From Anti-Americanism to Americanofilia: The United States in the kaleidoscope of Greek society

On 3 June 2025, the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford hosted an illuminating symposium entitled “From Anti-Americanism to Americanofilia: The United States in the Kaleidoscope of Greek Society.” Over the course of the afternoon, Dr Lamprini Rori, Assistant Professor of Political Analysis at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Dr Eirini Karamouzi, Associate Professor of Contemporary History and International Relations at the American College of Greece, presented preliminary findings from their joint research project. Their remarks were followed by commentary from Professor Paul Betts (Modern European History, St Antony’s College, Oxford) and Professor Dimitris Papadimitriou (Political Science, University of Manchester). Together, they charted fifty years of Greek attitudes towards the United States, weaving together party politics, public opinion, media analysis and the performative rituals of state visits.

Dr Rori commenced with a mass-level perspective, demonstrating that Greek public opinion—drawn from Eurobarometer, MRP and national surveys—remained net negative towards the United States throughout the 1980s and 1990s, only tipping into mildly favourable territory in 2022. She highlighted a striking pattern of elite–mass convergence and divergence: in the 1980s both voters and party elites shared similarly anti-American sentiments; in the 1990s, elites became noticeably more pro-American than the electorate; in the 2000s, the public adopted scepticism aligned with the left-wing parties; and in the 2010s, citizens moderated their stance more rapidly than party leadership. Until the mid-1990s, ideological self-placement and party vote were strong predictors of attitudes to the US; after the financial crash, however, these factors lost explanatory power, leaving only pro-European orientation and attitudes towards Russia as significant correlates.

Dr Karamouzi then traced the post-1974 evolution of elite discourse, drawing upon sentiment analysis of 102 party manifestoes and over a million parliamentary speeches. She showed that manifestoes from Greece’s centre-left and centre-right parties have consistently expressed mild pro-American sentiment, whereas the far left—and from the mid-2000s onwards, the far right—fired up peaks of anti-American rhetoric around the Cyprus crisis of 1974 and the Iraq War of 2004. Parliamentary debates, by contrast, proved more volatile: from the end of the Cold War until the financial crisis of 2008, mainstream parties overwhelmingly adopted a pro-US tone in discussions of defence and EU–US relations. After 2008, however, those same parties sharply reduced US references even as the political fringes intensified their criticism, linking Greek economic hardship and sovereignty anxieties to broader global events. To test these observations rigorously, Rori and Karamouzi estimated a series of probit regression models across both elite and mass-level datasets.

Shifting from discourse to spectacle, Professors Papadimitriou and Karamouzi examined Greece’s eighteen high-level visits since 1974 as barometers of the bilateral relationship. Their media analysis revealed that until around 2010, state visits elicited cautious coverage, often resurrecting grievances over Cyprus, the junta years and US policy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Once the financial crisis and renewed regional tensions with Turkey reasserted Greece’s strategic value, however, press narratives shifted decisively. US Presidents and Greek Prime Ministers were portrayed not as distant patrons or adversaries, but as indispensable crisis-managers. As one interviewee quipped, “Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about Greece—these visits remind him we exist.” That pragmatic outlook, echoed in both elite circles and popular media, heralds a new chapter of measured “Americanofilia.”

During the ensuing discussion, participants probed these findings from multiple angles. They debated whether anti-Americanism in Greece is truly distinct from broader EU or Turkey-related anxieties, whether political parties lead public opinion or vice versa, and how cultural admiration for American film, fashion and fast food can coexist with persistent policy-level distrust. Long-standing certainties—of left-wing opposition defining anti-Americanism—gave way to a more nuanced narrative in which right-wing populism, debates over economic integration and diaspora politics all play pivotal roles.

As the session drew to a close, it was evident that Greek attitudes towards the United States remain a kaleidoscope of historical traumas, strategic necessity and shifting domestic cleavages. Whether the modestly positive turn in 2022 marks the dawn of genuine Americanofilia or merely another transient alignment in an ever-evolving political landscape will be the challenge for the next phase of this project—and for anyone endeavouring to fathom the subtleties of transatlantic friendship in the twenty-first century.

by Yangyang Zhao (ESC Research Assistant)