Catholic features in The Tablet – return of the Near East

Something peculiar is going on when Greece’s venerable newspaper of record, Kathimerini, devotes an entire page to a new cultural and geopolitical theory, under the headline (in self-consciously archaising language): “We belong to the East.”
People who know modern Greek history (as readers of that august broadsheet generally do) could instantly pick up the gentle irony. The paper was riffing on one of the defining sound bites of the constitutional order that was re-established in Athens half a century ago, after a nasty interlude of military rule. In June 1976, to be precise, Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis told his cheering parliamentary supporters: “Greece – politically, militarily, economically and culturally – belongs to the West.”
Superficially at least, that programmatic statement has been borne out. For all the rocki­ness of the last five decades, including Andreas Papandreou’s flirtation with non-alignment and a financial crisis that brought Greece (and the eurozone with it) to the edge of the abyss, the country’s place in the western network of institutions seems unquestioned, and the current outbreak of war in the greater Middle East has only reaffirmed that basic alignment.

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