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Southeast European and Black Sea

Studies
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Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a

Greek Democrat and Political Maverick
a
Thanos Veremis
a
ELIAMEP
Published online: 18 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Thanos Veremis (2013) Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek
Democrat and Political Maverick, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 13:1, 106-108, DOI:
10.1080/14683857.2013.773183

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 106 Book reviews

different research traditions and dubious methodological dichotomies that often

sterilize academic debates.
The editors seem also quite well aware of the weaknesses of the project. In
methodological terms, qualitative comparative analysis remains outside the scope of
the contributions, although it seems ideal for small- to medium-n studies, as one
would expect to be the case with the selection of a number of EU countries to test
Europeanization-related hypotheses. More attention could have been paid on the
Europeanization of actors involved in the policy-making process, besides and
beyond political parties, and on the thematic areas whereby a more representative
sample would talk to a much wider audience. The external dimension of
Europeanization is also inadequately covered, with only one chapter available on
the EU-BSEC interaction, although the EU mode of governance – on which Euro-
peanization has a lot to say – is a key dimension of the EU international presence
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and actorness, especially in the broader European neighbourhood. Having said that,
we need to acknowledge that the editors have to strike some balance and not
everything can fit in a single volume.
In a nutshell, this is a very interesting piece of work that paves the way for
further research in the Europeanization literature. It is quite coherent, an area where
many edited volumes often suffer, and the argumentation is well articulated. The
editors adhere to analytic eclecticism, arguing in favour of overcoming meta-
theoretical and ontological obstacles in quest of causal explanations that can tackle
substantive research problems. This is not an easy task to do and requires a solid
background on the basic epistemological and methodological underpinnings of each
research approach to Europeanization. This is what the volume offers: a rounded
view of causality in Europeanization that leaves the reader with the difficult but
very challenging task to compare, select and/or synthesize the approach that best fits
his or her own research.

Spyros Blavoukos
Department of International and European Economics Studies,
Athens University of Economics and Business
Patission 76, Athens 10434, Greece
sblavo@aueb.gr
Ó 2013, Spyros Blavoukos
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2013.773187

Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Democrat and Political

Maverick, by Stan Draenos, London, I.B. Tauris, 2012, 340 pp., £30.00/$49.00
(hardback), ISBN 978-1-78076-080-3
This new biography of eminent Greek politician, Andreas Papandreou, covers the
first part of his career in Greek politics between his return in 1959 in Athens, after
20 years in American academia and 1967, when he was arrested by the junta of col-
onels that imposed a seven-year dictatorship on the Greeks.
The author avoids treading on the dangerous grounds of his hero’s personal life.
His relationship with his divorced parents and his first wife1 are not used by Drae-
nos to construct a psychological portrait of Andreas as a child and later as a young
 Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 107

