Vicarious Reconciliation and the Restitutive Mindset: The Demand-Driven Dynamics of Greek Foreign Policy
George Kalpadakis
Senior Researcher at the Academy of Athens & Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna
Kostas Bakoyannis
Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin
The article identifies sovereignist mobilizations as a key factor shaping Greece’s strategic choices across history. Traditional foreign policy analyses prioritize institutional actors and formal diplomacy, giving insufficient weight to grassroots pressures, mass mobilizations, and the deeply ingrained restitutive mindset that ties national identity to a perpetual quest for vindication and historical redress. Drawing on constructivist theories of ontological security, the article examines how collective anxieties over national sovereignty and political agency have periodically translated into sovereignist campaigns that undercut the Greek state’s pursuit of its strategic interests. Case studies spanning the rejection of the 1840 Greek-Ottoman treaty, the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, the Enosis campaign of the 1950s, and the Macedonian name dispute of the post-Cold War period illustrate how foreign policy can serve as a symbolic substitute for national reconciliation in a historically fragmented society. In doing so, the article presents an analytical vocabulary with which to reconceptualize both the latent fractures of Greek civic life and the recurring entanglement of national aspirations with policy miscalculations. By contextualizing these movements within broader patterns of state-society relations, the article seeks to offer a fresh perspective on how foreign policy can reflect domestic cleavages while also serving, at specific junctures, as an arena for their temporary resolution.
Keywords: Foreign Policy Analysis; Modern Greece; Demand and Supply Side of Politics; Ontological Security; National Restitution; Civil Society; Sovereignist Mobilizations; National Reconciliation; Factionalism and Civil Conflicts; Secret Societies; Democracy; Institutional Resilience; Strategic Planning
* The authors wish to express their warm appreciation to Nikiforos Diamandouros, Michael Herzfeld and Dimitris A. Sotiropoulos for their valuable comments on the article.
