nimosity has deep historical roots and each side points to age-old grievances to justify its hostility toward the other. However, it can be argued that at least during the last several centuries that peace was at least conceivable. Or rather it was that at least until 1974 there were no irreconcilable tensions in the Aegean for the simple reason that there was a climate of mutual and cordial co-operation within NATO (Moustakis, 1999, p. 8).
Historically the Aegean has attracted many conquerors and invaders but the presence of Greeks in the Aegean has been consistent. The present dispute between Greece and Turkey is a break with history in that both countries are members of the NATO alliance and logically are supposed to be allies.
Greeks have formed the majority of the inhabitants on the Aegean islands for some 3,000 years and despite the succession of foreign occupiers, they maintained this status quo into the present century. After they won their independence from the Ottoman Turks during the 1820s, the Greeks managed to establish their sovereignty on these Greek-inhabited territories through wars (especially the Balkan Wars of 1912-14) and various treaties (especially the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 and Treaty of Paris in 1947) (Moustakis, 1999, p. 9).
Despite Turkish apprehension about these foreign controlled islands lying closely off their coast, there was a relatively peaceful co-existence between these two countries until 1974. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 triggered a series of other disputes in the Aegean, which created the danger of an armed conflict between Greece and Turkey. Crises occurred in 1976, 1987 and most recently in 1996, a level of discord that is now suddenly and unexpectedly receding, as is discussed later (Wernick, 1999, pp. 96-7).
Much of the trouble of the region in the past 25 years as well as before that has come about because of a sense of insecurity on the part of Turkish leaders and ...