Towards a No-State Solution in Cyprus

Part I: The Problem of Citizenship

i: Why must our solution be anti-national?

The political situation in Greece has long necessitated a functional analysis of nationalism. Radical movements in Greece have typically approached the question of nationalism from a material, economic perspective. It is quite correctly asserted in this analysis that nationalism is a manipulative tool employed by the capitalist class which keeps the people emotionally invested in mythmaking and nation-building to the detriment of their own material standing. However this analysis falls short of a comprehensive understanding for two reasons.

The first is that many of the rich are no less sincerely committed to nationalism than many of the poor. In fact there are quite wealthy people who have dedicated their time and energies to processes of national articulation. It is true that among the gains they achieve by doing this are financial gains. However, these people famously die quite spiritually satisfied as well, believing sincerely and possibly accurately that what they have helped to create has enriched the lives of their countrymen. At the same time, successful adoption of proper national symbols and ideas can gain one of even a poor background some level of admission into a society of cultured nation-builders and increase the material standing of the individual as well as “enrich” them intellectually, spiritually, and “culturally”. This means that, while nationalism is generally of detriment to the poor nationalist as an individual, and certainly so to the proletariat as a class, there are real material incentives for active participation which can supersede principles of class interest or historical accuracy or any such thing.

The second is far more important and is the subject of this text. The psychic link which is established in the constitution of a nation does not translate to a material, economic one. The economic factors which conspire against the Greek proletarians are quite different in different parts of the world. It is therefore not necessarily true that Greek nationalism is across the board the product of common bourgeois actors. Greeks in Cyprus are made economically subservient by different actors in different ways than Greeks in Greece, and Greeks in the diaspora have little in common with each other, let alone with the Greeks in Greece. While at the same time, there are, and have always been, Greeks among the economic oppressor classes of these countries. Analyses which problematise nationalism only due to its effect on the material standing of the individual without addressing the underlying spiritual beliefs of nationalism therefore have almost no persuasive power over Greeks who live outside of Greece because Cypriot and diasporic proletarians are not obviously exploited by its creators in the foremost. As well as this, Greek diasporics can sometimes become among the most privileged segments of their host countries. We find that the process of Hellenisation was initiated in the first place by Greeks who lived in the West while today Greeks in the west and particularly in the United States have bankrolled the recent rallies over the Macedonia naming dispute — a dispute which makes absolutely no sense in the American context.

Americans who accept the logics of ethno-nationalism do so largely due to the contributions of ethno-nationalist diasporics from countries like Greece, as well as other countries like Israel and India which have strong historical revisionist tendencies. The founding mythologies of these countries are based on a basically ethno-historical logic and the basic assertions by their national historical revisionists are accepted by the American mainstream as fact and not considered to be or even suspected to be historical revisionism. Despite the foundational aspect of racial hierarchy to the American state, ethno-nationalism is not foundational to the United States, and so for the most part, the mainstream of the United States’s accepatance of ethno-national logic in other parts of the world stems from passive, uncritical acceptance rather than active ideological proliferation.

Countries like Israel and India have strong currents of internal dissent which are dedicated to problematising these revisionist narratives. But I have found that these currents of internal dissent are rarely accepted by diasporas. Yet these diasporas maintain influence over the ideological developments of their host cultures. The ethno-nationalist tendencies of even small countries thus become global problems as they become part of a unifying revisionist history which justifies the system of nationality and citizenship all over the world. This allows for an incredible amount of international far-right solidarity; what is rightly considered the propaganda of far-right fascist revisionists in India can gain acceptance among the establishment, centre, left, and even counterculture of the United States as legitimate factual history. I aim towards a globally unifying theory of this problem through which a global anti-authoritarian solidarity can be cultivated and through which diasporic populations can be reached with an anti-authoritarian and anti-national analysis.

My first priorities in writing this are to work earnestly towards the prevention of a resurgence in violence in Cyprus as well as to address these two weak points of the antagonistic movement in Greece, to which I consider myself an aspirant contributor. However, I believe that the situation in Cyprus offers us in my opinion one of the most immediately visible demonstrations of nationalist ideology and the full range of its ramifications and consequences and shortcomings. I believe therefore that the situation of Cyprus has a lot to offer the world as a case study. To that end I have also written with the intention that a foreigner (or a diasporic) will be able to basically follow the premises of this text, although they may be eluded by some of the finer points of history. (But then who isn’t?)

Why do I consider it so important that nationalism be problematised and annihilated? In my view there are many reasons for this. It is true that nationalism is inextricable from the workings of capital on a global scale, and there is much with which one might be dissatisfied regarding the global organisation of wealth and capital. But in my view of a greater priority than this is the dissolution of national borders. Their existence is nothing less than an unmitigated global disaster. Even foreigners know of Greece’s role in the “refugee crisis”. The most important thing to understand about this crisis is that the European capitalist class has treated Greece as a containment zone in which refugees and migrants are sequestered in subhuman conditions which would scarcely be the envy of the the last survivors in an apocalyptic zombie horror serial. To the credit of the Greeks (and international volunteers), many people on the ground have worked to provide services and social integration for the many people who have found themselves stranded in Greece. But the service providers are an exceptional, extraordinary story in the current global order and even face significant levels of direct violence in Greece. The consequences of the processes of national ideological formation are very much present in the situation of the refugees in Greece today in ways which I will explain later on. But what must be understood is that what the fascists are fighting for is the prevention of the establishment of a global order which allows for mass migration in times of crisis — the likes of which happened at every other point in history. It is believed by most of the scientific community that humanity would have perished as a small collection of tribes centered around a lake in Africa some 150,000–70,000 years ago without the first mass migration, because that’s when that region fell into drought and necessitated it. Had our ancestors held to a childish belief in their being corraled into a national border in that time period, they’d have perished as the Syrians and Rohingya are now expected to do by the nationalists. So strong is this belief even in principle that it is preferable to the nationalists that people be slaughtered by the millions rather than exceed the arbitrarily drawn borders of their countries.

As for the rest of us, we must admit that the prevention of mass human migrations is impossible and undesirable moving forward.

ii: What is citizenship?

The concept of citizenship is, in theory and practice, a condition in which some enjoy freedoms and rights that others do not. The preamble of a constitution proclaiming all human beings to be equals in enjoyment of inalienable rights is undermined the moment that constitution recognises for itself a citizen class. In this recognition, the state necessarily creates a non-citizen class.

This is demonstrated quite conclusively in the camps in Greece. The Constitution of Greece has not provided for the equality of its refugees. The Constitution of Greece has not even endeavoured to provide for the equality of its refugees.

The forward of the Constitution proclaims that it’s been “animated by the principles of the rule of law and […] raising the respect to the value of man as the primary obligation of the state”. What does “rule of law” mean? It means equality before the law. Yet almost immediately after, Part 2 Article 4 states that Greeks, not people, are equal before the law. The principle guiding the idea of equality before the law to the constitution of Greece is thus not humanity but citizenship.

Since humanity alone does not qualify one for equality before the law, the country’s migrants can be held in barbaric apartheid conditions, ranked according to varying hierarchies of refugee, resident, etc, without any apparent contradiction with the state’s liberal ideology. This makes its migrants an easily exploitable labour class without legal rights, many of whom are forced into degrading positions such as drug dealing and prostitution, because of the sheer level of violence which visits those whose citizenship is alienated.

Citizenship is alienable as it is granted by the state. A state which can grant citizenship can remove citizenship as has been demonstrated numerous times throughout history from Nazi Germany to present-day Myanmar and Assam. What’s more, a citizenship which is granted by a state is contingent on the viability and power of a state. Citizens of states such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and indeed North Cyprus find themselves with limited citizenships which are not recognised in most of the world. At any point in history a geopolitical tide in even the most powerful of countries can change and render a passport of a citizen of a country more or less valuable than it had been earlier. In an international system of borders and citizenships, the worth of an individual derives from the state. Those who have studied fascism will understand that this is a basic tenet of fascist ideology. There can be no national borders without the universal acceptance of this basic tenet of fascist ideology.

At this point in history, it is expected that enormous swathes of humanity will have their rights to citizenship removed entirely owing to geopolitical events. Either their citizenship will be removed by their state, or their state will cease to exist, or their state will lose international recognition, or their state will make itself so inhospitable to them that they will be forced to leave and thus to render themselves a non-citizen of wherever they end up living. This is not a flaw in the system. This is its expected functionality. Nobody expects this not to happen. Nobody on Earth expects the war in Syria to be the last such conflict. In fact it is expected that Syria is to be only the beginning of a historical trend in this direction and that the world of tomorrow will have more refugees than the world of today.

Obviously this cannot stand unaltered. This poses a serious existential threat to every single person on Earth. Nobody on Earth is safe from the alienation or obsolecense of their citizenship.

Therefore we have in Syria the first of what could be predicted to be many wars over not whether the nation-state should continue its existence but over how to replace it and with what: should it be violently displaced by a fascist “caliphate” open to all who pledge allegiance or should it be simply undermined through a Democratic Confederation? Both ISIS and the PKK agree that the nation-state is not the way forward, with varying levels of coherence. I do not suspect that they will be the last groups to make this argument, and I would be surprised if they were the most dangerous. I am of the opinion that proactive steps should be taken so as to preclude the development of this kind of war in other parts of the world; our criticism of the nation-state must be coherent, principled, understood, and proliferated so as to not be co-opted by blind fascist rage or to drive the people into the protection of horrifying right-wing groups by our inability to otherwise guarantee their safety.

iii. What is Nationalism?

A nation is a form of legal and cultural codification of a group’s internal power structures. If the group’s internal power structures are capitalist, as is the case in Cyprus, then nationalism becomes an effective origin myth for capitalist hegemony. Nationalism needn’t always be capitalist. Communist regimes as well have historically cultivated a strong sense of nationalism in their people for their own reasons, such as the USSR under Stalin which is well known to have encouraged the growth of a Russian nationalism. But in all contexts, the purpose of nationalism is to persuade the people to ally themselves with the dominant power structures of the social context in which they live, even if within those structures they are members of a subjugated class. Its mechanisms and function are in this way similar to many religions, and in many places, such as Cyprus, religion and nationalism become so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable from one another.

Nationalism requires emotional passion and this can be cultivated can be far more easily than the knowledge required for a coherent class analysis. People can live under even a leftist government unaware of the finer points of labour commodification and surplus value and commodity fetishism, while the basically moral, basically religious obligations towards the nation, such as obligatory displays of patriotism (saluting the troops, standing for an anthem or pledge, etc) can be understood in a few seconds and can be compelled by law or social sanction. But the more one learns of the nation the less there is to salute or to stand for. The vast majority of nationalists are not actually members of the dominant class of their nations’ power structures. Class analysis, then, exists as a counter-narrative to nationalist ideologies which keep one enslaved to the nation. A slave who understands that her purpose for existence has been created in such a way that it is service to another will seek to destroy that state of servitude. In other words one cannot be consciously both a citizen and a proletarian. They are mutually exclusive consciousnesses; practically opposites. A conscious proletarian is a threat to the nation, which is to say a threat to the power structures of her society.

Since Cyprus is a capitalist country, a threat to the nation in Cyprus becomes a threat to capitalism and the inequality of classes engendered by capitalist economic systems. Nationalism and capitalism therefore close rank around one another for one cannot exist without the other. They are not even two sides of the same coin. They are the chicken and the egg. It is not possible, historically speaking, to fight one without the other and not possible, in practice, to support one without supporting the other.

This is embodied by the history of the Stalinists on Cyprus. They have made a critical error in this regard and so have not represented a serious threat to capitalism. Rather they are a foundational pillar of the capitalist nation which exists in Cyprus.

Stalinists do not observe that a nation is the means by which capital becomes a religion. The Stalinists take the nation for granted as an essential fact. To a Stalinist, a nation has an essence and a nation has rights. The Stalinists do not consider the destruction of a Nation to be any lesser a crime than the liberals or the fascists do. Rather they argue for the “national self-determination” of “oppressed peoples”. It’s notable that these “oppressed peoples” are not the proletariat but rather the “nation”. This nation is understood without problematisation of its internal power dynamics. The oppression of nations takes place not on account of capital but on account of the nationality of that capital, and so the Stalinists seek to reconstitute their nation as an “oppressed people” in contrast to the “imperialist powers” which oppress nations. This differs precious little from the mainstream self-victimisation narrative of far-right nationalists the world over, and I imagine has inspired a fair few.

In summary, the Communists consider that nationalism is as valuable a political tool to them as it is to the far right. They are quite incorrect on this count.

In the years immediately following the Nazi occupation, Greece found itself in a civil war and for a time most of the country was under control of the Greek communist party. At this time, Cyprus was still a British colony, and the Cypriot communists had supported an independent Cyprus. But when political fortunes changed in Greece and it appeared as though a communist Greece was an immediate possibility, the Cypriot communists abandoned this position in favour of the Greek nationalist position, which was calling for Enosis, or unification with Greece. This was supported by both Greeks and Greek Cypriots. Of course a Communist cannot be criticised for having differing positions regarding annexation to a communist state than they do annexation to a capitalist monarchy. I do as well. But to adopt a nationalist rather than pragmatic line in service of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of nationalism. The Communists did not argue that Cyprus should join Greece conditionally based on politics. They argued for, and actively facilitated the growth of, a Greek nationalist consciousness.

It is necessary to illustrate this analytical shortcoming because it is highly influential in the diaspora. Since communists think their nationalism is different than everyone else’s, diasporics sometimes consider that their nationalism is less reactionary because it is actively promoted by communist parties, while other activists from communist-influenced backgrounds find themselves robbed of the tools to engage critically with the diasporic nationalisms of their comrades.

As well, I believe that in problematising an ideological tendency, it is better to criticise the most rational, most sympathetic parties which hold it, rather than focusing on the most extreme and least sympathetic example. Like many diasporics, I find the communist arguments for nationalism to be most powerful, and so I have dedicated myself to problematising them first so as to eliminate any doubt in the reader that some variant or the other of nationalist ideology is defensible.

To constitute a nation is to link the destinies of all groups within that nation, right or wrong. It might make sense to a proletarian to join a communist Greece and not a monarchist Greece, but to a citizen it does not. National regimes rise and fall and a Greek, once having been made a Greek through the development of a national consciousness, remains a Greek after the fall of a monarchy and for that matter after the fall of Communism. A national considers that their national destiny will be intertwined with that of their nation regardless of any regime. In supporting national objectives, then, Communists find common cause with the extreme right and form an effective coalition. And of course the beneficiary of any coalition is the most reactionary group.

Second is that the nation is an authoritarian lie. An authoritarian regime is at the top of the power structure which a nation exists to legitimise and so has to guarantee the loyalty of the rest of the nation, which they do by creating nationalism. Nationalism is not an intellectual pursuit but a passion. Passions soar in times of duress, such as in times of economic crisis caused by the fall of a regime — which is also the time when intellectual class analysis is most important. As famously articulated by communists the world over, the fall of a regime creates a potentially revolutionary situation. Yet we see no anti-capitalist revolutions which have preceded the fall of Communist regimes, and we see that no Communist regime which has fallen to give way to an anti-capitalist revolution. How can this be? Should not the people of a Communist regime have been armed with at least a passable analysis, at least passable modes of social organisation which can prevent a post-communist state from falling to unmitigated free-market ravages to become hubs of crime, drugs, alcoholism, and prostitution? Should they not be well-versed enough in social issues to at least understand that immigrants and gay people are not actually the cause of their woes such that this becomes a non-viable political platform in a successor state moving forward?