man. The proximity of the author with Andrea’s second wife and his children, per-
haps kept the description of his personality within the confines of the politically
correct. Although his close friend from the years in the USA, Adamantios Pepelas-
sis is briefly quoted describing ‘the dark cloak that covered his (Andreas’) pain and
wound’, Draenos does not venture into Pepelassis mine of information on the man
Andreas. This reviewer owes much to such accounts of tale-telling minutia about
Andreas’ psyche and personae. Yet, the book has put together an interesting
description of the turbulent period 1962–1967 when Andreas’ father George, rein-
vented himself as the champion of liberal democracy in Greece. As the popular
prime minister between 1963 and 1965, he clashed with the young King Constan-
tine on the issue of the latter’s constitutional prerogatives. In hindsight, this emo-
tionally charged period makes no national sense given George Papandreou’s anti-
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communist reflexes and the preoccupation of the King with the control of the mili-
tary. In fact the junta of colonels that evaded the attention of royalist generals and
staged their own coup, did so at the expense of royal interests and were responsible
for the flight of the King from Greece. So, why did this relatively small number of
primitives in politics manage to take on such seasoned politicians of the right and
centre-right in the Greek political establishment and catch them unaware?
While giving a detailed account of Andreas’ advent in the Center Union party
of his father, Draenos fails to understand the impact of the young Papandreou lib-
eral-left views 10 years after the end of the civil war, on Greek politics. Strangely
enough Eugen Macarthy, liberal from Berkley, with his populist views directly cut
from the American political fabric, appeared far more alien to the Greek conserva-
tives than his leftist views merited. Yet he proceeded with his left-righteous
contempt for the parochial natives, to commit one political mistake after another.
His involvement, albeit harmless, in the ASPIDA mini-conspiracy, cost his father
his hard-earned position as Prime Minister. This subsequent war against the
‘establishment’ which was hardly in line with the ‘military-industrial’ complex
of the USA, but rather a series of short-lived alliances between such strange
ideological bedfellows as Stephanopoulos and Tsirimokos, proved the fragility of
those in power, be they with the institution of the crown or with the popular George
Papandreou. Throughout the first months of 1967, Andreas explained with great
conviction to his followers why it was impossible for any military coup to succeed
and promised to face the conspirators in person heading thousands of democratic
citizens. When in the morning of 21 April 1967, the tanks of the practically
unknown group of colonels rolled into Athenian streets, there was no popular out-
cry, let alone resistance. Andreas along with most political leaders was arrested in
his home and no countermeasure ever occurred against the morning coup.
Draenos’ account strangely enough, places the major responsibility for the 1967
dictatorship squarely on Andreas himself: for opposing his father’s attempt to come
to an agreement with the opposition and the King, and for becoming once more the
center of attention on the eve of the coup. Given the trial against ASPIDA, he
could be arrested and tried shortly before the elections because the immunity of
deputies was lifted with the dissolution of parliament. George proposed a bill to
preserve the immunity of Andreas even during the period of the elections only to
be rebuffed by the opposition. Throughout the first months of 1967, Andreas gave
the impression of a sleep-walker performing a wild dance in the precipice of a cliff.
Draenos’ work contains some known information, personal accounts of limited
value and much about official US views that is valuable and new. It seems that US
 108 Book reviews

agencies were in full knowledge of what was transpiring in Athens, even to the
extent that colonels such as George Papadopoulos were already conspiring against
their seniors. This information nevertheless exonerates the Americans from the
responsibility of the coup. Like Pintius Pilote they washed their hands of any
involvement in a messy affair and they tried to built their bridges with the colonels.
If the King was constantly asking the Americans to give him the green light for act-
ing unconstitutionally, the Papandreou family, especially Andreas, were constructing
terms of confrontation that were scarcely in line with reality. When the last eyewit-
ness of this turbulent period passes away, historians will have trouble deciphering
this psychogoverna.
No evidence of Andreas’ misadventure in Greek politics between 1963 and
1967 can be more damning than the success of the April coup in grasping power
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practically unopposed. There is no mention of Lyndon Johnson’s intervention to

free Andreas from the clutches of the colonels. Is this an ordinary omission, or a
Freudian slip? All in all this is a well-researched work that will help future histori-
ans understand the Andreas enigma.

Note

1. Although her account of their years as a married couple is included in the brief bibli-
ography by Christina Rassia, 10 years as the Wife of Andreas Papandreou, Athens,
Xenophon, 1992, Draenos makes practically no use of her testimony.

Thanos Veremis
ELIAMEP
veremis@eliamep.gr
Ó 2013, Thanos Veremis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2013.773183

Party patronage and party government in European democracies, edited by

Petr Kopecký, Peter Mair and Maria Spirova, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2012, xvi + 415 pp., £60.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-19-959937-0

Thanks to a Herculean data collection effort, the edited volume provides us with
the first standardized cross-national patronage data-set in Europe. Based on this
data, the authors convincingly challenge conventional wisdoms regarding the nature
of patronage, its role in linking parties with the state and theories of party govern-
ment. It should be read widely.
Traditionally, patronage has been conceived of as a particularistic exchange
between parties and voters, with state-funded benefits traded for electoral support.
Often used interchangeably with clientelism, patronage thus stood at the core of
linkage politics in less-developed countries in particular. By contrast, in more devel-
oped economies where citizens demand more public goods, programmatic appeals
trump and patronage is expected to decline. The authors challenge this line of rea-
soning by highlighting the flexible usage of patronage. Understood as the appoint-