Between Parliament and Barracks: The Crisis of Liberal Rule during the Greek Interwar Period

The Hellenic Studies Program presents Dr. Giorgos Souvlis (NOVA University of Lisbon), on "Between Parliament and Barracks: The Crisis of Liberal Rule during the Greek Interwar Period"

Abstract: This paper examines the crisis of political liberalism in interwar Greece by analysing the recurrent intervention of army generals in politics as a structural consequence of the failure to establish a durable bourgeois hegemony after 1916, with particular emphasis on the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–1935). Conventional historiography has often interpreted military intervention as an external disruption of political life, portraying coups and army-led governments as episodic deviations from an otherwise functioning parliamentary order. This paper offers a different interpretation by conceptualising the Greek military as a structural political actor within a regime that struggled to secure stability through consensual mechanisms of governance. It argues that military interventions constituted recurring mechanisms through which unresolved social conflicts, intra-elite rivalries, and crises of political legitimacy were temporarily managed when civilian institutions proved unable to contain them. The army thus operated as a political “safety valve” within a fragile parliamentary system, absorbing and regulating tensions that the civilian political sphere could not resolve. To explain this dynamic, the paper draws on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, understood as the capacity of a ruling bloc to construct and sustain political consent both within dominant social groups and across broader sectors of society. Gramsci’s distinction between intra-class cohesion -the ability of a dominant group to organise itself politically- and inter-class consent -the capacity to incorporate subordinate groups into a stable political order- provides a framework for analysing the structural vulnerabilities of Greek liberal democracy. Building on Dylan Riley’s reinterpretation of Gramscian theory in his work on political sociology and fascism, this paper argues that the persistent politicisation of the army reflected the inability of Greece’s dominant political forces to construct a stable hegemonic bloc capable of reconciling elite competition with broader social integration. The repeated emergence of the military as an arbiter of political conflict should therefore be understood as a manifestation of a deeper crisis of state formation, political representation, and bourgeois hegemony in interwar Greece.

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Bio: George Souvlis completed his PhD at the European University Institute (Department of History and Civilization) in Florence. He has taught courses in modern and contemporary Greek and European history and sociology at Democritus University of Thrace (2019–2020) and the University of Ioannina (2020–2023). Since 2025, he has been a researcher in the ERC Starting Grant project STEXEU — The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship: States of Exception and Authoritarianism in Europe, 1900–1939, coordinated by Arturo Zoffmann Rodríguez at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), NOVA University Lisbon, and funded by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant, Grant Agreement No. 101163723). His research interests lie in the fields of fascist studies, intellectual history, and historical sociology. His most recent publications include the books and edited volumes "Voices on the Left (2019), "Back to the ’30s? Crisis, Repetition, and Transition in the 20th and 21st Centuries" (co-edited with J. Rayner, S. Falls, and T. Nelms, 2020), "The Normalization of Far-Right Discourse in Greece" (co-edited with R. Vasilaki, 2021), the special issue "Re-assessing the Metaxas Dictatorship (1936–1941): Greek Fascism or Old-Style Authoritarianism?" (Fascism, 11(2), 2022; co-edited with A. Kallis), "Radical Journalism" (co-edited with S. Farrell and E. Siapera, 2023), "Duty to Revolt: Transnational and Commemorative Aspects of Revolution" (co-edited with A. Karatzogianni, 2023), "The Alternative Right in Greece (2025), and "Politics of Liberation: Conversations with Theory and History" (co-edited with R. Vasilaki, 2025). He has also published articles in journals including "Praksis", "Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe", "Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies", "Práticas da História", and "Critical Education".

The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University; and co-sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center's European Studies Council