Can cultural life thrive under Authoritarianism? Evidence from Greece, 1970–1973

On 7 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on the relationship between authoritarian rule and cultural creativity. Chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of SEESOX, who also served as discussant, the seminar featured Stathis Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, presenting his recent Greek-language book Big Bang 1970–1973. Best known for his work on civil war and political violence, Kalyvas turned to the cultural life of the Greek military dictatorship to ask a broader question: is the absence of freedom necessarily suppressive of culture?

Kalyvas began by observing that the answer is far from obvious. One intuition holds that repression stifles cultural life; another that hardship drives people to seek refuge in culture. The empirical record is mixed, with much richer cultural life in Brazil than in Pinochet's Chile, in Czechoslovakia than in East Germany, and in Iran than in North Korea. Greece under the Colonels (1967–1974)—the last successful military coup in Europe, launched by colonels against their own generals and ultimately undone by the Cyprus crisis and the Turkish invasion of 1974—is conventionally remembered as a "cultural desert". According to the standard narrative, the regime interrupted the cultural renaissance of the early 1960s, driving creativity underground into indirect forms of resistance, symbolised by two émigré figures, the composer Mikis Theodorakis and the actress Melina Mercouri. Kalyvas organised his talk around four questions: whether there was high-quality cultural production under the dictatorship; if so, what explains it; why this has been forgotten; and why it matters.

Escaping from inequality: Is Europe trapped by history?

On 5 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on the long-run history and future prospects of economic inequality in Europe. Chaired by Timothy Garton Ash, the seminar featured Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, best known for The Great Leveler, on the historical forces that reduce inequality, and Escape from Rome, on how Europe’s fragmentation shaped its distinctive path to modernity. Garton Ash challenged Scheidel to combine the arguments of both books into a single account of whether Europe can escape inequality while remaining, in effect, trapped by its own history. Scheidel responded with a deliberately high-level overview, noting that precise measures of historical inequality remain elusive.

He began with the long arc of European inequality, which peaked just before the First World War after roughly four centuries of rising inequality following the Black Death. Within that period, he argued, the Thirty Years’ War was the only major interruption, illustrating his central thesis that only massive, usually violent shocks have historically produced significant levelling: mass-mobilisation warfare, communist revolution, state collapse and catastrophic pandemics. The great compression between 1914 and 1945, followed by further, gentler equalisation into the 1970s, was a semi-global phenomenon. East of the Iron Curtain it was driven by communism; in Western market economies by falling returns on capital, progressive taxation, unionisation and the post-war welfare state. Since the 1980s, however, deregulation, financialisation, automation and, above all, globalisation—which added roughly a billion low-income workers to the world economy—have reversed the trend, steadily increasing the share of income flowing to capital rather than labour.