In the early 1990s, it became fashionable to portray Greece as an awkward partner or indeed a black sheep in the European Union: an economic laggard, falling behind in the European income league, with large budget deficits and double-digit inflation, who also acted in a particularly uncooperative manner in the attempts made by its Western allies to stabilize the Balkan region. This followed a decade of economic mismanagement and rhetorical outbursts in the area of foreign policy, coupled with the habit of adding dissenting footnotes to joint communiques issued by the European Community (as it was still called at the time) and NATO.
For those who use the term "Balkans" in a pejorative fashion, Greece was behaving like a Balkan country in the EU, adding to the problem instead of trying to be part of the solution in a notoriously unstable and conflict-ridden region. And then came Samuel Huntington, who argued that the clash of civilizations was bound to replace the struggle between liberal democracy and communist totalitarianism, and who then proceeded to identify the major fault lines cutting across the European continent. Greece found itself on the wrong side of Huntington's map, because of its Orthodox tradition, not to mention several centuries spent under Ottoman rule. It all made sense, of course; and it was therefore utterly predictable.
