A State Made in London: The Protocols That Created Greece

The Greek state has a birth certificate, and it is worth reading closely. It is not a proclamation issued from a liberated Acropolis, nor a treaty concluded between the Ottoman Empire and a victorious insurgent government. It is a diplomatic protocol drawn up in a European capital and signed by the representatives of three empires, none of them Greek. To follow the paper trail of the founding is to watch a nation-state constituted less by the people it would govern than by the powers that had decided it should exist. The romance of an ancient nation reawakening in 1821 is a later gloss; the documents themselves describe something more modern and more revealing — a state written into being from outside.

The Protocol of 3 February 1830

The decisive instrument bears a precise date. Roderick Beaton marks the London Protocol of 3 February 1830 as the watershed of the whole story — the moment at which Greece became, in his phrase, the first new nation-state of Europe. What matters is who put their names to it. It was, as Beaton records,

“the ‘London Protocol’, signed on 3 February 1830 by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, and Russia”

— Roderick Beaton, The Making of Modern Greece, p. 1

Not a Greek signatory among them. The men who constituted the Greek state were the accredited representatives of the three great powers, acting with the Ottoman government’s prior consent annexed to the document. And the language of the founding article was not Greek but French — the working tongue of nineteenth-century diplomacy — decreeing the new state into existence in the register of the chancelleries:

“La Grèce formera un Etat indépendant, et jouira de tous les droits politiques, administratifs, et commerciaux”

— Roderick Beaton, The Making of Modern Greece, p. 1

“Greece shall form an independent state.” The grammar is telling: a future imperative, issued by outside authority. The nation does not declare its own independence; it is declared independent, in someone else’s language, by someone else’s ambassadors. Whatever else the Greek Revolution had been — and it had been a decade of insurrection, siege, and sacrifice — the legal act that produced the state was a European settlement.

The three protecting powers and their king

The Protocol of 1830 fixed the principle of an independent Greece; it did not yet settle what kind of state that Greece would be, or who would rule it. Those questions were answered two years later, again abroad, and again by the same three governments. Koliopoulos and Veremis, in the standard academic history of modern Greece, describe how the Greek Question was resolved in the summer of 1832 by the powers that had appointed themselves its arbiters:

“by the three protecting European powers – Great Britain, France, and Russia – which signed two founding international treaties, one with the Bavarian royal dynasty of the Wittelsbach”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, p. 28

The phrasing repays attention. The founding treaties of the Greek state were signed not with any Greek assembly but with a Bavarian dynasty — the house of Wittelsbach — whose teenage son Otto was dispatched to reign over a country he had never seen and whose language he did not speak. Yannis Hamilakis strips the arrangement of its ceremonial dignity in a single phrase, describing Otto simply as “the Bavarian monarch that European powers had selected for Greece” (The Nation and its Ruins, p. 108). Selected: the verb belongs to a procurement, not a coronation. Even the young king’s legitimation had to be borrowed from outside, staged through the classical antiquity that Europe itself had projected onto the Greek landscape and then handed back to its inhabitants as their inheritance.

The pattern that emerges from these documents is consistent. The powers that had destroyed the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827, and so opened the military path to Greek statehood, were the same powers that drafted the Protocol of 1830, signed the Wittelsbach treaties of 1832, and chose the king. At every hinge of the founding, the decisive signatures are foreign. The Greek population supplied the revolution’s blood and much of its will; the European chancelleries supplied its state.

A perfectly colonial condition

What word fits an arrangement in which foreign powers write the founding document, choose the form of government, install a foreign monarch, and underwrite the whole with loans secured against the country itself? Stathis Gourgouris, surveying the same founding arrangements, does not flinch from the strongest available term. Reviewing the independence loans that held the entire country as collateral, the foreign-prescribed orthography, and the Bavarian king hailed as a marble monarch reborn, he reaches a stark verdict:

“What we have here is none other than a perfectly colonial condition”

— Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 153

The claim is deliberately provocative, and it is meant to unsettle the national narrative at its root. If sovereignty means a people constituting its own state on its own authority, then the founding of Greece was, in Gourgouris’s reading, an inversion of sovereignty: a state instituted as Europe’s project on Ottoman ground. This is not to deny that Greeks fought, suffered, and desired independence; it is to insist that the desire was consummated by a settlement they did not author. The independence proclaimed at London in French was real, but it arrived pre-owned.

None of this diminishes the courage of the insurgents of 1821, and it need not. The point is narrower and more exacting. The modern Greek state, whatever its people’s aspirations, was legally constituted by a foreign protocol, given its constitution and its king by a foreign treaty, and financed by foreign loans against foreign collateral. A national mythology that begins with an ancient people liberating itself must edit out the ambassadors, the French text, and the Bavarian court. The archive does not permit the edit. It records, plainly and in three signatures, a state made in London.