The decades following the Second World War saw the return of the ‘minorities question’. The last of the colonial empires were being dissolved and replaced by nation states, where the principle of nationality was usually interpreted in terms of state boundaries having to coincide with cultural and linguistic ones. Around the world, Greek minorities experienced the corollaries of the ‘question’ very differently. The most extreme examples were Egypt and Turkey, each of which expelled them. In West Germany, Greek and other southern Europeans were invited to work, but not to settle. The fact that they were dubbed Fremdarbeiter (‘alien workers’) and then with the milder term Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) suggested their presence raised concerns about their ‘acceptability’ on cultural grounds (Gatrell 2019: 143). In Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, Greeks and Greek Cypriot immigrants were able to settle permanently, but here too governments and host societies expected newcomers to assimilate and leave their cultural baggage behind. By the later decades of the century, however, Greek Americans, Greek Canadians, Cypriot Greeks in Britain, Greek Australians and Greeks in Germany had become prosperous communities in the world’s most prosperous countries. By then, most of the nations in question practised forms of multiculturalism, had outlawed ethnic discrimination and were celebrating cultural difference rather than merely tolerating it.

This chapter takes up where Chapter 3 left off, but begins with Cyprus, with its most unusual post-colonial history and its equally unusual ‘minorities question’. This former British colonial territory had seen imposed upon it a ‘neutered’ post-colonial existence and an unworkable political system to suit the strategic interests of much greater powers (Anderson 2008). In 1974, in response to a political crisis engineered by another foreign power (Greece), Turkey violently partitioned Cyprus so that its Turkish minority did not have to live under Greek majority rule.

The ‘Cyprus Problem’ in international affairs, 1950–1955

Cyprus was spared the devastation of the Second World War. If anything, the island benefited from high wartime demand for its commodities, bringing high employment and giving greater bargaining power to unions, which saw a rise in membership.