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Eastern Party in Greece


Eastern Party is a concept that has long been used by mainstream historians to define the reaction of a section of the population in the Third World countries against Westernization and the import of Western values in their societies. Rather than a specific political party, the term refers to a current in the public opinion of the said countries opposed to a "Western Party" of modernizers, who tend to accept Westernization as an inevitable phenomenon, which finally benefits the overall progress of Third World societies. Particularly in the History of Greece and Byzantium, this concept has been largely used by noted historians like Arnold J. Toynbee, Leften Stavrianos, Alexander Vasiliev and Nicolae Iorga, at the beginning of the 20th century and later by Dimitri Kitsikis.

American historian Stavrianos was a follower of British historian Toynbee and wrote in 1972 that "the first teaching given to us by History is that Greece is an underdeveloped country and therefore is part of the Third World". Toynbee, who, in 1922, had published a famous book on the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922, he also had placed Greece in the Third World. Furthermore, he considered Greece a victim of the West and condemned Western civilization as a failed civilization

The concept of an Eastern Party, as a reaction to the West, existed in China in the 17th century. In the last days of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese people were divided, like the Byzantines some centuries earlier, between supporters of Western Roman Catholics and supporters of the Manchus and Turkic Mongols. The first were collaborating with the "Franks", the second with the "Tatars". Finally, the Eastern Party prevailed, and Beijing gave itself to the Tatars. Supported by the Jesuits, the Chinese empress, the wife of the last Ming, was baptized as a Roman Catholic under the name Anne, and the heir of the throne, as a Catholic, had taken the name Constantine. The two queen mothers and many members of the royal court were also baptized as Roman Catholics.


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