A succession of political challenges and crises dominated Greece's twentieth-century history. The seven-year military dictatorship in Greece from 1967 to 1974 was marked by, among other negative features, a decisive turn away from the contemporaneous democratic patterns evident in most of Western Europe during the Cold War. This edited volume is the outgrowth of an April 2017 conference of scholars from a variety of disciplines who analyze aspects of the dictatorship and its impact. The contributors provide fresh interpretations based, in many instances, on the opening of formerly classified materials.
In the introduction, editors Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos point to, among other points, the exceptionalism of the dictatorship's occurrence during a period of strong economic growth in Greece, quite unlike authoritarian patterns in other world regions and periods. Basic to an understanding of the dictatorship's emergence is an overview of the Greek military's historical involvement in politics, and this...