Quote:
Originally Posted by AmeNoJaku
The what?! Helping a country go from 90% to 140% sovereign debt, while buying out cheaply all its industries, and forcing it export to them all its highly educated workforce, is not particularly friendly. Still the rhetoric is necessary since all European states in lesser or greater extent have moral systems based on Greco-Roman culture, a little corrupted by middle eastern religions. And since you are probably referring to the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, keep in mind that this was a general strategy in all countries not just Greece, and that most muslim fought alongside christian nationalists (not only Greek, since Albanian, Serbian, and Romanian fought alongside in 1821/1912 and earlier unsupported revolts) against an empire that was very corrupt and oppressive to them, in the end the Turkish nationalist destroyed that empire with a popular revolt... just saying  |
I'm not going to defend the morality (though it's different over the
necessity) of the Hamidiyan despotism, but I take any tone taken straight from Lord Kinross or any ex-Ottoman national historiographies (including Turkish ones) with a grain of salt. And Albanian one was more motivated by fear over being genocided by neighboring christians rather then "centuries of oppression under Turkish yoke"(tm).
I can't exactly say for the Slavic Balkans since their communist experience kinda severed their pre-Cold War ties to the west*, but Greece and Cyprus certainly had received a lot of free passes due to christianity and idealized fantasy of ancient greek civilization with which modern greek cultures have little in common, including entrance into EU which has caused all this. Indeed, this experience should've shown everyone that distant Hellenic heritage and christianity doesn't automatically make a country western europe and suitable with western european system. On the other hand, they are indeed victims of as much their own fault as they are of half-attentive western meddling, which has more often then not, ended up terribly for the economy of the subjected countries.
*)though again, there's also Romania and Bulgaria which have had worse track records in human rights then Turkey but had their entrance forms got stamped almost immediately after submission.