The day after the dream

Nationalism and revolution The day after the dream The Greek struggle for independence helped inspire a wave of nationalismand holds lessons for foreign intervention today The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe. By Mark Mazower. Penguin Press; 608 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30

When a coalition of footloose merchants, sea captains, hard-pressed peasants, landlords, bandits, clerics and intellectuals raised the flag against the Ottomans in the spring of 1821, the great powers of Europe knew exactly what they thought. This impertinent move to establish a state called Greece spelled trouble and should be discouraged.

After six years of grinding warfare, economic ruin and atrocities, the calculus shifted. Europe's masters felt they had more to fear from an Ottoman victory, with all the punitive killings and deportations that would follow. In October 1827 the British, French and Russian navies-notionally bent on enforcing a truce-sank the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet in Navarino Bay. That did not instantly create a functioning Greek state, but it was a matter of time.

In turn that set a precedent for the emergence of other small, proud European states, wrested from the grip of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires-a process lasting until the final collapse of those empires during or soon after the first world war. As the subtitle of Mark Mazower's new book maintains, events in Greece 200 years ago helped shape modern Europe. His elegant and rigorous account also holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.

What changed the international view of the Greek struggle? To some extent, the...