The answer is that Communist regimes have invoked nationalism and in doing so have neutered the intellectual and social development of their proletarian class. Knowledge can be incorrect and a people who have received their intellectual nourishment from an authoritarian liar regime will not trust that knowledge. But they will trust their hearts and their feelings and their passions. When those passions include nationalism, that means nationalism has a level of popular trust which no other ideology can match. It becomes a vice, more than an ideology — a coping mechanism one leans on in hard times, the way a professed atheist begins to pray when a loved one falls ill. In invoking nationalism to buttress their regimes, Communists cultivate this vice, and neuter a proletarian revolution so that it becomes a state revolution.

After the fall of a so-called Communist state, the stupefied populace, robbed of a mass society and a genuine revolutionary consciousness and made reliant on a state which no longer exists, are incapable of mounting a serious resistance to the reorganisation of their capital and therefore their social relations by the so-called “Imperialists”. A communist regime, by their own reasoning, should leave people more capable of carrying on a mass struggle than they were at the time of the revolution. The self-professed objective of a communist regime is to leave the people so capable of social organising that the state becomes unnecessary. There is nothing that could be more antithetical to this goal than nationalism.

The next point is perhaps more tangential but still serves to highlight a shortcoming of the authoritarian tendencies inherent in Stalinist ideology. The Greek civil war itself was lost in part because there was a bona fide ideological dispute between the combatants whether they should even continue to fight after Stalin offered an open, blanket denunciation of the struggle of the Greek Communists. In doing so Stain shored up the Communists to the “Imperialist”-backed Monarchist demons as a blood sacrifice. The Communists faced mass execution, exile, and imprisonment in torture camps on the Greek islands for decades. Not just communists but innocent Greeks were slaughtered as the United States Air Force killed entire villages with all the ferocity of EOKA and exponentially more firepower. Much of Golden Dawn owes their origin to the Western intervention in the Greek Civil War and the ideas, weapons, and training which were left behind during this period. Debate can be had and was had about what was the right way to proceed under these circumstances. But whatever the correct position may have been, it must be a matter of historical record that the Stalinists, at their most powerful, argued in seriousness that a revolution of the lambs was best led by a wolf.

Whether Stalin himself personally sacrifices revolutionaries at the altar of the “imperialism” that his regime is purportedly constituted in opposition to, or it is simply his regime leaving behind an authoritarian nationalist legacy in the homeland which Putin can and does call on later when he pleases, nationalism has proven a consistent boon for the far right, even if those expounding it consider themselves ( even if not baselessly) to be the worst enemies of the far right.

Part II: Hellenism: Who are the Greeks, what has happened to them, and what have they done?

i. Who are the Greeks?

There is a widely conflicting range of opinions on this subject, all more or less equally unsatisfactory, from everyone from western classicists to eastern irredentists to every politician, most youtube comments, and a worrying outgrowth of paid “content writers”. It is a question to which no satisfactory answer can be drawn because its true function is to subsume civic debate to questions of an unproductive, immaterial, quasi-religious nature.

What does it mean to understand that nationalism is a question of a quasi-religious nature? In Greece this is a question that can be answered incredibly literally, due to the role of the Church in the construction of the nationalist ideology and the state. Greek unification was considered to have every bit as much the spiritual mandate from the heavens as informed the Americans’ belief in their manifest destiny. The bishops and archbishops said so directly. A devout Greek will consider their religious ideology to inform their values, ethics, priorities, and their sense of self. It is through this lens that they will position themselves in time and space. A Protestant may consider herself to be a participant in a movement of capital accumulation with an accompanying moral obligation to weaker individuals. A Hindu may consider herself to be a means of carrying on her caste, not fundamentally different from the last 40 generations of her family. A Muslim may consider herself to have an obligation to restrain herself to a certain course of action in hopes of a reward on Judgement Day. A Greek cosmology, on the other hand, is one deeply concerned with the belief in inheritance rights over the ancient past. These inheritance rights are as central a tenet as the Muslim’s belief in judgement day or a Hindu’s belief in karmic cycles of rebirth and earthly responsibility to the caste.

How did this concern come to occupy such a prominent position in national discourse? One will not find any mention of cultural inheritance in any translation of the Bible of which I am aware. Nor does it seem to have been widely held by the common people in the eras preceding the establishment of the modern state. Nor does it seem to have been drawn from any legal principle governing international or even Greek law.

Its origin is actually quite obvious in Greek. Prior to the “Greek Enlightenment”, the Greek words used to refer to the Greek people were Graekoi and Romaioi. Greeks and Romans. Over the course of the independence period, the term Hellenes became more widely used. The world of distinction between these two terms is typically ignored in English-language literature. English-language literature will use the terms interchangably. In doing this the English-language literature puts forth the extremely dangerous notion that the Graekoi and Hellenes are the same people. This obfuscates the fact that the Greek independence period created from the ground up an entirely new ethno-national identity. Only by coincidence and successful political manoeuvring by the Church does this new identity share constituents in common with the identities which preceded it.

The Romaioi, members of an explicit legal category predicated on the political and legal authority of the Orthodox Church within the explicitly theocratic Ottoman Empire, considered themselves to be members of a potential universal brotherhood which sought to unite humanity in service to the social vision of the Church under the leadership of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Not all of the Romans were to eventually become Hellenes; new denominations of the Orthodox church would be created in order to manage the new, increasingly fragmented nationalities which would be created from members of the old millet. For that matter, not all of those who eventually became Hellenes had in the first place been Romans. Despite its essentially ethno-national character, the Hellenic Republic did become a modern state predicated on sovereignty over an area of land and so came to count many citizens who had not been of the Roman millet.

While the Roman identity had been predicated on a potentially universal religious brotherhood, the Hellenic identity would become one predicated on exclusive cultural inheritance rights. While the Roman millet had been a logical outgrowth of Ottoman policy, the order was reversed in the new independent Greece: the new state existed for the purpose of recognising the new self-created national community. To create something from a legal category and to create a legal category out of something that already exists are not the same. Hence we will find a great deal of inconsistency in interpretations of who exactly are the Greeks. But answering the question of who are the Greeks is the primary motivation of statecraft and society-building in Greece as it is in most Balkan states. The Balkan states are states created to recognise and administer an ethnic identity and its property rights. This is why these countries put such an emphasis on archaeological finds. If a land is determined to be the “rightful” inheritance of one group or another, this is the basis of a land claim.

If, as Engels writes, male supremacy and monogamy were established for the purpose of securing rights of property inheritance, then certain states predicated on cultural inheritance, including Greece but also others, were established in part for the procurement of rights of communal property inheritance regarding culture and territory. But an inquiry into the legal principles behind the notion of communal rights of this nature will yield no satisfactory answer. No legal principle means no legal recognition. The actors behind the state consider the function of the state to be something other than what it is. This is the foundational angst of the modern Balkans. Like a frustrated idiot trying to beat a computer until Photoshop unfreezes, the competing nationalists remain at a constant simmer with their moderate countrymen and their international counterparts in order to establish the right history, the right role for themselves, the right borders along which to fragment what is in reality an exceptionally heterogenous part of the world within which different peoples have always interacted.

National inheritance rights, like the nation itself, are a lie to which people are browbeaten into acquiescence so that they may accept the premise of national borders. It is nothing more than an irrational, violent orthodoxy which structures society into warring factions as much as those championed by the RSS, ISIS, or any Nazi occultist. It cannot be established peacefully or legally. The only thing which can establish it is nationalist violence — I know of no partition which has not been a result of nationalism and I know of no nationalism which has not resulted in some degree of partition. As always, nationalism is politically motivated, not an acknowledgement of fact.

In fact I have upon investigation found that the modern Greeks have scarcely more legitimate claim to sole successorship over ancient Greek culture than the ancient Greek rulers did to their claims of sole successorship from the mythological figures with whom they claimed blood relation. I will analyse a few of the claims which are made in order to justify the cultural successorship of the Hellenic Republic from Ancient Greece.

First, it cannot be said in honesty that the Hellenes now and the ancients were of a common communal identity to each other. The Hellenes now and the Romaioi of yesteryear are not of a common communal identity. What commonality exists can for the most part be considered a commonality of leadership rather than constituency. What’s more, the Hellenes of old, being a pagan people lacking a common leadership of any sort, did not even consider themselves to be of a common communal identity to each other. In fact they were constantly at war with each other. The modern Athenians have far more in common with the modern Istanbulites than the ancient Athenians did with the ancient Spartans. The Hellenes thus invented not only the Hellenic identity as it currently exists, but they invented the idea, in and of itself, of a rigidly defined group of people which could observe the inheritance rights of the cultural achievements of this heterogenous group of people wholesale. They invented the notion of this group of people as heterogenous to begin with. In fact they even invented the notion of cultural inheritance rights. The Roman millet did not consider that they exclusively had these cultural inheritance rights. The ancients had no issue with their ideas spreading to every corner of the known world and had no concept of rights of ownership over them.

The claim of a common communal identity then is ahistorical.

What about blood? Blood claims are the basis of property inheritance in many legal systems throughout history and around the world today. It is true that there is a genuine blood relation between the modern and ancient Hellenes. But humans are traditionally a very mobile species whose genetics are able to spread far and wide to everywhere on Earth. If a group is truly endogamous this is due to peculiar social circumstances to that group and these circumstances are certainly not present with the Greeks, who have historically interbred quite liberally. If blood is the basis of the Greek identity then there are few groups on Earth who do not share a claim. Alexander’s armies famously made their way as far east as Punjab, leaving, I am sure, descendants wherever they went. I live further east than that. I know of Greeks who live further east than me. There are Greeks as far west as Anchorage and as far South as Cape Town. The British royal family is half Greek by virtue of recognised blood ties. So the Greeks as defined by the Greek state undoubtedly share blood ties with the ancients. But not exceptionally so as compared to any other people — it must be remembered that inheritance rights were classically, and are today, recognised as patrilineal without regard for modern notions of blood quanta. If blood is the basis of this inheritance claim, then this is an argument against the notion of the claimed communal rights, for there are few peoples in the world who do not have some basis for a claim of their own.

Perhaps for this reason, blood-based claims are a persistent cause of nationalist anxiety. A person can move to another part of the world and become a part of society there. The fascist assertion that a national body can be purged of foreign blood is predicated on assumptions about the possibility of inalienably foreign blood, which is itself predicated on assumptions about the possibility of national blood which can exist in levels of purity or impurity. This is also the foundational assumption of the nationalist conception of citizenship; if it is not conceded that blood can be inalienably foreign, it is certainly conceded that blood defaults to being foreign except under exceptional circumstances. That many states, including Greece, grant citizenship on the basis of documented blood ties, respects deeply concerning ideas in this regard.

Can we then say the claim is based on language? One hopes not. Greece is exceptionally linguistically diverse. Aside from the many dialects of Greek present in the country, and the widespread proficiency in English as well as French, German, and Italian as acquired languages, there are also many speakers of Turkish, Hebrew, Armenian, Romanian, Albanian, Rom, Macedonian, Pomach, Vlach, Greek Sign Language, as well languages of recent immigrant communities like Urdu, Farsi, Somali, Pashto, Bengali, Punjabi, many dialects of Arabic, Rohingya, Kurdish, many dialects of English aside from the standard American, British, Australian, and Greek variants, languages which are studied as second languages by Greeks like French, German, Russian, and Italian, and many other languages. What’s more, not all modern Greek speakers live in Greece; many of them are dispersed throughout Turkey as well as countries like the USA and UK.

If we are to discuss rights of successorship through language then it must be noted that ancient Greek surely provides a better claim to inheritance of ancient Greece. The nationalists historically have not considered language less subject to corruption than they have blood. This has been every bit the source of anxiety as blood quanta. Historically, nationalists have gone so far as to “reconstruct” forms of ancient Greek for use in government and formal settings. Greeks were then expected to learn this ludicrous mockery of a communication technique, even though it made communication much more difficult, solely for bolstering their claims to cultural inheritance!

As the historic “Greek language question” demonstrates, languages can be acquired. Many western classiscists claim to have recreated ancient Greek more successfully than Greek scholars. This has correctly been pointed to as a claim to cultural capital by the Americans, the Germans, and the British. But surely one need not understand the finer points of disagreement among proto-linguistic phoneticists in order to arrive at the conclusion that this would not actually qualify them for communal inheritance rights even if it were true that they had more faithfully recreated the language and even if the notion of communal inheritance of culture were in the first place defensible. The argument could be made that the Germans were not born speaking Greek natively, but this closes off the citizenship in the region not just to immigrants but to ethnic minority groups who acquired Greek as a second or even first language during or after the independence period. If the Germans raise their children speaking Greek as the Arvanites did, will they be Greeks? Furthermore it is known that the nationalist era has standardised Greek to an astounding degree such that dialects have faded and become indistinguishable from each other. Some of these dialects which have faded would be quite difficult to understand by speakers of the now-standard National Greek, who can barely emotionally handle a Cypriot accent. If a language is the basis for inheritance, is that language National Greek or is it classical Greek? The language question settled this debate; it is national Greek. National demotic Greek became the language of the nation while the reconstructed ancient Katharevousa was decommissioned in all capacities. But at the time of independence, not all Greek communities spoke what eventually was to become standardised demotic. To this day there are speakers of languages like Tsakonian. Yet to this day the right of the Tsakonians to the same inheritance rights as anyone else is contested by nobody. On the other hand, groups like Albanians and Roma who now speak Modern Standard Greek fluently have their right to even the basic protection of the state called into question all the time.

Surely the similarity cannot be pointed to in terms of religion? The idea is not worth entertaining. There were few Christians in the years Before Christ. So if the basis of the claim to inheritance of Greek culture can’t be said to be in religion, in consistent communal identification, in language, or in blood, what can it be based in? This question seems to have eluded everyone who has written or spoken on it. The answer is actually very simple. The answer is the same as it was in the first Hellenic era and in fact even in the earlier stages of pre-civilisational barbarism.

The answer to why a nation exists is because the people who constitute the nation have willed themselves to be so. In willing this to be so they have willed themselves to be a collective capable of exerting a certain amount of physical force. It is force which can defend rights. The people of a nation consider themselves to be entitled to rights over each other along the lines of the internal structures that constitute the actual form of the nation, but they also consider themselves to be entitled to rights over their non-citizen class; that is, over the rest of the world, as well as internal non-citizens (such as the non-Hindus in India, the African-Americans, or the Roma in Greece). The rights which the Greek nation considers itself to have include the rights of national inheritance. The basis of the claim is not in legal principle or ethical principle but in political expediency and logistical ability. The lack of a functional legal framework renders the borders of the Balkan states much more open to contest by show of arms than in regions like North America where national borders are based on contemporary claims rather than the absurd premise of an ahistorical claim which can only be accepted by those who have been bribed or beaten into accepting it.

This is of course not a defensible legal principle. It is the argument of a gorilla who would be equally capable of articulating the legal or moral principle behind citizenship in a Balkan state as the states’ foremost intellectuals are. Rather than enforcers of the rule of law, the Balkan states are barbaric quasi-monarchist war regimes with openly corrupt governments which must contend with a political climate, medieval in its governing principles and contemporary in its destructive power, in which transparent power-grabs and military incursions are regular and expected events.

ii. Who are the Greeks?

