Conclusions

Greece’s Ostpolitik, its political and economic opening to the Soviet Bloc, constitutes an exceptional case in the international politics of the Cold War. It was a multilevel foreign policy course that had serious ramifications in the regional architecture of power in the coherence of the NATO Alliance. Unlike the French and German Ostpolitik, which was exclusively intended to achieve a détente in their relations with the Soviet Bloc, Greece’s opening to the Eastern European countries was designed to serve multiple purposes. This study argues that the Greek equivalent to the Ostpolitik Paris and Bonn followed during the Cold War, concerns only the period from the early 1950s until 1967. Greece’s opening to the Communist World during the military dictatorship (1967–1974) was of a mere propagandistic nature. The more robust, comprehensive Ostpolitik pursued by Athens in the timespan 1974–1989 was aimed at addressing an existential threat for Greece’s security, which came from its own Western Bloc, Turkey.