Since the mid-1970s and after a quarter of a century of forced ‘silence’, the course of the country in the international environment puzzled the Greek society and created a strong confrontation. Under the burden of the events in Cyprus in July 1974 and of the constantly aggravating relations between Greece and Turkey, the international cooperations and alliances, the position and role of Greeece in organizations (United Nations, NATO, EEC) and the ‘privileged’ relations with the USA were contested. This tendency to change and redetermination of the country’s international relations was expressed by Andreas Papandreou, who often developed an anti-American oratory. Himself and PASOK dominated the political life in Greece throughout the 1980s.

Watchwords such as ‘Greece belongs to Greeks’ and ‘sovereignty’ embodied the new ideological and political pursuits that prevailed in the Greek society and related to its new images and ideas about itself and its position in the world. As to government policy, a series of peace initiatives signified ultimately that Greece claimed a different position in the system of international relations and roles different from those that were traditionally attributed to it. Examples of these initiatives were the constitution of the Group of Six (Greece, Sweden, Tanzania, Argentina, India, Mexico) for the freeze of nuclear equipment, the systematic differentiation within the EEC and the NATO (e.g. the veto), the unilateral development of relations with the USSR and its allies, but also with leaders (e.g. Arafat) and countries that were the target of the USA and the western forces (e.g. Libya, Syria, Nicaragua).