erolz wrote:Kifeas wrote: Indeed you are right in admitting that trying to prove Greece's "expansionist" nature by using the yard stick you have provided, "must be idiocy of a grand scale," however, do you also know why it is such a "total nonsense?"
It is generaly GC and Greeks that use the term 'expansionist' in a perjorative sense and specifically when they refer to Turkey. In reality the term expansionist has no direct 'moral' meaning. It means simply to expand and if you do not measure how much something has expanded by how much it has expanded, then you are living in a cloud cookoo land of rehtoric over reason.
Indeed one can rightfully claim that Turkey of present and the last few decades shows very strong signs of an expansionist country! Setting aside the fact that it invaded and continues to occupy north Cyprus for purely expansionist and geo-strategic reasons -and not those it claimed to have once existed, or still do; it shows expansionist trades by the way it reacts to the RoC's right to exploit its continental shelf (even the one south of Cyprus;) by the way it reacts to Greece’s right to expand its territorial waters in the Aegean, to the internationally recognised by treaties 12 miles; and by the way it "barks" and goes about the situation in Northern Iraq and the oil reserves in it, using the minority Turkmen population there as a stepping stone.
Back to your allegory, do you mean to say that had the 1821 Greek revolution successfully liberated the whole of today's Greece, instantaneously (all at once,) instead of only a small part first (presumably due to lack of means or due to the existence of a very powerful ottoman colonial force) and then a gradual liberation of more territories in the course of time; that this
would not have "qualified" Greece as an expansionist country? Is the criterion only the scope of time it took, since the first section was liberated and gained its independence; or is it whether one country legitimately increased its territory due the existence of majority ethnic populations, besides the existence of whatever historical rights?
As far as I know, expansionism, as the term is used in international politics and law, has a rather negative connotation! It is usually -if not always, associated with colonialism and /or imperialism, i.e. the illegitimate expansion of one country into areas that legitimately should belong to another country or nation. "Expansionism" of one country always occurs in the illegitimate expense of another country or nation! To whose expense did Greece "illegitimately" expand its territories over the years? Wasn’t it in the expense of the former Ottoman Empire? Was the Ottoman Empire a legitimate possessor those primarily Greek populated areas, or in fact it was the opposite? Was it an illegitimate expansionism on the part of Greece, or it was the bringing to an end of an already existing illegitimate expansionism by a then existing colonial empire? What does time, i.e. the scope of years during which this end was brought, has to do in this equation?
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Why is everything that says something negative about Greeks "propaganda"???