Insofar as a legal principle does govern who is a Greek, it can be said that the basis of this identity changes over time. It can be said that the identity has undergone an incomplete faux-liberalisation and has shifted to one dependent on recognition by the nation-state. But this is not a true liberalisation. It is a bringing into alignment with a different form of hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of liberal states as they actually exist on Earth. Are rights based on recognised blood ties and the recognition of the nation-state more consistent with a historical drive towards universal liberty, equality, and fraternity than rights based on communal alignment or language or any other criteria? No. They are in fact less so because while a state cannot easily legislate the use of a language or participation in a community, if it maintains an uncontested control over rights of citizenship it can effectively shut its doors to the participation of others forever.

The state is only one of the groups which seeks to rigidly define citizenship; although it must be said that most of the other groups which seek to do so consider that this task can best be accomplished by their gaining control of the state. But certain of the structures of the modern state are built to be resistant to change by political actors. In other words, the state has a view of its own on this subject which is elaborated by its own enshrined processes of recognition which a ruling party cannot simply change by decree.

In fact a change in the basis of recognition for citizenship is a central point of ideology for many political groups across the spectrum of nationalists. Golden Dawn, for instance, considers the basis of Greek identity to be much more strongly based in blood than it historically has been, and also borrows strongly from nazi conceptions of racial hierarchy despite the general lack of a historical precedent for these ideas in Greek society and the obvious challenges posed by application of a system based on visible identification to a setting in which the people it is attempting to divide cannot be easily visually distinguished from one another, such as Greeks and Syrians. On the other hand exist groups which call for the annexation of FYROM on the grounds that its people consider themselves to be Macedonians; they consider that these groups should be unproblematically assimilated as citizens to the new Greek state. Other groups disagree, with varying levels of coherence, on the citizenship status of the Muslim minority in Thraki, the Roma, the Albanians, etc, calling for the state to recognise or deny the rights of certain minority groups to differing degrees on an inconsistent ideological basis.

I must stress that these demands are often not articulated as such or articulated at all beyond the incoherent screaming of a hate group. When a hate group tosses a molotov through the window of the house of a Roma family, some interpretation is necessary. In my view, what they are saying is that they do not respect the right of a Roma family to have their property or safety protected by the state authority, and the family should also know not to expect this protection. When they chant accusing the Roma of being pigs and murderers, what they are saying ideologically is that they consider the group to have forfeit their right to protection and safety through the presumed criminality of the group. But this presumption in itself being a denial of the freedom from assumed guilt or collective responsibility which is enjoyed by rightful citizens of a modern state. So to chant that the Roma are pigs and murderers is to say “the Roma are not citizens, never have been, and never will be”. It is to relinquish the recognition of Roma citizenship in the Hellenic Republic.

Of course when there is disagreement regarding who is a rightful citizen of the state there are no winners. If a militant group considers that the Roma are not citizens, and that their civic participation must be limited through direct physical force, any disagreement with this group matters only insofar as it is backed with force which defends the rights and safety of that group. If a militant group considers that the Roma are criminals without rights, and a different militant group considers that the Roma are fine, but that they should go after their true enemies, the Muslims, then both Roma and Muslims are made vulnerable to the lone wolf terrorist tactics of national exclusionist groups. The greater the diversity of opinion in this regard, the greater the diversity of vulnerabilities created by them.

Of course merely to question which group of people rights and freedoms and protections should be denied to is indefensible. It is not more justifiable to deny them if this denial is conducted according to internally consistent criteria. To fully understand that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant is to disavow the nationalist project which has only ever existed for the sake of carving the world into mutually exclusive nation-states. It is to invalidate the logic of national citizenship.

iii. Who are the Greeks?

The Greeks are those who have inherited the nationalist legacy of the Hellenist ideology and the Big Idea and the accompanying forms of national exclusion, who now face the historic task of establishing a mobile social order with free points of contact between ourselves and other modes of association; in other words of destroying the unnatural nationalist walls which have prevented the reproduction of a natural, which is to say syncretic, culture. In this respect we do not differ from any other group of people in the Balkans or the Eastern Mediterranean or the Earth. Our task is to break down the national and cultural borders which have separated us from those with whom we share everything important in common. These borders have fragmented our societies from each other for the convenience of capital and the easy compartmentalisation of dissent. To be a Greek is to describe not who we are but what we have not yet accomplished: our own abolition as a citizen class.

The objection will be raised that in invalidating the claim of the Greeks to antiquity I have committed the same anti-national sin as the hostile nationalists of other states. But I do not hold what I have said to be any more or less true of any other state founded on historicity. If the other Balkan states wish to accept my premise that nationhood cannot legitimately be based on claims of cultural inheritance, I welcome them to do so and to abolish themselves as well.

iv. Hellenist reaction in the diaspora

It is an act of historical ignorance that the Greeks on the ground ignore thediaspora. It was from the beginning the diasporic merchant class living in the west which initiated the Hellenist idea. It is known that they still represent a large part of the “vanguard” in this sense. Greek diasporics, especially Greek-Americans, have in large part bankrolled the recent protests over the Macedonia naming dispute, for reasons which by now are hopefully not hard to guess. The diaspora are political actors in their own right, and it is to its own detriment that the anarchist movement ignores them.

But diasporics are famously ignorant. How to sift through the levels of meticulously cultivated ignorance which seems to have set root in every diaspora community? The same way to question nationalism everywhere else: by changing the terrain. Nationalist ideology would have the diasporic as soon as, if not sooner than, everyone else beholden to itself, which is to say that it would have them ask themselves how best they can serve their country? How best to fulfill this moral imperative and in doing so endow their lives with meaning?

What we ask is a different question entirely. Which system of hierarchies can you most effectively undermine? Diasporic communities are in-groups as subject as any to internal hierarchies. They can in fact be much moreso due to their small size and insularity. Diaspora communities experience a deep anxiety to differentiate themselves from the mainstream of their adopted countries. It is important not to romanticise this. The patronising attitude with which this phenomenon is handled by all parties in the west is one that is enabling to something which is really quite unhealthy because this anxiety often regards the difficulty of maintenance of the internal systems of hierarchy which govern the diasporic community against a backdrop of a legal, cultural, political, and historical framework which was not created to accommodate it. Most often this is the family. The frameworks still accommodate a form of family, mind. But accommodate reify a foreign form of family which is not preferred nor even necessarily well-understood by the individual diasporic patriarch. This often necessitates the use of emotional and physical terrorism in order to enforce these hierarchies.This is a cause of domestic abuse in diasporic communities. But removed from legal frameworks built around them, the diasporic victim of domestic violence is deprived of the forms of recourse or moderation from the state which it might be expected that a member of a modern citizen class would have access to. Instead she is taught by the churches, as well as the well-meaning multiculturalist social resources, that her suffering noble savage of a father is pitiable rather than condemnable. Forego moral judgement of a man whose impulse upon losing power was to violently enforce it upon those who he felt entitled to power over! Ignore his otherwise reactionary politics, so ignorant and violent that they are considered borderline feudal in his home country if not actually fascist. How much pain he must be in, removed from where he rightly belongs, ontologically unable to assimilate to the country in which he was wed and fathered children!

This is a form of solidarity among male supremacists, if a patronising and racist one. Recourse to domestic violence for members of the majority population is extremely rarely any better, mind. Diasporic victims are not necessarily any better or worse off in this regard. But the mechanism of reproduction of this dynamic is somewhat different. With proper diasporic outreach, which in the modern age is by all rights not that hard, we can provide a form of direct aid to diasporic abuse victims, which is in my view one of the most important things for them to have: a functional analysis of the phenomenon as essentially politically motivated, and inextricable from the reactionary political ideologies which govern the community as a whole. In the case of Greek diasporics, the ideologies of the diasporic community are the ideologies of the church, which has historically been its foundational authority. Those dedicated to the reproduction of the Greek diaspora will find themselves dedicated effectively to the Church, as the Greek diaspora is, by definition, the community of the Church. So there is a lot for the diasporics to gain in the abolition of the Greeks as a citizen class. But for now they instead remain its vanguard.

v. The declining power of the Ottoman Empire required the Church to reconstitute its power base.

That the Ottoman Empire instituted a system of ethno-religious supremacy is, despite some nationalist exaggerations on the Greek side, basically true. However preferable it may have been compared with some of the other empires in existence at the time, it’s ultimately worth striving for a geopolitical situation not predicated on ethno-religious supremacy, no matter how many other advantages it may have over other systems prevalent at the time. Furthermore it cannot be denied that the Greek state, for all its flaws, has made advances in education, medicine, literacy, multilingualism, etc. However, the Greek state has yet to embody or even to attempt to embody the ideal of a political system not predicated on ethno-religious supremacy. It does not currently appear that it will do so at any point in the near future.

Often apologists of the Ottoman regime point to the great deal of power which the Ottoman system vested in the Orthodox Church. From the start of the Ottoman administration, the Orthodox Church was a fully developed pillar of it. What these analysts do not recognise is that there is a difference between the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox peoples of the Ottoman Empire. The Church was in fact an exploitative power in its own right, which ruled over the Greek people through emotional manipulation and religious indoctrination, accumulating a great deal of wealth, land, and power, much of which was given to the church “freely” by the people insofar as a religious fanatic is ever not a slave. The power that the Church accumulated in this way increased over time and eventually rendered the Ottoman administration superfluous, especially in its lattermost years when its ability to enforce order was waning anyway.

Before Independence, the Church would derive its legitimacy from the Ottoman Empire, and would have the powers assigned to it thereby. But the Church did not create the Ottoman administration. The creation of a nation-state was the Church’s means of maintaining its power. The nation-state was a necessary adaptation at a time of when the Ottoman state from which it derived its legitimacy was weakening. The question of Ottoman vs. Greek hegemony was not a question of ethnic legitimacy but rather of Church policy.

vi. The violence against the Turks in the independence period was an extension of the Church’s power politics.

Compared to the Church, the Turks who lived in Cyprus were mostly low-level management, who, like the Church, derived their authority from Ottoman policy. They were not answerable to the Church but rather to the Ottoman administration. Had the Church asserted authority over them, they surely would have rejected it. This made the Turks superfluous or even contrary to the Church’s project of gaining uncontested power over a modern state.

The violence against the Turks in the Greco-Cypriot Independence period is often justified along the lines of the role the Turks played in the exploitation of the Greeks. But the fact is that the Church exploited the Greeks far more than the Turkish middle management. If the purpose of this violence was to address the exploitation present at the time, it could have been argued that Christians and Muslims alike had common enemies in the Ottoman-Orthodox power structure which reigned at that time. But the purpose of the violence was not to end exploitation. It was to shift power from one arm of the structure to the other.

Political systems are the means by which ethno-religious supremacy is maintained. A new political system then means the end, or at least a different organistaion, of the old system of supremacy. Therefore, the wholesale cleansing of the Turks was not necessary in order that they would not retain their superior positions. Turkish superiority was located not in Turkish ontology, but in political authority — political authority which a revolution, by definition, would have wrested from its holders.

But nationalist ideology is created by members of a society who wish to consolidate their own power over that society in the form of a modern state. In Cyprus, as in Greece, this was the Orthodox Church. The Muslims were, by definition, not its subjects, and thus not a part of a national body which could be defined by its loyalty to the Orthodox Church.

It can be correctly observed that among the Greek Cypriot nationalists there was internal disagreement over what should be the fate of the religious, linguistic, and cultural minorities. Most Greeks and Turks in Cyprus and everywhere would, given the choice, live together in harmony with each other, and I am sure this was the case in the Independence era as well.

But the safety of a minority group is not a democratic vote between Option A and Option B, where if Option A wins, the supporters of Option B melt their weapons to build light industry in the countryside and volunteer to clear the minefields. The supporters of Option B are in fact usually a small statistical minority who assert their opinions through both organised and disorganised violence. This can only be stopped through force — force which the supporters of Option A often oppose on principle.

The question therefore is not whether most people want to live in harmony with the other groups, but whether those who desire harmony are willing and able to provide the requisite force to deter the nationalists.

History is clear on whether this was the case in Greece. The Church’s goal of creating a modern state constituted of its subjects was a complete success. This is because many of Greece’s celebrated independence heroes were involved in acts of ethnic cleansing. In the Siege of Tripolitsa, tens of thousands of Muslim and Jewish civilians were slaughtered over the course of a few days. This is widely celebrated by Greeks today, and the Greek national anthem commemorates these slaughters at incredible length. In Navarino, thousands of Turks were driven to starvation, promised safe passage to Egypt in exchange for their surrender, and then betrayed and slaughtered. Over 1,000 Turks, with scarcely 200 weapons between them, were slaughtered in Athens. The list goes on.

These slaughters often escape serious ideological analysis, as they predate most of the systems of thought by which we might analyse them. It is this lack of serious analysis which allows them to remain the exclusive discursive domain of the nationalists and the fascists.

It should be understood that while I criticise here the actions of the Greeks, I make no attempt to exceptionalise them. My aim is rather the opposite. With few if any exceptions, probably every nation in the Eastern Mediterranean, and many outside of it, can be criticised on the basis that they have historically striven for a homogenous ethno-nationalism. The issue is a systemic one, not an issue of the superior or inferior moralities of any particular sectional elite.

The fact that there were massacres against Greeks by Turks as well is therefore beside the point, since we are not concerned with questions of who started it or who suffered more. The point is that we must understand that the violence which led to the creation of the Greek state was ideological in nature, and the violence which the state today carries out against its migrants and refugees and otherwise members of its non-citizen class is ideologically consistent with, and ideologically descendant from, the violence of its foundation. It identified a citizen class and a non-citizen class 200 years ago, and it identifies the same now. This is true of every nation-state on Earth, of course including Turkey.

We must understand also that this same violence remains instrumental to far-right Greek ideologies. This is the ideology animating Golden Dawn’s violence against migrants.¹ The historical process that led to the deaths of thousands in Tripolitsa, Navarino, and Athens remains in force today.

vii. The differing experiences between Cyprus and Greece are best explained through an analysis of the political situation rather than particularising Enosist ideology.

This process has been, and remains, a driving force in the history of Cyprus. It makes far less sense to view Cyprus as a part of Europe exceptional in its violence than it does to view Cyprus as a part of Greece exceptional in the unresolved nature of its violence. The Greek Cypriots were unexceptionally a part of the historical processes which led to the creation of the Greek nation-state. While the Greek Cypriots were not exceptional in having extremist groups which wanted to slaughter the Turks wholesale, the groups were exceptional in being unable to. While Ottoman authority had broken down entirely by the time of Greek independence and been almost completely delegated to the Church, the British were much more capable of maintaining the rule of law over Cyprus. Despite decades of effort by Greek extremists, the rule of law never quite broke down in Cyprus for more than a period of a couple days or so.

The most important of the Enosist organisations was EOKA, or the National Organisation of Cypriot Struggle, which carried out at various points in its history acts of terrorism and guerilla warfare and which targeted Turks, leftist Greeks, and Britishers. It opposed the creation of an independent Cyprus. Once an independent Cyprus was created, one of its former co-founders, Makarios III, who was also an Orthodox Archbishop, became President of the new republic. The organisation was formally disbanded, although its former members continued to be involved in acts of treason against the independent Cyprus. The history of EOKA is brutal, horrifying, and easily available to those who wish to seek it out. Makarios III distanced himself from EOKA, from its co-founder, General Grivas of the Greek military, and from the goal of Enosis, on the basis of practical and political necessity rather than ideology, although EOKA’s former members still remained the greater part of the military and police force of the island.

