Unwanted, ally: Greece and the Great Powers, 1939-1941

Abstract

Greece’s international position and national security in those years
have, until recently, been examined mainly from the point of view
of contemporary official Greek policy. This has lead to the development
of a semi-official Greek historiography, essentially as an extension
of war and post-war Greek foreign policy and its requirements.
The purpose of this paper is to examine, on the basis of sources newly
made available, the governing assumptions and premises of this
historiography, and to pursue a re-evaluation of contemporary developments,
free from a number of these assumptions and premises,
which are not supported by evidence and which have generally misguided
scholarship. The main thesis of this paper is that the Greek
government in that period failed, for reasons that had to do with the
policy of Britain and Italy in the eastern Mediterranean as well as
with the nature of the ruling regime in Greece and Greek appraisals
of the country’s strategic value, to secure an alliance with Britain
to ward off an Italian attack, and accepted such an alliance against
Germany at the insistence of the British government.