Greece's Elusive Quest for Security Providers: The `Expectations-Reality Gap'

Abstract

The article analyses Greece's traditional quest for providers of security against the Turkish threat by highlighting the gap between Greece's misguided expectations of turning both the Atlantic Alliance and the developing European defense project into providers of security and real-life cases indicating the inability of those security institutions to meet Greece's expectations. For Greek security analysts and decisionmakers, a series of events has provided ample proof that neither NATO nor the EU can provide Greece with security guarantees. More recently, another series of developments, mostly related to the evolving European security and defense project, was enough to draw Greece into a state of continuous vacillation between widening and bridging the `expectations-reality gap' described above. Following the 1999 EU summit in Helsinki, Greece initiated a long-term policy of removing the Turkish threat altogether. In the long run, this policy appears as the only sound alternative to Greece's longstanding search for security bulwarks, but in the short run Greece should realize the limits of the EU's involvement in its defense policies.