[Book review] Democracy in Southern Europe : colonialism, international relations and Europeanization from Malta to Cyprus

Abstract

This is a comparative study on Cyprus and Malta regarding democratisation in Southern Europe. As far as Malta is concerned, the book dwells, among other things, on periods marked by legitimation crises of state and government. These include the discussions around the independence constitution, from which the Malta Labour Party (MLP) was left out, the church’s meddling into politics to prevent the ushering in of the MLP’s ‘project of modernity’ centring on six electoral points and later the ‘perverse’ 1981 election result and the fallout from it. The book, however, also underlines moments of democratic consensus such as, the post-integration decision to leave Britain involving members on both main sides of the legislative assembly, the two-third majority supporting the constitutional change in 1974 for the country to become a Republic, and the constitutional amendment which allowed for a change of government in 1987. The book does not disappoint as it provides detailed accounts of setbacks and breakthroughs in the two countries’ struggles for transitions from colonial to Western representative democratic politics. There were violent periods and episodes along the way, violence being infinitely more widespread in the Cypriot case. The two islands always struck me as suitable for a comparative study, with Cyprus differing because of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot ethnic divide. The book outlines the strife-torn path that the East Mediterranean island had to tread before one segment, the Republic of Cyprus, was absorbed into the ‘supranational state’ that is the European Union (EU). This passage was marked by a struggle for enosis resulting in guerrilla warfare by EOKA-B exponents and executions by the British – recalled in the Museum/Cemetery of ‘the Struggle’ in Nicosia. It was also marked by a civil war barely 3 years after formal, but one can say hardly actual and concrete, ‘independence’. Of course, there was the well-remembered (to people of my age at least) Greek-Cypriot military coup, involving implanted Greek military personnel, against Makarios, led by EOKA-B’s Nikos Sampson and instigated by the Greek colonels of the Papadopoulos and Ioannides regime, at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Harry Kissinger [excerpt].