Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [229]
One look at a map (not something the great statesmen did often enough) would also have showed that Venizelos was proposing a very strange country, draped around the Aegean Sea. His Greece would stretch one finger northward up the Adriatic, and another thin one along the top of the Aegean toward Constantinople; then it would jump across a bit of Turkish territory and the Dardanelles to take in about two thirds of the coast of Asia Minor, with a big lunge inland at Smyrna. This Greece of the “two continents and the five seas” was a country turned inside out, a fringe of land around waters it did not control. It would have enemies: Turkey certainly, and probably Bulgaria, both of which were down to contribute land, and probably also Italy, which had its own plans for the Adriatic, Albania and Asia Minor. Yes, agreed Venizelos, the shape was inconvenient. “But for thirty centuries Greeks had lived under these conditions, and had been able to surmount great catastrophes, to prosper and to increase.”17
Yet how could a country with fewer than five million people take on such a burden? A country so poor that in the years before 1914 a sixth of the population, almost all vigorous young men, had emigrated? So divided that there had almost been a civil war in 1917? For all the talk of ancient Greece, the country at the Peace Conference was new and shaky. As in the dreams of the other Balkan countries, the glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.
Venizelos’s arguments, so logically laid out before the Peace Conference, were as full of holes as the Greece he wanted. His statistics were as dubious as any in the Balkans, a mix of outdated Ottoman numbers and wishful thinking. In making his claim for southern Albania, for example, he argued that people who looked like Albanians and spoke Albanian were really Greek; if they were Orthodox, they were Greek to their very souls. Why, the Greek military was full of men who were Albanian in origin. Venizelos dealt with population figures like a conjurer: there were 151,000 Greeks in North Epirus, out of a total population of 230,000. Take away the purely Albanian districts, and that left 120,000 Greeks and only 80,000 Albanians. Majority Greek areas should of course go to Greece (self-determination) but so should all areas without a clear majority: “for it would be contrary to all equity that, in a given people, a majority which possesses a higher form of civilization should have to submit to a minority possessing an inferior civilization.” The Albanians, indeed, were fortunate that Greece was willing to take them on.18
Its past gave modern Greece a ready-made circle of supporters. Clemenceau, in a rare burst of unqualified enthusiasm, told his secretary, Jean Martet, that humanity had reached its summit in ancient Greece: “Immerse yourself in Greece, Martet. It is something which has kept me going. Whenever I was fed up with all the stupidities and emptiness of politics, I turned to Greece. Others go fishing. To each his own.” (Clemenceau had reservations about the modern Greeks, whom he found sadly ignorant about their own glorious history.19) The Greeks were the descendants of Homer and Pericles and Socrates. Serene temples, noble discus throwers, the golden light thrown by classical Greece and the Byzantine empire floated between the statesmen in Paris and the reality of a small, faction-ridden, backward nation. From Berlin to Washington, national parliaments, museums and galleries, even the whitewashed churches in small New England towns, showed the continuing power of classical Greece over the imagination of the West. Indeed, the young United States had nearly adopted classical Greek as its official language. The foreign services