialist interpretation to the Greek Revolution to attack the con-servative character of Greek society. At others revisionism stemmed from a serious sci-entific effort to re-adjust theoretical and interpretive categories in the light of an evermore complex, ‘uninhabitable’ and tragic reality as when Irish and Greek historianswere trying to fathom the responsibilities of Nationalist or Marxist historiography inthe swerve into dictatorship, sectarian conflict or even totalitarianism. Finally revi-sionism could also derive from the ‘politics’ of historical writing per se as the steadydemocratization of Western societies led also to a democratization of the subject mat-ter of history which became fully apparent only following the post-modern chal-lenges to the conventional epistemological assumptions of historiography from the1980s according the sovietologist Steve Smith.50 In this latter case the questions ofwhose story is being told and whose story is being silenced, what compromising or con-tradictory facts are elided or glossed over and why become very important indeed andmethodological innovation lies at the heart of this new revisionism. That said the over-

50 STEVE SMITH, Revising the Totalitarian Story: the Historiography of the Russian Revolution (1917-20)from the 1970s to the Present, Talk given at a conference entitled, “Revisionism in European Historiogra-phies of the 20th Century. See above n. 27.

110 EVI GKOTZARIDIS

arching argument of this article has been that this latter form of revisionism suffusedwith an unprecedented level of epistemological, theoretical and methodological aware-ness could not have grown without the contributions of the first and more significantlythe second phases of revisionism; what I have called the ‘internal critique’. Far from thisauthor is the wish to let teleology enter from the back door again by implying that his-toriography is on a steady progressive march or to minimize the temptations alwayslurking in such exercise. As the German example in the 1980s indicates, regressions arestill possible and prove the utility of having historical scholarship subject to the prob-ing eye of other social sciences. That said, it is important to show, in our age of polit-ical correctness and legislative codification of the truth, that not all fragmentations arehere to serve a nihilistic or reactionary intent.

Evi Gkotzaridis(European University Institute)