The condition of the Turkish Cypriots over the course of Makarios III’s actually somewhat moderating presidency bears some examination. Peristianis² writes of a First Partition which took place over this period:

The main consequence of the intercommunal conflict, which began in December 1963 and continued intermittently until late 1967, was the exodus of large numbers of Turkish Cypriots from areas where they were in the minority into a number of self- contained enclaves, where they set up their own separate administration; this was the “first partition” of the island, which was to radically change the centuries-old pattern of mingled cohabitation, leading to extensive territorial separation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Many of those who moved did so for security reasons, following the outbreak of violence which led to numerous casualties, atrocities and the taking of hundreds of hostages by both sides. Others seem to have moved after the prompting of their leadership; most importantly, once they did move into the enclaves they were strongly discouraged, and even intimidated, so as not to return. Within a year, 20% of the Turkish Cypriots had moved and half of the community was cramped in the enclaves, which covered a much smaller percentage of land (2–4%) as compared to their ratio of population (18%) at the time. The barricaded enclaves were guarded by irregulars and living conditions were difficult since important public services, such as electricity and telecommunications, were in Greek hands. Hardship increased when the Greek side imposed an embargo on “strategic goods”, presumably to prevent their usage for military purposes, but also to discourage the consolidation of the enclaves and thereby of separation; for instance, building materials were disallowed for fear of being used for military fortifications, but this also made difficult the repair and building of houses. Since thousands of jobs, primarily in the public sector but also in Greek enterprises, were lost, unemployment among Turkish Cypriots increased dramatically and they had to rely heavily on Turkey’s financial aid for survival.

Clearly, many Greeks were dissatisfied with Independence, and still saw the possibility of political gains from the ghettoisation of the Turkish Cypriots. Under Gaza-like blockades, it is scarcely a mystery why Turkish extremist groups grew in power in these ghettoes.

General Grivas, mentioned earlier as co-founder of EOKA and old partner of Makarios III, was among theose who sought to exacerbate this situation. Grivas had in WWII founded the anti-Communist Monarchist group Organisation X, which had collaborated at various points with the Nazi occupiers and far-right British-backed factions of the resistance to the Nazi occupiers. During Makarios III’s presidency, at a time when Greece was under the rule of a military junta, Grivas created an organisation called EOKA-B, which the Junta gained de facto control over following his death. Such was the control of the Colonels’ Junta over Cyprus that in 1974 the Colonels enacted a coup in which Makarios III was overthrown. This was the greatest breakdown in law and order in the history of Cyprus.

viii. The Republic of North Cyprus was created over the course of a two-phase invasion by Turkey.

The Constitution of Cyprus named Greece, Turkey, and the UK as “guarantor powers” which had the responsibility to intervene in the case that the Constitution was threatened by internal or external factors. In this capacity, there was a Turkish invasion which took place over two phases. The first invasion was completely lawful and is regarded by all parties as having been unambiguously proper and lawful. Even the Greek National Court ruled on 21 March, 1979, that Turkey had had the right and duty to intervene for the protection of the Turkish Cypriots. The ruling went on to to place the blame exclusively on the Greek officers who “engineered and staged a coup and prepared the conditions for this intervention”.³ In other words, an action carried exactly the consequences that the framers of the Constitution intended it to.

The Colonels in 1974 were simple crooks who had committed a crime and were given predictable and orderly due process of the letter and the spirit of the law. For once in history, the car alarm actually deterred the burglar.

The second invasion, which took place a few weeks later, after a period of intense and unceasing intercommunal warfare which seemed to have no hope at abatement whatsoever, established the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and partitioned the island. This invasion is considered to be more legally grey, although, for what it’s worth, I haven’t yet heard anyone who has taken objection to it argue that it created more violence than it prevented. Rather it is argued that it was violent, and illegitimate because it was not supported by international law. While these are fair criticisms of it, they take advantage of a geopolitical analytical framework which is concerned with certain questions at the expense of others. A geopolitical framework asks questions about order between states. Which actions are legitimate for a state to carry out, and which should rightly face condemnation and legal consequence? Nothing is inherently wrong with asking these questions, and I’ve written on these subjects myself. But the offending party on the Greek side in this conflict was not another state, it was a terrorist group which, while not completely separable from the state, operated in stations slightly beneath the dignity of one and was not one, and so the Republic of Cyprus can be accused, at most, of preparing the ground for the actions of EOKA-B — it, arguably, cannot be held completely culpable for the actions themselves. To restrain the field of inquiry to geopolitical analysis only is therefore a clever way of eliding the question of Greek culpability.

To hold a discussion in a geopolitical framework is to remove the question of motive from consideration. Geopolitical actors don’t have motives. They have objectives. It can be said conclusively that among the objectives of the Turkish state was to ensure that Cyprus did not become a Greek geopolitical monopoly; since virtually all other islands in the region had come under Greek control, the concern existed that “Turkey ceases to be a maritime nation”⁴ should the island pass to Greece. But its convenience to Turkish geopolitical strategic objectives does not make the protection of Turkish Cypriots an unsympathetic objective. Few people would argue that a military invasion of an island and its forceful partition are an acceptable way of accomplishing a geopolitical strategic objective which should not carry sanction. But when the culpability of EOKA-B is eliminated from consideration of the problem for the simple reason of it not being a state and the discussion being one pertaining exclusively to the conduct of states, the same error is committed which allows the state of Turkey to evade responsibility for the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides because these genocides were engineered not by a state but by organisations which sought to create a state (and shortly after did).

What were the plans of the Greeks? The Greeks considered that they (which is to say, the Greek nation, which is to say, the Greek State, the Greek Church, and the bourgeoisie, especially but not exclusively or even primarily the Greek bourgeoisie) had a right a right to rule the entirety of the island as they saw fit. The status quo in Cyprus until this point was nigh-uncontested Greek dominance, with ideological differences between different poitical actors only in the extent of this dominance and the form it should take — for instance, at the time of the coup, the Communist-backed “moderate” Makarios was proposing the removal of some power sharing provisions of the Constitution. We must understand that the pre-coup unified state was inseparable from the political dominance of the Greek Cypriots which it existed, arguably, to moderate, but also, inarguably, to legitimise.

But there were also Greeks who felt like this was not the ideal form for Greek dominance to take. Nazi-like in their priorities, EOKA-B redirected resources during the coup — that is, during a war in which they were failing at their stated objectives — to massacres of Turkish civillians. Wikipedia as regards any Cyprus-related subject is as partisan as one might expect, but the article on the Maratha, Santalaris, and Aloda Massacre is well-sourced enough to be worth quoting at length:

On 20 July 1974, the men of the villages were arrested by EOKA-B and sent to Limassol. Following this, according to testimonials cited by Sevgül Uludağ, EOKA-B men from the neighboring village of Peristeronopigi came, got drunk in the camp they established in the village coffeehouse, fired shots in the air, and subsequently raped many women and young girls. The rape later included the boys and this continued till 14 August 1974. Upon the launch of the second invasion of the Turkish Army, they decided not to leave behind any witnesses and killed the entire population of the villages present at the time.

In Maratha and Santalaris, 84–89 were killed. The imam of Maratha stated that there were 90 people in the village prior to the massacre, and only six people were left. Elderly people and children were also killed during the massacre. Only three people were able to escape from the massacre in Aloda. The inhabitants of the three villages were buried in mass graves with a bulldozer. The villagers of Maratha and Santalaris were buried in the same grave.

Associated Press described the corpses as “so battered and decomposed that they crumbled to pieces when soldiers lifted them from the garbage with shovels”. Milliyet reported that parts of the bodies had been chopped off and sharp tools, as well as machine guns had been used in the massacre.

This incident is indicative, not exhaustive. There were other such atrocities. In the village of Tochni, for example, all adult Turkish men were put into busses and massacred.

The coup installed Nikos Sampson as the would-be puppet dictator of the island. Known to the Turks as the Butcher of Omorphita and to the Greeks, tellingly, as the Conqueror of Omorphita, Sampson was a newpaper reporter who had previously reported on killings of police officers by “freedom fighters” during the colonial period. It was eventually discovered that Sampson was the one who had committed the murders he had reported on, and he was sentenced for them.

In his capacity as a “freedom fighter”, did Sampson target powerful officials? No, he targeted rank and file. What’s worse, the British government had a system of reservations in the civil service, meaning that the officers he targeted were Turkish Cypriots.

In popular discourse, the appointment of Turkish Cypriots to the civil service is referred to as “British divide and conquer tactics”. Sampson was sympathetic to this discourse, considering the Turks to be agents sympathetic to a colonial occupier. I reject this understanding for four reasons. The first is that reservation policies do not constitute a “divide and conquer tactic”. Aside from Sampson, other reactionaries who hold this understanding are Americans and Indians who agitate against affirmative action and reservations, respectively. But reservations (as well as to a lesser extent affirmative action) are a means of ensuring the full civic participation of an otherwise socially and/or economically disenfranchised minority group. The second reason I reject this understanding is that it is common practice that police officers in one area are not necessarily from the areas which they police. This is the case all over the world. It may well have the effect of distancing the police from the communities that they “serve”, but the many, many descendants of the Janissaries throughout west Asia today will tell you that this is in no way unique to the British and is not necessarily utilised towards the exacerbation of communal tensions in the way suggested. In the San Francisco Bay area, for another example, it is well known that the police from all over the bay generally live in the suburban neighbourhoods south of the city. I do not mean to position the police in the United States as a model to emulate by any means, but merely to illustrate that British Cyprus was in no way exceptional in this regard. Calling in police from outside of the community is a way to prevent favouritism and corruption.

The third and most important reason is because nationalists up to the present day do not seem to care that these are “British divide and conquer tactics”. India’s nationalists should understand better than anyone the effects and mechanisms of these “divide and conquer tactics”, if they are such. But the purpose of these alleged tactics is to ensure that the different communities of any given place will be too busy antagonising each other to present a meaningful resistance to the continued domination of foreign powers and interests. So presented, these tactics are the transparent trickery of a cartoon scoundrel, smirking towards the camera as the light reflects off of of his glasses so as to emphasise the intellectual foresight engendered by this dastardly scheme. Yet even in the cartoons, this trick gets worn out if used over and over again. Even a child will bore of watching this ruse episode after episode. The circumstances of a cartoon writer mandate that even the most hotheaded and gullible anthropomorphic cartoon antihero eventually learn to see through and reject these kinds of tricks, as it will no longer suffice to create a believable drama in the mind of a small child who may well believe that the events of the cartoon are real somewhere. Surely serious political movements led by adults should have at least the depth of analysis of a child watching a cartoon. Why then do the serious political movements of adults continue to antagonise rival communities?

The answer of course is because it is not intercommunal harmony and cooperation which creates the kinds of nation-state towards which these movements strive. It is ethnic and national homogeneity. They are not gullible idiots haphazardly strewn along by the superiour intellect of a foreign puppetmaster. They know full well what they are doing. It is consistent with their goals and objectives that they do so.

The fourth reason is because of the alternative. If Greek Cypriots had been appointed to police Greek Cypriot areas and Turkish Cypriots to police Turkish Cypriot areas, this would have been exactly the kind of ethnic homogeneity in administration that the Nationalists champion. It could have been said of the British, with much more truth, that in doing this, they would be recognising a fundamental division between these communities. They would have been making an ideological assumption that a Greek cannot maintain law and order for a Turk nor a Turk for a Greek. It would have provided cultural precedent for the partition of the island which eventually did transpire. Greek apologists would then have pointed at the “British divide-and-conquer tactics” which were so hell-bent on separating the Greeks and the Turks that they would not even trust them to police each other. How ever were the two peoples to repair the damage wrought by this brutal British policy of separation and division? How were these hapless bystanders to cease what the British had set into motion?

For all of these reasons and more, Sampson’s career as a serial killer should not be considered the morally gray bravado of a nationalist radical. He was a pure and simple racist. After his brief career as a puppet dictator, he would admit in an interview that “Had Turkey not intervened, I would not only have proclaimed Enosis but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well.”⁵

As noted, such annihilation would not have been without historical precedent. It happened in Athens and Tripolitsa. Especially after the 1922 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the ideology of the Greek state had only been driven to err towards even more ethnic homogeneity than what it had been founded on. It was not without reason that the Enosists felt that to “annihilate the Turks” was a necessary condition precedent to annexation. The Greek state had not, and still has not, done anything to dissuage this notion. The Turkish fear of persecution in the event of Enosis can therefore be considered to be, if anything, understated. They’d have been persecuted in the way the Muslims of Tripolitsa or Crete were persecuted. “Enosis and only Enosis” to a state founded on ethnic cleansing is an agenda of ethnic cleansing without compromise. It is only on this understanding that we can claim sincerity in working towards a solution. The actions of Turkey were not simply imperialistic. They unambiguously prevented a genocide using means which were supported by the community against whom the genocide was threatened. It accomplished this in the absence of other proposals to do so.

ix. What is the difference between ethnic cleansing and partition?

It bears examining how exactly ethnic cleansing and partition differ from one another, particularly in how they are talked about in the context of Cyprus and which words apply to which events. A partition is the redistribution of land between two (or theoretically more, but in all instances of which I am aware, two) groups who are rightly entitled to the land but who cannot coexist on it. It is a means of prevention of further violence. It is imperfect. It requires massive sacrifice on both sides. Nobody likes it. Even when their circumstances are so brutally threatened by the group from whom they seek partition that even a partition in all of its brutality and violence seems necessary, it is merely preferred to current circumstance, not liked, and at that usually only by an exceptionally political minority vanguard.

But it is not an ethnic cleansing, because an ethnic cleansing means to remove the people of an ethnicity from a land wholesale so that the cleansing party can gain an increase in their land area at the expense of the cleansed party.

Note that ethnic cleansing and partition are not mutually exclusive. An ethnic cleansing can be used as a means of partition, while a partition can be used as a means of ethnic cleansing. But not every instance of partition necessitates, or in itself constitutes, an act of ethnic cleansing, even an especially violent and bloody partition, which, make no mistake, Cyprus’s was. This is a detail elided by Greeks who consider the partition of Cyprus to be an act of ethnic cleansing in itself.

In the decade leading up to the partition, the Turkish Cypriots were unjustly deprived of their land and property through the so-called first partition. But this is like calling the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto a partition. The land to which the Turks were relegated was clearly of an inferior quality to that of the land from which they had been driven. It was overcrowded and kept underdeveloped through economic blockade. The ghettoisation of the Turkish Cypriots was a tactic employed by those bent on eventual cleansing; it was an early stage action in a larger campaign, and was taken advantage of as such later. It contrasts with the second Turkish invasion in that the land in South Cyprus is not of inferior quality, it’s just less proximate to Turkey. It was not kept underdeveloped through economic blockade. It’s true that in proportion to population, the Turkish Cypriots walked away with a bigger person:land area ratio, but not by an extent which is unlivable to the Greek Cypriots or which even compromises their quality of life; most of Cyprus is still very sparsely populated, and North Cyprus in the past has in any case indicated a willingness to give some of its land to the Republic of Cyprus.

This is not to say that Turkey is blameless and did nothing wrong. Like the Greek Cypriots, there are many atrocities which Turkey can be rightly condemned for. The Turkish military systemically raped women and tortured and killed prisoners. It committed many acts which were barbaric, illegal, and certainly condemnable and for which there can be made no excuse.

But I submit that as a whole it is a stretch to consider the creation of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus to be an act of ethnic cleansing. There was no ongoing campaign to conquer the rest of the island by Turkey. (The administration of 1974 cannot be held responsible for the remarks of Turkey’s current hardline right government.) The settlement of new immigrants cannot be considered to be an act of ethnic cleansing — or else we have no choice but to accept the arguments of the far-right European organisations claiming to be ethnically cleansed at the hands of Muslim immigrants. There is as well a hypocrisy in considering the settlement of new migrants to be an act of genocide while ignoring that South Cyprus literally sells citizenships to wealthy investors, who have become so numerous, wealthy, and organised that they have started a new political party, EOP. For mysterious reasons, Greek Cypriot demands to strip the Turkish “settlers” of their citizenship are rarely accompanied by an offer to strip wealthy European investors of theirs.

