The political mayhem which overtook Greece in the 1960s was avoidable and, in some ways, unexpected. Although the embers of a bitter left-right civil war were still smouldering, Hellenes began the decade in an upbeat mood. There seemed a decent chance that democracy would put down stronger roots in the land of its birth as prosperity grew.

Instead, one disaster followed another. The country’s future was furiously contested not only by scheming politicians but by other groups: street demonstrators, a politicised monarchy, the American embassy and foreign spooks. All this is subject to careful, intelligent analysis in a new biography of Andreas Papandreou by Stan Draenos, an American-based Greek historian and political scientist.

Using archives and interviews, Mr Draenos studies every twist in the early political career of the man who later stormed to power as Greece’s first socialist leader in 1981. The book traces Papandreou’s return to Greece in 1959 as an American-trained academic, his metamorphosis into a political firebrand, his imprisonment in 1967, followed a few months later by his expulsion from Greece and exile in Sweden. (The family’s Swedish experience helped to mould Andreas’s son, George Papandreou, into a moderate social-democratic leader whose government fell victim to the euro crisis last year.)

Mr Draenos describes how Andreas’s father, George Papandreou senior, struggled from 1963 to govern as a prime minister of the centre, only to fall in 1965 after a quarrel with the king. The stakes rose as the younger Papandreou moved further to the left of his father, querying Greece’s role in NATO. But many of the book’s most original points relate to the older man, who, despite his populist style, was a staunch anti-communist. The story comes to a head in April 1967 when a clique of colonels seized power in a bid to pre-empt an election victory by the Papandreous; many Greeks suspected an American hand in the takeover. Military rule only ended in 1974 when the regime, again with an apparent wink from some American quarters, launched a disastrous coup against the leader of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, prompting a Turkish invasion of the island.

Can any parallels be drawn with Greece’s present-day travails? One thing, at least, never seems to change. There is a vicious circle in which heavy-handed external intervention in Greek affairs triggers feelings of victimhood and xenophobia, and reduces the chances of local politicians ever taking full responsibility for their country’s fate. As a political and psychological strategy, blaming foreigners is always easier than honest introspection – and easier still when foreigners really do behave badly. But that paradigm only goes so far when trying to understand the 1960s, and in this finely-worked study, Mr Draenos dissects the conventional wisdom, albeit from a perspective broadly sympathetic to the Papandreous.

And he provides some useful balance. A military coup, he argues persuasively, was never the preferred outcome of the American government, either in 1967 or the preceding years. Like some other analysts of the period, he also notes that the colonels’ coup came as a surprise to many influential Americans; they were expecting a generals’ coup, not a revolt from the middle ranks. Conventional thinking is right to deplore the criminal folly shown by the Athens junta in fomenting an ultra-nationalist coup in Cyprus in 1974. But, as Mr Draenos recalls, tension between Greek leaders in Athens (including democratic ones) and their Greek-Cypriot cousins, had been simmering for a decade. To any leader in Athens, including George Papandreou senior, the idea of annexing all or even most of Cyprus seemed a tempting way of guaranteeing a place in history. Many Greek-Cypriots preferred their island to be independent and non-aligned. From the 1960s onwards, the internal quarrels of the Greek world were so passionate that all Hellenic parties underestimated the determination of Turkey to assert its interests.

Many Greeks recall with admiration the refusal of George Papandreou senior to accept an American plan to unite most of Cyprus with Greece while giving Turkey a base on the island. But, as is made clear by Mr Draenos’s account, the wily centrist leader was quite attracted by the plan; it was more the detail, and the bullying way it was promoted, that he disliked. And it was not the colonels, but George Papandreou senior, who sent George Grivas – a right-wing nationalist guerrilla chieftain – back to Cyprus in the hope of bringing to heel the independent-minded Makarios. Democratic politicians, as well as blimpish colonels, can engage in nationalist gamesmanship.
This book takes readers deep inside a political drama whose consequences are still with us. Many Greeks believe their country’s democratic development was fatally set back by the junta of 1967-74; and Greek-Turkish relations have yet to recover from the Cyprus conflict of 1974. Some of the book’s details will be of interest only to specialists on the region; but for anyone who works through the details, it contains sobering lessons for the present day.

Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Democrat and Political Maverick by Stan Draenos. I.B. Tauris; 256 pages. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

* This article was first published in The Economist.