Since Roman times the representation of monarchy as an antidote to anarchy was a strong form of legitimization for the monarchical institution. In modern Greece, this formula dates back to 1821. The Greek Revolution and its republican constitutions were identified by European statesmen with anarchy and demagogy. Thus, a foreign monarch, alien to Greece's internal factions, was deemed the ideal remedy for internecine strife, and the best guarantor of internal unity as well as stability in the Near East. This image of monarchy proved its usefulness again during the First World War, when a controversy between the premier Eleftherios Venizelos and King Constantine over foreign policy and constitutional issues led to the National Schism (1915–17).
The article examines the reception, conception and practical application of corporatist ideas in inter-war Greece. Drawing on Peter Williamson’s terms, this study looks closely at both consensual- and authoritarian-licensed corporatist theories and policies. In the period under consideration, Greece was a fledgling, fast industrializing society that was significantly affected by the economic advantages and misgivings of the ‘gloomy thirties’. High rates of unemployment, which were aggravated by the global economic crisis of 1929, low wages, long working hours and insufficient enforcement of labour law increased the dissatisfaction of the working classes and fanned social unrest. Consensual-licensed corporatist proposals for ‘professional representation’ entered the debate on the (re-)establishment of the Senate in 1928–29. Authoritarian-licensed corporatism found a much broader audience and practical scope during the Kondylis and the Metaxas dictatorships in the period 1935–40. Fascist-like corporatist practices were applied in agriculture and in the bargaining of collective agreements that regulated minimum wages and salaries. In fact, Metaxas had pronounced the transformation of his anti-parliamentary regime into a corporatist ‘new State’. However, the eventual implementation of corporatist ideas was rather limited. For that matter, I argue that interbellum Greece remained, in its European setting, a marginal case of corporatist theories and policies.
Greece's defeat in the war with Turkey in 1897 resulted in submitting the state's finances to the control by an international committee and provoked the necessity to introduce systemic reforms . The role of the father of modernization was vested in the new Prime Minister, Alexandros Zaimis, who on 29 October 1898 submitted to King George an extensive memorandum specifying the directions of essential reforms, indispensable to stabilize the country's situation . The main goal was to "rebuild the state and the country", and the means to achieve it was a fundamental modernization in such spheres as organization of the state, administration of justice, fiscal system, as well as education and social welfare . The main achievement of the modernization policy was the passing of the Constitution (27 May 1911), amending the fundamental law of 1864. The Constitution mainly improved the lawmaking process and until Greece joined the Second World War, it had been the basic point of reference in systemic issues .
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