Partition was by this time a well-accepted phenomenon with many historical precedents. In fact both Greece and Turkey had both agreed to it in principle during the population exchange 25 years prior, which was forced on those who were exchanged just as much then as in the partition of Cyprus. Nothing was peculiar about the partition of Cyprus from the standpoint of Hellenist ideology. Nothing was peculiar about it from the standpoint of Kemalist ideology. The difference is that the party which was forcefully displaced was in this instance being represented by warring factions within a well-armed terrorist group which had infiltrated the highest levels of government and was not a small marginalised minority within the country which was rounding them up for exchange. Most importantly, to me, none of the opponents of the establishment of North Cyprus seemed to bring much to the table in terms of a meaningful response to the Sampson plan and the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing which was being waged by EOKA-B. I have heard Cypriots state in frustration that they should have been allowed to simply “fight it out”. But there was no fight between a well-armed terrorist group in the highest levels of military, church, and government and a small ghettoised minority group. This applies as well to the Turkish Cypriot terrorist groups’ attacks on Greek Cypriot civilians as it does to EOKA-B’s assaults on Turkish Cypriot civilians. Simply allowing them to “fight it out” might be more appeasing to the slavish Marxist deference to the spirit of “national self-determination”, but there is no arguing that it was the more ethical choice.

x. The partition has created two incomplete states.

The Republic of Cyprus cannot be considered to be a complete state. It does not consider itself to be a complete state. It is a apparition state, which traces the halls of a plantation as they stood in 1974. Like a phantom, it is undeterred by the fact that new walls lie in its path; it simply passes through them. Its lack of acknowledgement for reality reflects itself in every aspect of its constitution and governance. The civic life of the island thus lies derelict, with none daring to place themselves at the mercy of this national poltergeist. It is thoroughly necessary for the social antagonists to fill the role of exorcist for none else can do it.

The Republic of Cyprus maintains a government-in-”exile” which it recognises as the rightful administration of the districts which are either partly, or, in the case of Kyrenia, completely within the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. One would consider that an election which is boycotted by every single person currently living there would be one lacking in legitimacy. This seems not to deter the Republic of Cyprus, which allows voting in these districts not based on whether one lives there now but based on whether one or one’s family lived there in 1974. It is a pathetic sight.

The Turkish Republic maintains a complete dependence on the one country which recognises it. Its passport is accepted in a small handful of countries and it has spent the past 44-odd years (more, if you count the blockades imposed on the Turkish enclaves during the first partition) under economic sanctions which have impeded its economic development. The global community utilises ouija boards and soothsayers to contact the phantom government of Kyrenia while the king remains trapped in the floorboards beneath the seance, his muffled screams perfectly audible.

This has been the situation for forty-four years. It is little wonder that the island expects an eventual war to change this absurd state of affairs.

The Cypriot states in the grand scheme of things do not accomplish all of the things which might rightly be expected of a modern state. Both states have consistently refused cooperation with UN mine removal efforts. This opposition is not on principled or moral grounds. Even the fascists cannot put forth an ideological argument that it is better to have landmines randomly dispersed throughout the countryside. This is simply another form of corruption and hypocrisy openly practiced by both states. This means we can use this to point to the shortcomings of the Cypriot state as a means of social organisation.

Any entity which cares for the well-being and safety of the people more than it cares about maintaining its own grasp on power would surely work towards mine removal. The states are not working towards this. The state in the south is working towards selling the resources of the island to Russian and European direct investors while simultaneously dismantling the welfare state which is the only thing which would justify wealth accumulation of this nature. The state in the north similarly subservient to the interests of the Turkish state in service of expansionistic, militaristic goals. There are many aspects of the liberal ideal which may rightly be criticised. But beyond that there are a thousand ways in which it is demonstrable that neither state legitimately strives towards the liberal ideal in its positive or negative aspects. The social antagonists in Greece rightly assert that networks of mutual aid are more capable of providing these services than a liberal state. The lived reality of the political situation in Athens demonstrates this clearly. The lived reality of the political situation in Cyprus must be made to as well.

For a more thorough discussion of the the impediments to the peace process on the Greek side of negotiations, see Part IV.

Part III: Towards a No-State Solution

i. Nationalism is harmful towards those included in the national formulation, because nationalism is a way of organising and formalising in-group domination.

The Cypriots have experienced the worst of the processes I have described above. The Turkish Cypriots can attest to the processes of historical exclusion through the violence of the First Partition and the Greeks can attest to it through the violence of 1974. But equally important is the processes of national inclusion. To be included within a national formation is not to be at liberty. To be a citizen is not to be free. National inclusionists don’t advocate the unconditional acceptance of their aspirant countrymen but more often they seek to incorporate them into a subservient position within the national body. The Turkish Cypriots can attest to this through the consistent efforts of Turkey to undermine their sovereignty and to erode the progressive secular character of their politics. Of course the Turkish Cypriots can be Turks — but they have to sign the devil’s contract.

For the Greek Cypriots, it was not enough to be Greek nor to be Cypriot nor to be Greek and Cypriot. It was rather necessary — that is to say, enforced violently — that in order to have any place within the nationalist world order, they must undertake the spiritual, emotional, and ideological transformation into Hellenes under the aegis of the Church’s political aspirations. In few places were the ideological prerequisites of this transformation more explicit. Even the mild, reformist deviations of AKEL and Makarios were not acceptable to the historical drive towards Hellenisation.

This is to say that to be a Hellene is not an innate quality of an individual but rather a pseudo-religious ideological assertion which took place on a backdrop of such incredible violence that maybe only a few small groups of well-armed extremists can be said to have made the decision willingly. The Greek Cypriots were in effect made into a Hellenic citizen class forcefully by such a plurality of factors that the only thing that can truly be held responsible for it is the global wave of nationalism, which seems to have weakened not a little bit whatsoever. To Greeks this may appear a matter of somewhat academic concern (though it is not) but to Cypriots, understanding it is the key to the reunification of the island which most people hold to be a matter of urgency.

ii. Why should the Greeks take special care to establish international solidarity in this particular case?

I do not believe that there is a form of international solidarity which is not important in annihilating the international system of nation-states. All states have assertive attributes and defensive attributes. The defensive attributes justify the state’s existence while the assertive attributes mould the world to fit its political understanding. The assertive attributes are the ones that anarchists take the biggest issue with — they are the ones which form the hierarchies on which a society is constituted. But there is an element of sincere need to the defensive attributes. There is an extra onus of responsibility that comes with opposition to a state that stands between the Turkish Cypriots and Nikos Sampson. I do not believe such a position is justifiable when said state is the only line of defence. But all states guarantee some measure of protection from hostile foreign powers whether this hostility is popular or state-initiated. We cannot simply ignore this. The cultivation of a culture of sincere goodwill is a necessity if we are to assume that a stateless society can protect us from the possibility of a group of people becoming beholden enough to prejudicial ideas that they again reconstitute themselves into a nation capable of carrying out sincerely held evil ideologies. This is another way of saying that a stateless society can only exist in a climate of unprecedented international solidarity the task of which it falls to the anarchists to create. This means that it is important to cultivate this solidarity everywhere in the world. The premise that there must be anarchist solidarity between Greeks and Cypriots therefore needs no further elaboration in order to be accepted.

But the Greek and Cypriot solidarity is of particular importance because of the strategic importance of Cyprus as a Hellenist stronghold as well as the fact that the hands of the Cypriots are tied by social convention vis á vis the history of political terrorism on the island. Politics are not commonly discussed. People are hesitant to approach the topic, and with good reason. Nationalism occupies a hegemonic ideological position on the island and the only thing which can keep it entrenched is the complete absence of a serious criticism to it. This absence should be considered something which is actively maintained through force, implicit or explicit, rather than some sort of innate status quo. But the force which maintains it is a force to which not all people are equally susceptible. It is one to which the Greek Cypriots are exceptionally susceptible and nobody else faces the dangers that they do for espousing this criticism.

The Greek Cypriots have a sincere desire to realise the idea of a shared destiny with the Greeks. But the Greek Cypriots know of this destiny only what is visible from Cyprus. They see the nationalist recruitment in the military, they see the propaganda of the Church and state, they see the headline-grabbing nationalist rallies over the Macedonia name dispute, the statements of the politicians who are fanatically sworn to one or the other idea of nationalism. They do not see our networks of mutual aid, our street clashes with the fascists, our propaganda on the walls of Athens, or our solidarity with the refugees. And so they do not understand that their common cause is with us, and not the Greek state’s nationalistic propaganda.

In this regard they resemble the Greek diasporics, especially the Greek diasporics in the United States who exist in states from conservative ignorance to fascist fanaticism with no progressive, revolutionary, or left presence at all. But the diaspora is just as much a necessary component of the anarchist struggle in Greece as Cyprus is, and for more or less the same reasons.

The sincere aspiration of both parties to join the shared destiny of the Hellenic nation is not in itself bad as long as it is understood that this destiny must be a drive to self-abolition rather than reification of the national idea. These diasporics could be brought to understand that these forms of hierarchy are not a source of pride but a source of violence and misery. The diasporics can be brought to understand that the Greek community is the community of the Church and service to the Greek community and the Greek nation is a form of subsummation of the purpose of the existence of the individual, even if that individual considers herself to be confessionally an atheist, to the Church — that to be Greek is to be Greek not in the sense of American-style confessionalism but in eastern-style communalism which exists as an arm of power of the Church and which will never, ever exist without that purpose. Hellenic abolition is every bit as much a matter of urgency in the diaspora as it is in Greece.

iii. Suggestions for praxis

The most immediate praxis suggestion is the translation of revolutionary material into English and to distribute it widely through internet spaces frequented by Greek diasporics as well as both Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This happened in December 2009, which is when I was radicalised. The lack of translations and distributions of revolutionary materials in English among diaspora communities in recent years is among the oversights of the anarchist movement since. The potential revolutionaries in the diaspora can’t counter the reactionary politics which dominate their communities if they are never ever exposed to any other information contradicting this point of view. This is one of the most egregious and easily addressable shortcomings of the movement.

The Cypriots have every excuse in the world. They live in a small, deeply polarised country. There is only so political someone can be in Cyprus without jeopardising themselves politically and socially and sometimes physically. It is hardly a mystery why no democratic movement exists in these conditions. To create one would require a level of discussion, analysis, and deconstruction that is very difficult to establish and it is commonly understood that these conditions only exist for Cypriots once they leave the island, at which point they can finally be so bold as to make a YouTube video saying that perhaps Greeks and Turks can be friends. This state of affairs is pleasing to nobody. The adults are deeply dissatisfied with the country’s many economic issues and the extreme “delay” in reunification. The young are eager for new political ideas and a climate in which they can discuss them, with many of them leaving the island in order to find just such a climate — but, having done so, finding themselves more or less ignored in an insular country where party leaders can’t possibly face any popular pressure from an aggressively apolitical populace.

The creation of antagonistic social space is very important in this context and the Greek anarchists are extremely skilled in doing precisely this. The fact that they have not gone to Cyprus in order to do so — where, as mentioned, they would risk next to nothing in terms of social and political consequences when compared to Greek Cypriots — seems to me as something that can only be considered an oversight or a reflection of the insularity of the anarchist movement, not a deliberate tactical decision. It is of vital importance not just in Greece but also in Cyprus and the diaspora that anarchists distribute propaganda which is critical of communalism, foreign investment, the Greek and Cypriot states, and nationalist ideology, as well as to establish social spaces in which protest actions can be planned.

iv. Where does this analysis differ from the Greek Cypriot mainstream?

The maybe five percent of the liberal ideal which does see its realisation in Cyprus has come at the expense of creation of a state of social affairs which has spent the past century brutally dividing society on the basis of communal and political affiliation. The people know and understand this and would agree that the destruction of this state of affairs is the top political priority for the people of the island. The only way in which my analysis differs from the mainstream politics of the island is in the identification of the most important means of doing so. All members of the mainstream visible “political spectrum” in Cyprus are in agreement that reunification by one means or another is the end-all be-all of what can be accomplished on the island. But this is an appeal to nationalist sentiment rather than material analysis. In reality the only thing which can unite the island in any meaningful way is a shared struggle against a bourgeois class which never knew national borders to begin with. This is because the division of the island along communal lines exists to ideologically justify the states which are the means of ensuring private ownership of capital (and, consistent with the historical experience of the Greek Cypriot Communists, can never be used to ensure anything else). The division of Greek Cypriot society on ideological grounds exists to justify the division of the island on communal grounds which exists in order to provide a defensive justification for the state and therefore of private ownership of capital.

So therefore we clearly have common cause with those whose political priority is the reunification of the Turkish Republic and the Republic of Cyprus. But they are at worst a logical extension of one communal expansionist ideology or another, or at best they are shortsighted both in the identification of the conditions precedent for reunification and the necessary consequences of reunification and so have spent the past 44 years politically inert.

Part IV: Regarding the Plausibility of Reunification, Turkey’s Bi-Zonal Federation, and Enosis

i. In all reunification schemes, the problems which led to the partition to begin with remain completely unaddressed.

The easiest “solution” to dismiss is the “unified, independent Cyprus” championed by the KKE. The position of the KKE that “the Cyprus Issue […] is an international problem of the invasion and occupation of the northern section of Cyprus by Turkey”⁶ is absolute balderdash. It contributes so little to the discussion and betrays such a lack of serious analysis that the party may as well have remained silent on the matter. It deviates precious little from the tried-and-failed ideas of Makarios III.

We can examine the two ways in which this unified independent Cyprus might come about. The first is by integration into the existing state of Cyprus. The second is through reconstituting one state which would replace both Cypruses.

The re-integration of North Cyprus into the Republic of Cyprus is an idea that can only be entertained by one given to lunacy, idiocy, or partiotism. There are well-known issues present with this solution which those proposing it have not even endeavoured to address whatsoever.

ii. Cyprus’s elections currently have only slightly more credibility than those of Egypt or Syria or any other despotic state.

The Republic of Cyprus’s recognised phantom government of Famagusta is maintained almost entirely by the Greek Cypriots who lived in Famagusta in 1974. Many of them do not live in Cyprus at all, let alone in Famagusta, and have the hard-right politics typical of diaspora groups. The electoral politics which they have engendered themselves to are a case in point of the kind of political environment the Turkish Cypriots would be reintegrating themselves into were they to rejoin the Republic of Cyprus.

A current MP of Famagusta District, and one on quite a number of important committees, is Sotiris Sampson, the unrepentant son of Nikos Sampson. As a member of the Republic of Cyprus’s ruling DISY party, it would be quite difficult to remove him from power.

No doubt that any reunification along the lines here discussed would involve a new election in at least these districts. But it would not be that the Turkish Cypriots could choose a candidate who competes with Sampson for his seat. Cyprus has a system of proportional representation. As long as DISY has so much as one seat in the Cypriot Legislature, and, again, it is the current ruling party of Cyprus, it is up to DISY to determine who fills that seat. They can fill it with Sampson if they so choose. The Turks can therefore not easily escape being represented by the son of a genocidal warlord; as long as DISY retains even one seat it will be up to them whether or not Sampson represents the majority-Turkish district.

So how best for the Turkish Cypriots not to live in a state where they will be represented by the son of a genocidal warlord, a man with acknowledged nazi sympathies? Even if the Republic is persuaded to cease its gerrymandering across time, and allow the vote only to those who actually live in the district, it is likely that DISY would still manage at least one seat. The Greek Cypriots insist on a system of majority democracy, and they insist, democratically, that the Junior Butcher of Omorphita have a high-ranking government position. They want to have their Turks and eat them too.

Hypothetically, we can argue that the best-case scenario is that they are able to oust DISY completely through grassroots cross-commnal coalition building and affect social change. To do so to the extent that DISY earns not one seat would be an extraordinary task under the best of circumstances, and discussion of politics is so forbidden among Greek Cypriots that the best of circumstances are certainly not present here. Greek Cypriots will not discuss politics with their friends, families, teachers, students, or co-workers. A newly annexed Turkish population would certainly have a steep hill to climb in finding a universal audience for their views.

iii. The electoral majority of the Greek Cypriots would prove just as much a threat to the safety of the Turkish Cypriots as it has always been.

But let us suppose that despite everything, the Turkish Republic rejoins Cyprus. Let us suppose that the election goes off without a hitch, and after the sudden revival of Cypriot civil society, in which due to divine protection no communal violence occurs, DISY is ousted from Famagusta in a crushing, globally unprecedented defeat of a current ruling party. Even in this case, the Turkish Cypriots will have had to plead their case, winning the sympathies of virtually every Greek. This will not fundamentally shift power relations, it will only alter the conduct of the majority community. It will ultimately be up to the Greeks whether or not this dignity is retained in elections moving forward. Of this there is no guarantee. The only guarantee that this will not be the case is if there is no Greek political power in Turkish areas. This is the current status quo, so there is no incentive for the Turkish Cypriots to abandon the status quo, which does not have this problem, for a new state of affairs, which will have this problem.

Rarely has there been so convenient a political scapegoat as the Turkish Cypriots would be in a newly reunited Cyprus. One who argues that there would be no politicians who would leverage anti-Turkish sentiments to win the Greek vote is one with no knowledge of history or politics of any country, let alone Cyprus.

iv. The past 44 years of history have precluded the possibility of a reunification as equals.

In fact it seems as though the only thing that the Turkish Cypriots have to gain from their acquiescence to this scheme is a lessening of the economic and diplomatic sanctions and threats which they live under courtesy of the Republic of Cyprus. Even this lessening is not guaranteed. It has been noted previously that the Turkish Cypriots lived under economic blockades even during the time of the unified Republic. It is unlikely the Greek extremists will be satiated by annexation. They will continue to issue these threats and sanctions, and there will be no wall nor military protecting the Turkish Cypriots from their “countrymen”. The Muslims in India, and the African-Americans in the United States continue to live in conditions of economic deprivation despite formal annexation. There is no particular reason to believe that this would not be the circumstance of this reviled and threatened minority group.

A political union achieved by threats and sanctions can never lead to a unified state of equals. This is aggression by a hostile foreign power. Threats and sanctions are the conduct of a conqueror. It would be unmitigated humiliation for the Turkish Cypriots to acquiesce to reunification on these terms.

v. The Greek Cypriots have demanded the mass return of property as a condition for reunification.

Let us for a moment examine the demands that a newly galvanised Greek extremist movement might make of the Turkish Cypriots in a Cyprus reunited by their efforts. The current Greek Cypriot government maintains its claims to the property which was held by Greeks in North Cyprus at the time of the Partition. A North Cyprus reeling from decades of economic blockade will already be economically subservient to the south for some time following unification. On top of that, after debilitating the country’s ability to advance economically for nearly a half-century, they intend to directly appropriate the properties and livestock and land on which the Turkish Cypriots rely? No compensation is proposed for the economic hardship that the Turkish Cypriots have spent 44 years under, yet the Greek Cypriots, who are one of the groups of people with the highest incomes in the EU, are entitled to compensation? No corresponding claim is made by the Turkish Cypriots over properties now held by Greek Cypriots which were either taken in the First Partition or forefit in the formal 1974 partition. Properties held by Greeks in North Cyprus constituted the bulk of North Cyprus at this time, because the Greek Cypriots had spent the decades prior disenfranchising the Turkish Cypriots from their properties. To demand the return of these properties would be to repeat and legitimise the violence of the First Partition, enshrining into law as the proper economic order something which was attained by the violence of hate groups.

To appropriate so much property from a minority group would be an economic catastrophe for the Turkish Cypriots and, frankly, for the rule of law globally. The Turkish Cypriots have a stake in opposing this. The Palestinians and Israelis have a stake in opposing this. India and Pakistan alike have a stake in opposing this. If it is allowed to pass, what is to stop the Turks from demanding the return of their properties in Crete and Tripoli, and what is to stop the Greeks from demanding the return of their properties in Izmir and Istanbul? Is the whole world to honour property rights as they were decided at some arbitrary point in the past? How is this point to be decided? In this case it is clearly decided according to which point in history the Greek Cypriots were most powerful, but how is this to work as a precedent for international law? Why would any Turk in their right mind take this with any seriousness? The proposition is anathema to virtually every peace process in the world. This is again the conduct of a conqueror. There is no pretence of any legal principle which could be applied in any other situation — not even the situation of the Republic of Cyprus, which would of course not be required to reinstate Turkish Cypriot properties as they were held in 1974, as the government of North Cyprus maintains no claim to them. The request is not a sincere one. It is an attempt to stall conversation by humiliating and harassing the other party.

vi. The Greek Cypriot demand that the Turkish “settlers” return to Turkey is unacceptable, and demonstrates that the Republic of Cyprus still views the citizenship of the Turkish Cypriots as conditional.

The current government of the Republic of Cyprus also demands the return of Turkish “settlers” to Turkey. By this they mean Turks who arrived to North Cyprus since the 1974 partition. By this they mean people who have lived on the island for nearly a half century.

I can accept for the sake of argument that these Turks were moved to the island as part of a policy to affect demographic change. But even if this is so, to demand a mass deportation is obviously contrary to the principle of open borders. Anything that can be destroyed by human migration, politically motivated or otherwise, deserves to be. How senseless is it to create a political order which relies on human migration ceasing entirely? The Turkish Cypriots are right to reject this ludicrous proposal.

From a Turkish Cypriot perspective, this threatens to decimate the entire society. When a community suddenly loses a great deal of members, that community suffers. When we hear that the Plague killed a third of Europe, we have a very difficult time comprehending the damage this must have done to European society. It is considered that this loss began to lay the groundwork for the esablishment of global capitalism, which obviously still has incredible consequences to this day. To this day, European and Euroderivitive societies have kept alive the folk memory of nursery rhymes like Ring Around The Rosie. When we have two people in our families die around the same time, we are overcome by a tremendous sense of loss. But Turkish “settlers” and their children make up about one half of the population of North Cyprus. One half of the population of North Cyprus would be forced to leave their homes through no fault of their own. Forget British divide-and-conquer tactics — these are Greek divide-and-conquer tactics which aim at the Turkish Cypriots recognising among themselves differing grades of citizenship. It seems that the Turkish Cypriots know better than to fall for it. This is nothing less than the creation of a non-citizen class and the decimation of its rights on this basis. To even open this discussion is to open the door to the removal of citizen status and therefore to the removal of basic rights from a huge segment of North Cypriot society. Under no circumstances should this be entertained. The only acceptable response to its mere suggestion is a violent rejection.

Tellingly, the Greek Cypriot leadership seems to have thus far been unwilling to offer the same treatment to the extremely wealthy members of the bourgeois class who have purchased their Cypriot citizenships. It is much easier to remove citizenship from poor villagers living in a small country which has spent the last 43 years wracked by economic sanctions than it is to remove it from the bourgeois class. The demand of the Greeks to strip citizenship from the “Turkish settlers” is nothing less than an open declaration of class war so that the island may be settled by the extremely rich. In this demand the Greek Cypriot leadership resembles Bashar al-Assad, who has made it his priority to clear Syria of the poor so as to give rise to a new middle class consisting in large part of Russian settlers. Only the brutality of the enforcement of this demand — so far at least — differentiates the two.

What’s more, the “settlers” would be arriving in Turkey in condition scarcely better than those who did so as part of the 1922 population exchange. To honour Greece’s demands would be to halve the size of North Cypriot society and rob it of almost all of its property while deliberately creating a large refugee population in a militarist state which has proven to be brutal towards the refugees it already has. To allow this to pass would be unthinkable. The world should pick up arms if this is ever treated seriously.

If there can be said to be a principle guiding the bestowal of citizenship of the Republic of Cyprus, then, it is that it is granted if it is profitable to the Greek Cypriot leadership to grant, and it is refused if it is profitable for the Greek Cypriot leadership to refuse.

vii. The artificial creation of a Cypriot nationalism would not work any better the second time.

The Republic of Cyprus, in its unified days, attempted to cultivate a pan-Cypriot national identity, but these efforts were undermined by every segment of both societies. The communities retained their separate medias, separate languages, separate businesses, separate enclaves, separate education systems. Little in the way of serious attempt was made to unify. Even the monstrous electoral power of Makarios III ultimately proved powerless against the waves of Kemalism and Hellenism. It may well be that Turks and Greeks can live in harmony. But Hellenists and Kemalists can’t. The formation of a Cypriot nation, then, requires the destruction of nationalism. It is unlikely for there to be recognised by two such disparate communities a common anti-nationalist platform simply so a third nationalism can take root. A conjurer may wish to summon a larger monster which can defeat the two he has already conjured, but Cyprus is, by its own constant admission, a smaller monster than Greece and a smaller monster than Turkey and certainly smaller than the destruction wrought by the feuding between the two.

Even this idea, though, was only entertained when the Greek Cypriots determined that the wholesale annihilation and/or subjugation of the Turkish Cypriots was impractical. Ignoring all other evidence, the Turkish Cypriots considered rightly that they’d rather not be at the whim of the Church’s practical and political capabilities, for if the Church gained these capabilities again it would endanger them. It still will. It was reasoned that the Turkish Cypriots need their own state for their protection from the hostile power of the Church, and the only way they can be convinced otherwise is if the Church and state alike are disempowered in some other way.

viii. The capitulatory reunification of Cyprus will lead to an upset in the balance of power between Greece and Turkey which neither country is likely to accept.

By far the most important relationship the North has is its relationship with Turkey, and the South, its relationship with Greece. Cypriot industries are reliant on their ties with Greece, and North Cypriot industries are reliant on their ties with Turkey. The relationship between Greece and Turkey is like that between oil and water, or maybe between Tom and Jerry. An annexation of the North by a Greek-dominated state on what can only be capitulatory terms is unlikely to lead to a thaw in this regard. A unified, independent Cyprus would be subject to the machinations of either nation as surely as it is now if not moreso. If the two states are not guarantor powers but simply trading partners, there will be a power struggle over trade rights, and like all international power struggles, this will have incredible potential to cause international disruption. Cyprus has historically been reliant on the militaries of Greece and Turkey. It has effectively no ability to defend itself from either. An independent, unified Cyprus would be placing itself at the whim of two larger political powers. This is not an issue of identification.

The best-case scenario of the KKE, then, which is in perfect conformity with the Cypriot nationalists on every important point, is scarcely worth entertaining. The most important reason why it will not work is that the reason for which it already did not work nearly 50 years ago was not addressed at all. One would expect a Communist party to understand that the issue of power between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is one that is economic and material, and their proposed solution has taken into account no economic factors and no material factors.

ix: The complaints against an unconditional reunification mostly also apply to other consociational arrangements, including Turkey’s proposed bi-zonal federation.

As for the idea of a reconstitution of the state in some other kind of consociational power-sharing arrangement, none have yet been presented which address the flaws of the current Republic of Cyprus. The Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have mutually incompatible visions and goals.

The solution favoured by Turkey is the creation of a bi-zonal republic which will maintain a partition status under a unitary government. This idea is not much more plausible. The reason why it is implausible is because there is no reason why it should exist. Certainly it’s less disagreeable to the North than unification and involves their giving up less autonomy, but it still involves them giving up autonomy while gaining nothing in return. Again the issue here is that the Turkish Cypriots will be forced to give up what is dear to them while the Greeks have nothing which the Turkish Cypriots ask them to give up. The only thing that the Turks have to gain from the Greeks is freedom. Incorporation into a republic of any sort is not gaining freedom, it is a change in what tactics are available to the Greek Cypriots to dominate them.

The argument for why the bi-zonal republic should exist is seemingly for the sole purpose of simply having a unified republic for the sake of having a unified republic. It is guided by sentiment only. But the sentiment of the people does not support a unified bi-zonal federation. The sentiment is thus not with the people but with external political actors. Everybody says they want a unified Cyprus, but nobody wants the consequences of a unified Cyprus. The demand for a unified Cyprus has the maturity of a child who wants a pet but does not want to feed it. To say that there should be one Republic governing both of these areas just for the sake of there being one is inane. It is an argument no more inherently valuable than that that which says that the United States should annex Canada and Mexico simply because they share a land mass, or that which says that India and China should share a state regardless of their social, cultural, and political differences. George Orwell, hardly known for the depth of his political analysis, wrote in 1984 of the world’s division into three superstates called Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. This was in no way meant to be a serious prediction. He did this solely in order to create a fictional global politics which could be easily understood within the fiction he had created. Yet in doing this, he employed about the same depth of analysis as the argument which states that Cyprus should be one politically simply because it is one geographically.

This might work if sentiment is with it. There is no more and no less reason behind a unified Cyprus than that there is between the union of Athens and Crete. Sentiment is not the best means of developing a country, but it is well capable of accomplishing the task. But this sentiment simply cannot be artificially inculcated. No outside force, and very few inside forces, can simply declare that sentiment should flow one way or the other.

Further, the bi-zonality of this federation is necessary in part because sentiment does not back the union. If sentiment is towards a united Cyprus, then simply unite Cyprus. If sentiment is towards Greece, or towards Turkey, or towards North Cyprus, then you cannot unite Cyprus.

For my part, I do not believe that one state can be carved of two states with contradictory interests and mutually antagonistic histories.

x. No proposed solution seems to have yet taken into consideration the question of defence.

It is absurd to me that despite the proven failure of the unified Cyprus to provide for its own defence, no argument in favour of unification has tried to take this question into account. Who is to defend this unified Cyprus? What is to prevent a mutiny in the case of an army in which some soldiers are Hellenists, some soldiers are Kemalists, and only some of them support an independent Cyprus to begin with? And of those who support an independent Cyprus, not all of them will be of like mind regarding the legitimacy of any given ideology or ruler. Even intra-communally, Cypriots are not of one mind. A unitary discipline the likes of which can maintain a military is a risky proposition to say the least. The question is not whether there will be extremism within the military but whether the nationalist tendencies will grow at a rate capable of checking each other — even if they do, there is a risk of a civil war or another coup. The Cypriot military now is an environment in which extremists recruit openly. What would change this? The presence of a persecuted minority which has proven capable of its own armed defence and which is known to harbour its own international loyalties? A state which cannot defend itself from itself lives on borrowed time from the day of its inception.

Are foreign powers then to be charged with the defence of this united Cyprus against its internal threats? This raises ethical difficulties. If a state of political affairs is enforced by a foreign military against the will of the people, it is a military occupation. It is the subsumation of the people to the foreign policy interest of whichever state or states is charged with maintaining order. If it is to be that Cyprus is to come under foreign military occupation, best to be honest about it and make no pretence that it is anything else — to state outright that the unification of Cyprus matters more to international actors than that anyone living there is satisfied.

Let us say then that we accept this premise, that unification is more important than satisfaction. The issue then arises about who is to maintain that military occupation. To raise it alone is enough to dismiss it without consideration of any particular options. Will a foreign military occupation stop Cyprus from being a pawn of one foreign interest or another? No. It will make the power struggles over influence of it explicit. What’s more, the inter- and intra-communal tensions characterising its politics will not simply vanish. The previous colonial period, the time of British Cyprus, saw a conflict of interest between the ability of the state to maintain order and the development of reasonable political ideologies among the colonial subjects. I believe it to be the case that the reason that Turks and Greeks continue to coexist on Cyprus is because the British government was more capable of maintaining law and order by that point than the Ottoman government was. But this is hardly high praise of colonialism in concept. I don’t think it should be our guiding principle moving forward. If we have an idea which can only be enforced by a foreign military occupation, what that means is that it is very likely not a good idea.

Right now, on Cyprus, nobody lives under a colonial regime not of their community’s choosing. Despite everything, this is basically a positive development.

xi. The realisation of Enosist objectives would exacerbate the problem of Greek nationalism.

Finally what must be eliminated from consideration is the most ridiculous solution of all. It is not worth consideration whatsoever. The sensible and moderate Greek Cypriots will chide me for even considering that the idea still exists on the island at all, while the Greek diasporas will like this the least of anything I have yet said. But it is a fact that the national dream rots in the consciousness of the island like a putrid ulcer, and like a putrid ulcer, delayed treatment means an increased risk of death. The notion of Enosis must be amputated and incinerated.

One can argue about whether or not Enosis would actually be beneficial for Cyprus. But I will not dedicate much space to this argument except to say that sentiment, rather than material considerations, guide nationalism — a glance at history will reveal that nationalism has only occasionally concurred with economic interests, and even then, it has only served the economic interests of those at the top of the power relations which in practice constitute the nation. The “masses”, as it were, the driving force behind most nationalist movements, are betrayed as soon as, or sometimes even before, their nationalist plans come to fruition. We will consider that the same applies here — that the segments of Greek Cypriot society which are driven towards Enosis will not be deterred from it, nor particularly morivated towards it, by any economic factors.

The argument for complete Enosis might be argued, and has been argued, that the Turkish Cypriots could actually live in peace within the Greek state. I question this. As I have stated, it is only ever a small armed political minority which commit violence against a communal minority. The question is what can be done to forcibly deter the communalists from carrying on their violence. It is unlikely that the communalists will be satisfied and simply stop being racist after the achievement of Enosis. This has never happened at any point in the history of any country of which I am aware. Violence against the Muslim minorities in Greece continued after the establishment of the Greek state and continues today. At every point in Greek and Greek Cypriot history, those who are most in favour of violence towards minorities are also those who are most in favour of the foundation or expansion of the Greek state. The two goals are intimately connected in the minds of people who hold them, and this has a historical basis which can be neither dismissed nor refuted.

The Nationalists will thus claim Enosis as their victory, and it will be. This vindication of nationalist extremism will put all of Greece’s minorities at the mercy of groups which have no mercy. They will be checked only by armed groups which are willing to stop them. This will mean, in the best case scenario, probable losses of life for Greek anti-racists as well as people from minority groups. Any concessions to the nationalists in any manner risks an identical outcome.

The condition of Greece’s ethnic and religious minorities is already extremely shameful. The Muslim refugees in Athens and the Muslims in Thraki face communal violence from fascist groups. The Roma live in economic and social deprivation subject to the whims of one of the worst forms of racism I have ever seen in my life. An anti-Roma pogrom in Athens was reported as recently as June of last year. This is not the ontological condition of these groups. It is Greeks who carry out these abuses and create these conditions. One could argue that the Greek Cypriots are not the Greek Athenians or the Greek Lesvians or the Greek Thracians. But the violent militants of Cyprus trace their ideological origins to the Athenian and Thracian and Lesvian militants. Golden Dawn recruits openly in Cyprus and they have a puppet organisation, ELAM, represented in the Cypriot parliament. So one cannot claim that the Turkish Cypriots in a unified Greece would not be subject to at the very least the same violence and deprivations as the rest of Greece’s minorities, which they would be quite reasonable in finding not preferable to their current situation even assuming no exacerbation occurs. But the popular anti-Turkish sentiment in Cyprus is not based in racial ignorance or even fascist agitation but rather in a deeply personal sense of having been wronged by those against whom there is an ongoing blood feud. It is neither politics nor stupidity but honour and property. The Turkish Cypriots are considered not to be vulnerable migrants or petty criminals but violent colonists and rapacious home invaders. So it is likely to be much worse than the racism which currently exists in Greece.

This is true even though the moderate, mainstream parties which control the Greek state are not likely to earnestly consider ethnic homogeneity a prerequisite for statehood. They may well be willing to accept Turkish Cypriots as their own citizens. But they will not be willing or able to prevent the violence towards them carried out by nationalist groups. They do not even prevent it now against minority groups currently present within Greece. On the contrary, the Greek police often work with the nationalist groups more or less openly.

So the greatest barrier to Enosis is actually the Enosists, followed closely by the Turkish Cypriots, who will almost assuredly, and quite rightly, take up arms against this proposition.

xii. Turkey has both geopolitical and humanitarian reasons to oppose Enosis.

This on its own will also, as mentioned, prompt a humanitarian intervention, almost assuredly from Turkey. The Turkish Republic exists for the sole purpose of preventing this sort of event. Greece then is also not likely to support a move towards Enosis. The mainstream Greek political parties differ on this issue from the fascist parties for one reason. The mainstream political parties consider that this particular expansionist tactic will not be worth the disaster which is sure to ensue from a war with Turkey. But for the fascists, violence in service of the state is valorised. They do not disagree that there will be a disastrous war. They differ on whether disastrous wars are good or bad. This is why the fascists correctly assert that fascist control of the state is necessary in order to make the national dream a nightmarish reality. Enosis is a form of national expansionism. As long as Enosis exists, national expansionism will exist. As long as national expansionism exists, it will serve as an argument for fascism. Since nations are not real, sometimes it takes a fascist to argue the ins and outs of what forms they should take.

Part V: Proposal for a Two-State Solution: The Pancypriot Council Act

The criticism can so far be raised that in emphasising the necessity of a no-state solution, I have laid no blueprint for what a society governed by a no-state solution might look like. This is because I do not believe it is possible to predict the functioning of a stateless society founded on popular struggle. The social institutions which replace the state have not yet been created, and are to be the instruments of struggle which can eventually take over functionality of the state.

Yet this will not reassure most people that the no-state solution is a plausible one. In a volatile geopolitical situation, it is not preferred that the new world order consist of radicals winging it. The situation in Cyprus calls for order and structure. This is a fair enough criticism. To that end I propose a solution of two non-communal states subject to the mediating authority of a Pancypriot Council which both states vest with certain powers. I will lay this solution out in detail in a full act of parliament which I will share in its entirety shortly. I believe that this state of affairs will allow for the growth of a far more powerful civil society and therefore, although anarchists might disagree with me, I do not consider it at odds with other objectives I have stated earlier, as I consider the growth of a civil society to be the single most important objective on the island.

i. Some preliminary objections can be voiced to my proposal for a two-state solution.

This is my final proposal which I believe has the potential to end the geopolitical stalemate on the island. I believe that whether or not this comes to pass will act as an indictment on the ability of the State to act rationally towards the furtherance of the historical objectives which it claims for itself: that is to say, peace, stability, harmony, liberty, equality, and fraternity, for my suggestion is better for all of these objectives than what currently exists and what else has been proposed.

The objective will be raised that I have not resolved the issue of compensation for properties lost as a result of the Partition. This is a decision which has been taken intentionally, for reasons explored prior. The Greek Cypriots consider the violence which created the Turkish Republic to be illegitimate. I agree. Where I differ is that I consider the violence of the decades preceding, which ended in Greek Cypriots owning property quite disproportionate to their population while the Turkish Cypriots lived in fear and under blockades in increasingly smaller and smaller enclaves, to be equally illegitimate. I know of no legal system on Earth which will not consider a squatter to have rights over a property after forty four years of occupation. It is time to draw a line in the sand on this issue. The Greek Cypriots do not live in a state of material deprivation relative to those of occupied countries. They are, basically, fine. They are in fact one of the wealthier European countries. They are not the Palestinians or the Lakota or the Syrians. They have perhaps the worst argument for this of any group in west Asia — or, for that matter, the balkans. Were they to receive compensation, this would be the first case of this happening of which I am aware, and a less deserving people for it could not be named. It would set a troubling precedent. Frankly, peace will not happen until the Greek Cypriots relinquish this claim. This is a position which can only be demanded by Greek Cypriots and the diasporas. This demand is a poison which must be eliminated from the diasporic body.

The second position of the Greek Cypriots that is unreasonable is that they have two incompatible political demands. The first for the entire island to come under the control of the government. The second is for unfettered control of the government through statistical majority. Their claim to the first nullifies their right to the second, and the achievement of the second is possible only in lieu of the first. But the first requires consent of a non-consenting people, and is therefore impossible. So, there is no reason why they should not have the second.

ii. The two-state solution is superiour to what the Greek Cypriots currently enjoy in practice in providing for democracy and security.

The Republic of Cyprus is in practice inferiour to this two-state solution, and the adoption of the latter would mean that they are no longer constitutionally obligated to leave governmental posts vacant for want of a Turk to fill them, as is currently the case with the Vice Presidency.

Notwithstanding these two unceded demands, a scheme of mutual recognition does allow for the fulfilment of most of the other demands of the Greek Cypriots, which have currently no chance of coming to fruition. I believe the demands of the state and the people are in contradiction on the question of the military hegemony of Turkey. The reliance of the Turkish Republic on Turkey for trade, defence, and aid is due to a circumstance entirely of the creation of the Republic of Cyprus. It is due to the lack of international recognition enjoyed by the Turkish Republic.

Anyone who has studied the issue will advise against cutting off a family member who has joined a cult. As cults rely on the gradual dissolution of their members’ external support systems, a member who has been so cut off will eventually not have the social support required to leave even if they want to. They will be completely reliant on the support system maintained by the cult. This is precisely the circumstance of the Turkish Cypriots, who with the rightward shift of Turkey find the secular fabric of their society continually undermined by a hegemonic force on which they have been forced to rely. And I need not retread the historic susceptibility of the Greek Cypriots to rightward policy shifts in Greece.

But anxiety is a powerful binding thread for authoritarian regimes seeking not to lose their grasp on power, especially if this power has otherwise long since lost its reason. The Republic of Cyprus correctly observes that by putting its integrity in constant danger, hoping to teeter just close enough to the edge without falling over into a “civil” war, the anxieties requisite to justify the continued societal reliance on the superstitious phantom state will conjure themselves as surely as racist comments on a YouTube video about the same. The Greek Cypriots would prefer not to constantly face down the barrel of a Turkish gun. But the Republic, as currently constituted, virtually requires them to. For without this threat there is no reason for the Republic to exist. The Republic of Cyprus is therefore hell-bent on allowing Turkey to do as it pleases. They hold the issues of compensation and manifest destiny before the Greek Cypriots although the reality is that these designs will be honoured by the Turks perhaps on the day after Mexico pays for the wall by selling all of its flying pigs. It is an unreasonable, unrealistic demand which exists only to exacerbate communal tensions through the creation of a foreign threat, not just rhetorically but literally.

iii. The two-state solution would be an about-face on virtually every destructive ideological tendency on the island.

The Republic of Cyprus bears a great deal of responsibility in the creation of the irredentist current of its constituency. A recognition of the North would be a historic reversal of this trend. It would be to admit that the reason it governs the land it actually governs is not due to any essential ethno-national character of the land in question, but rather due to the consent of the people who live there now. This would be a crushing blow to the modern day inheritors of the Big Idea. If the state is an ideological enemy of fascism, rather than its progenitor, as both the state and the fascists assert, this is an option to be explored. The Turks, Cypriot or otherwise, do not aim towards the destruction of the Cypriot state. The fascists do.

Let us examine a handful of the conditions that the Republic of Cyprus could reasonably stipulate for diplomatic recognition:

• That North Cyprus limit the amount of foreign aid it accepts from Turkey
• That only a certain percentage of North Cyprus’s trade be with Turkey; the rest must take place with other trade partners
• That only a certain percentage of North Cyprus’s defence consist of Turkish troops or soldiers under the command of Turkey

The demand of North Cyprus for independence in its diplomatic relations and the demand of the Republic of Cyprus for the the decrease in Turkish power engendered by the existence of the North are in reality the same demand. There is no conflict between the states regarding this subject. North Cyprus is as likely to suggest these conditions as the Republic of Cyprus is.

iv. The Pancypriot Council Act

I have drafted the following Act of Parliament, which I believe can act as a model for discussion and which I believe offers a marked improvement from the situation on the ground in every possible way for both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. If this act is not adopted it will be because one or both governments have deliberately held up the peace process. The act is as follows:

Be it enacted as follows through the passage of identical Acts of Parliament of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, in furtherance with the aims of peace, stability, harmony, liberty, equality, and fraternity:

I. — (1) Be it recognised the existence of two sovereign secular democratic Republics on the island of Cyprus on the basis that these Republics have the consent of the governed and make no claim to govern anyone outside of their agreed upon borders. The mission of both Republics shall, from this day forward, be the mutual facilitation of friendship, cooperation, and goodwill in all matters as well as the eradication of communal extremism and the furtherance of the ideal of universal equality before the law.

(2) It shall not be lawful for either Republic to brand itself as a Republic of any ethnic, national, religious, or communal character, nor to refer to themselves or each other as such in any official document or correspondence.

(3) It shall not be lawful for either Republic to claim for itself a position of superiority, nor to claim territory or property outside of what has been agreed upon by mutual recognition at the time of the adoption of this Act. Neither Republic shall make such a claim of this nature in the design of its flag nor in the form of its Constitution nor in its anthem nor in its name nor in any other material.

(4) On the question of defence, the new Republics will maintain a defence force constituted as follows:

The militaries of South Cyprus and North Cyprus shall constitute forty percent of their Defence Forces.

British forces shall constitute fifteen percent of the Defence Forces of both South Cyprus and North Cyprus.

Greek forces shall constitute no more than fifteen percent of the Defence Forces of South Cyprus, and Turkish forces shall constitute no more than fifteen percent of the Defence Forces of North Cyprus. Britain, Greece, and Turkey shall be referred to as Major Defence Partners.

There shall be designated for both South Cyprus and North Cyprus three external, sovereign, internationally recognised countries, each of which will be referred to as Minor Defence Partners and whose armed forces shall each contribute ten percent of the Defence Forces for either South Cyprus or North Cyprus.

(4) The Minor Defence Partners shall be named by the passage of identical Acts of Parliament through the Legislatures of South Cyprus and North Cyprus. Minor Defence Partners can fill this role for either South Cyprus, North Cyprus, or both. Minor Defence Partners should be countries which are at peace, politically stable, and have no strong diplomatic preference for Greece or Turkey, and who have friendly relations with Greece, Turkey, North Cyprus, South Cyprus, and each other.

(5) With a view to limiting the dependence and therefore the influence which any one State holds over either South Cyprus or North Cyprus, effective 500 days from the adoption of this act, no more than fifteen percent of the GDP of either South Cyprus nor North Cyprus may be derived from exports to, nor spent on imports from, any single trading partner, including in the form of foreign aid. In mitigating circumstances, this period may be expanded to 2 years from the adoption of this Act by the passage of identical Acts of Parliament through the Legislatures of both South Cyprus and North Cyprus.

(6) Both South Cyprus and North Cyprus shall be charged with the creation of educational curricula regarding history as well as social sciences, and no importation of materials regarding these subjects shall be lawful, beginning on the third anniversary of the adoption of this Act. These curricula should be consistent between South Cyprus and North Cyprus insofar as possible and should highlight the achievements of both communities as well as the possibility for, and historic presence of, peaceful coexistence, but shall not deny any history of violence and antagonism.

(7) No segregation in the public education system based on race, ethnicity, religion, passports held, income level, or any other criteria of a communal character shall be lawful. All attempts shall be made to integrate educational facilities across linguistic barriers through the adoption of the international language of English as the primary language of education from the seventh year of education onward. Private and charter schools shall be permitted on an individual basis, subject to revocation, only on the grounds that they provide an educational experience different in substance than that provided by the public school system, their communal composition not deviate significantly from that of their locality, the material studied therein not be of a communal character, and the cost of admission, attendance, and all associated costs not be prohibitive to the poor.

(8) As early as possible and in no circumstances exceeding a period of 900 days after the adoption of this Act, new Constitutions shall be adopted by acts of the Legislature in South Cyprus and North Cyprus recognising the above conditions. These constitutions must be in uniformity regarding claims of territory and property. Until such a time as these constitutions may be lawfully adopted, the above stipulations shall take priority in the case of a conflict between this Act and either Constitution.

(9) The day of the adoption of this Act by identical acts of Parliament shall be declared an annual holiday in both South Cyprus and North Cyprus and shall be known as the Day Against Communal Agitation.

II. — (1) The Parliaments of South Cyprus and North Cyprus shall, by identical Acts, establish a Pancypriot Council with a view to bringing about harmonious action between the Legislatures and Governments of South Cyprus and North Cyprus, and to the promotion of mutual intercourse and uniformity in relation to matters affecting the whole of Cyprus, and to providing for the administration of services which the two parliaments mutually agree should be administered uniformly throughout the whole of Cyprus, or which by virtue of this Act are to be so administered.

(2) Subject as hereinafter provided, the Pancypriot Council shall have a President, who alone shall be nominated in accordance with instructions from the Presidents of North Cyprus and South Cyprus. Also present on the council shall be twenty other persons, of whom ten shall be members representing North Cyprus and ten shall be members representing South Cyprus.

(3) The members of the Pancypriot Council shall be elected in each case by the members of the Parliament of South Cyprus or North Cyprus.

(4) The election of members of the Pancypriot Council shall take place immediately, and this event shall precede the adoption or drafting of the new Constitutions of South Cyprus and North Cyprus, which shall recognise not only each other but additionally the Pancypriot Council.

(5) A member of the Council shall, on ceasing to be a member of the Legislature of South Cyprus or North Cyprus by which he was elected a member of the Council, cease to be a member of the Council: Provided that, on the dissolution of the Legislature of South Cyprus or North Cyprus, the persons who are members of the Council shall continue to hold office as members of the Council until a new election has taken place and shall then retire unless re-elected.

(6) The President of the Council shall preside at each meeting of the Council at which he is present, and shall be entitled to vote in case of an equality of votes, but not otherwise.

(7) The first meeting of the Council shall be held at such time and place as shall be appointed by the President.

(8) The Council may act notwithstanding a deficiency in their number, and the quorum of the Council shall be eight.

(9) Subject as aforesaid, the Council may regulate their own procedure, including the delegation of powers to committees.

(10) The constitution of the Pancypriot Council may from time to time be varied by identical Acts passed by the Legislature of South Cyprus and the Legislature of North Cyprus, and the Acts may provide for all or any of the members of the Pancypriot Council being elected by parliamentary electors, and determine the constituencies by which the several elective members are to be returned and the number of the members to be returned by the several constituencies and the method of election.

III. — (1) The Legislatures of South Cyprus and North Cyprus may, by identical Acts, delegate to the Pancypriot Council any of the powers of the Legislatures and Government of South Cyprus and North Cyprus, and such Acts may determine the manner in which the powers so delegated are to be exercisable by the Council.

(2) The powers of making laws with respect to railways, waterways, and development of natural resources which may cause environmental ramifications for both South Cyprus and North Cyprus shall, as from the day appointed for the operation of the new constitution, become the powers of the Pancypriot Council and not of South Cyprus or North Cyprus: Provided that nothing in this subsection shall prevent the Legislature of South Cyprus or North Cyprus making laws authorising the construction, extension, or improvement of railways and waterways where the works to be constructed are situate wholly in South Cyprus or North Cyprus as the case may be, and which will have environmental impacts only within the state in which it is located.

(3) The Council may consider any questions which may appear in any way to bear on the welfare of both South Cyprus and North Cyprus, and may, by resolution, make suggestions in relation thereto as they may think proper, but suggestions so made shall have no legislative effect.

(4) It shall be lawful for the Pancypriot Council to make recommendations to the Legislatures of South Cyprus and North Cyprus as to the advisability of passing identical Acts delegating to the Pancypriot Council the administration of any pan-Cypriot subject, with a view to avoiding the necessity of administering them separately in South Cyprus or North Cyprus.

(5) It shall be lawful for either Legislature at any time by Act to deprive the delegation to the Pancypriot Council of any powers which are in pursuance of such identical Acts as aforesaid for the time being delegated to the Council and thereupon the powers in question shall cease to be exercisable by the Pancypriot Council and shall become exercisable in South Cyprus or North Cyprus within their respective jurisdictions by the Legislatures and Governments of South Cyprus and North Cyprus and the Council shall take such steps as may be necessary to carry out the transfer, including adjustments of any funds in their hands or at their disposal.

(6) The power to designate and recognise official languages shall be vested exclusively in the Pancypriot Council. The Council, as well as the governments of both South Cyprus and North Cyprus, shall be obligated to provide all materials in English, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Cypriot Arabic, Kurbetcha, and any other languages recognised by the Council. The recognition of the council must be recognised and adopted uniformly across both North Cyprus and South Cyprus.

IV. — (1) The Council alone shall be vested with the power to alter the composition of the states represented in the Defence Forces as stipulated in Section I Paragraph 4. The Council may alter the composition of the Defence Forces only in a symmetrical fashion, and only with the approval of both the Legislatures of South Cyprus and North Cyprus through the passage of identical Acts. It may never increase the share of Greek personnel in South Cyprus, nor the share of Turkish personnel in North Cyprus, above 15%.

(2) Minor Defence Partners may be dismissed from the Defence Forces of South Cyprus by the Legislature of South Cyprus, or they may be dismissed from the Defence Forces of North Cyprus by the Legislature of North Cyprus, provided that at the time of dismissal, provision is made for the appointment of replacement Partners on the terms consistent with legal precedent established by this Act and other effective Acts governing such appointments.

(3) The Pancypriot Council shall have the power to establish a process for the dismissal of any Major Defence Partner or Minor Defence Partner within the Defence Forces of either South Cyprus or North Cyprus in the event of corruption, treason, the arising of a conflict of interest, or that these Major or Minor Defence Partners no longer fit the criteria stipulated in Section I Paragraph 3. It shall be the responsibility of the Council upon doing so to stipulate for the replacement of this Partner either on a permanent basis or on a temporary basis. If this replacement is made on a permanent basis, it must be made on terms consistent with legal precedent established by this Act and other effective Acts governing such appointments.

(4) The Council shall have the power to establish a process for the discharge of any individual service member within the Armed Forces of South Cyprus, North Cyprus, any Major Defence Partner, and any Minor Defence Partner on the grounds of corruption, treason, or conflict of interest.

(5) The Council may impeach an official of either South Cyprus or North Cyprus on the grounds of corruption, treason, or conflict of interest. The members of the Council shall, during Impeachment proceedings and hearings on removal on the basis of an Impeachment so issued, have the right to sit in the Legislature, speak, vote, and ask and answer questions.

(6) For the purposes aforesaid, loyalties to communal extremist ideologies or involvement in groups which advocate communal extremist ideologies shall constitute corruption or treason, as the situation may be, depending on the severity of the charge.

(7) For the purposes aforesaid, a communal extremist ideology shall be any ideology which proposes the annexation of either Republic, or both, into another State or other States; or the dissolution of the Pancypriot Council on grounds other than through its being made obsolete through the establishment of a political order which better furthers communal harmony; or which agitates between the communities which exist on Cyprus; or which maintains any irredentist claim of land or property other than those recognised by the Constitutions of South Cyprus and North Cyprus; or which intentionally brings to harm or advocates the bringing to harm of any community; or which intentionally brings to harm or advocates the bringing to harm of individuals based on their real or perceived membership in, or real or perceived loyalties to, any communal minority or majority group, in North Cyprus, or South Cyprus, or elsewhere, except through due process of law in the case that these loyalties constitute treason or corruption.

I claim no originality for Parts II and III of this Act, which make only small alterations to Parts VI and VII of the Government of India Act proposed by Dr. Ambedkar in his book, Pakistan or the Partition of India. Parts I and IV are of my own creation.

v. There are many benefits to this Act.

Republics constituted in this way are sure to face sabotage and extremism on both sides. The Republics I have proposed the creation of are given the means and the responsibility to deal with these elements in anticipation of this fact. As mentioned, neither the majority of Greek Cypriots or the majority of Turkish Cypriots are communal extremists, but those who have access to political tools tend to be on the more extreme side of things. The Pancypriot Council Act is a weapon in the hands of the moderate majority to stamp out extremism in the governments and the Defence Forces.

The most controversial sections of this Act I believe will be the composition of the Defence Forces. This is because we live in a world which has more or less accepted the principle of “national self-determination” for its own sake, even when it is bound to lead to conflict or suffering. The Act does not give the Republics majority in their own defence forces. This is because I find that a militarised society constantly at risk of war due to the extremist elements with which it is teeming to be scarcely preferable to the current state of affairs. But the Act provides a means and a motive for the reduction of extremism as well as a means of reducing the number of foreign troops over time as this becomes tenable. My hope is that both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots will be troubled enough by the existence of communal extremists within the military to support the initiative to limit their power until such time as they are removed.

As regards Greece and Turkey, the powers granted by the Mutuality Act are negative freedoms; Greece and Turkey are not to exceed a 15% representation. The number can be lowered, but never raised above 15%. As regards the UK, the presence of British troops in both militaries makes a war between the two nigh-on impossible. As regards the Minor Defence Partners, no one of them is to have too big a share. They are meant to be of a revolving, replaceable character in acknowledgement of the necessity of the task and the unsuitability for the task engendered by all parties inclined towards it. They have significant functional overlap with the UN peacekeeping forces such as that the latter can decrease in importance and eventually leave the island.

I believe this is the best solution to the Cyprus Dispute yet proposed anywhere. It establishes the purposes of the new States to be the elimination of nationalist extremism and the furtherance of the ideal of universal equality before the law. It recognises the autonomy of the Cypruses while also providing for the growth of friendship and cooperation between these communities with conflicting political goals. I would go so far as to say that even an anarchist should support this scheme. From an anti-statist perspective, it demotes the Republic of North Cyprus from a state mandated for the defence of an ethnically homogenous vassal state to a liberal democracy which exists only on the basis of the consent of the governed. It demotes the Republic of Cyprus from a de facto expansionist regime predicated on Church authority and Greek supremacist Ethnarchy to a liberal democracy existing on equal terms with its Northern neighbour, under a constitution which reflects reality. It weakens the imperialist powers of Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom and decreases the chances for war in Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, or any of the Minor Defence Partners. The goal of an anarchist is to affect the consciousness of the people in such a way as can develop into networks of mutual aid in order to destroy the systems of class in a capitalist society. Yet such a thing cannot possibly happen in Cyprus as it currently exists. The definition of extremist ideologies has been written so as to exclude anarchism, which after all exists for the furtherance of principles on which these states will be based. No anarchist should consider it a downgrade from the current state of things. One could go so far as to consider it a proletarian dictatorship in the service of equality and anti-communalism, or as close to such a thing as may ever exist in practical terms.

Yet those who are not given to anarchist ideology will find much to be happy about here as well. As sovereign countries, South Cyprus and North Cyprus will be able to determine the opening and closure of their own borders. They will be able to determine the circumstances of immigration or transfer of property between the South and the North under geopolitically normal conditions such as those which govern relations between the United States and Canada or Norway and Sweden. This Mutuality Act has not recognised and in fact foregone the recognition of any communal character and therefore of a Greek Cyprus or a Turkish Cyprus — the communal partition of the island is therefore not legitimised and is not mandated to continue into the future. The distinction between the two states is geographical and historical only. The principle of separation of church and state is thus maintained and allows for the alteration of communal character due to migration or conversion. Yet at the same time, neither government will be able to forcibly or maliciouslyalter the communal composition of the other because each will maintain normal levels of control which a modern day State might expect to hold over its territory. At any rate it will not be advantageous for either government to want to alter the communal character of the other, as this scheme rejects communal composition as a basis for statehood or the holding of office. The pox of communal political parties will remain, but this can only be rejected by the people, not by an act of legislation, and so remains a goal for the new civil society which will, if all goes well, grow under these conditions. Nothing is demanded of one state that is not demanded of the other state, and nothing is conceded to one state which is not conceded to the other state. The principle of equality between the two states is preserved completely. It neither precludes nor mandates an eventual reunion.

The Pancypriot Council Act is a reformist solution which seeks to salvage the best of the present geopolitical order in order to further peace and stability. It is preferable to the current circumstance in that it allows for the economic and social development of both societies and has, I believe, genuine potential to help bury the social tensions which currently hold the Cypriots back from establishing historical and social agency over their own circumstances as well as perpetually threatens a war. I believe that under the conditions created by this Act, a truly revolutionary ideology and movement would be more able to flourish. We should not wait on the establishment of these conditions, but we can agree that they are preferable to the conditions established by the coup.

But it would be overselling to call the act in itself revolutionary. Virtually every issue identified with the capitalist system, including that of the fundamental illegitimacy of national borders, remains untouched. This, too, remains an objective for the civil society.

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Footnotes

¹ Golden Dawn and the state disagree about the relationship of the migrants to the Turks who were expelled from what is now Greece along the course of the independence movement. In my view, the state’s allowance for the construction of mosques in Athens acknowledges that the Muslims who live in Athens today are not remnants of a Turkish oppressor class, especially in that this allowance is not accompanied by a retraction of the still-commonly-held view that the Turks of pre-independent Athens were remnants of the oppressor class. The fascists, though, seem to make no such distinction. But what is important here is that both interpretations share the same analysis of the violence carried out against the Turks in independence-era Athens, namely that it is justifiable because they constituted an oppressor class.

² Peristianis, Nikos. Between Nation and State: Nation, Nationalism, State, and National Identity in Cyprus. Middlesex University, 2008.

³ Hughes-Wilson, J. (2013). Greek Chickens Come Home to Roost. Rusi Journal. Retrieved from http://www.intelligencemuseum.org/assets/pdf/articles/article_cyprus_74_jhw.pdf

⁴ This quote is from Turkish Cypriot leader Raouf Denktas, quoting the sixth president of Turkey, Fahri Korutürk, in a November 1983 issue of Milliyet, a Turkish newspaper. Translation courtesy Hughes-Wilson, Greek Chickens Come Home to Roost, footnote 33.

⁵ Hughes-Wilson, J. (2013). Greek Chickens Come Home to Roost. Rusi Journal. Retrieved from http://www.intelligencemuseum.org/assets/pdf/articles/article_cyprus_74_jhw.pdf

⁶ https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Cyprus-united-independent-with-its-people-sovereign/