The beating to death of an Australian tourist on Mykonos has woken Greeks up to the question of how the rest of the world perceives this country. It is a periodic awakening, usually following senseless deaths of tourists.

Last year two French tourists drowned in the bowels of the cruise ship Sea Diamond, run aground by its captain off Santorini. In 2006 two British siblings died tragically of carbon monoxide poisoning when the boiler of their rented bungalow on Corfu malfunctioned. In 2003 a young Briton was slashed to death with a broken bottle in the Rhodes resort of Faliraki following a night of binge drinking. Such stories are inevitably going to generate headlines in countries whose nationals suffer.

Sometimes the tourism-related stories are objectively important. In the biggest such story in recent years, 121 passengers and crew were killed in 2005 when a Cypriot Boeing 737 failed to compress at high altitude and plunged into eastern Attica. And Greece made international headlines in 2000 when 85 people drowned on board the Express Samina in the country’s second-worst maritime disaster.

Travel and tourism-related stories, along with natural disasters such as last year’s forest fires, also happen to be the biggest international headlines Greece has generated since the 2004 Olympics. This is both good and bad. As one veteran foreign correspondent points out (see article on page 5), it is a sign of how economic and political progress have moved Greece on from the upheavals of civil war, reconstruction and dictatorship between the 1940s and the 1970s; but it is also a signal that Greece is politically and economically trivial – a resort country the rest of the world remembers when the second home market heats up.

The trivialisation of Greece is not all its own doing. The country is partly a victim of the trivialisation of world news. As print media and even television begin to go into the red, news-gathering budgets are being slashed. The only news bureaus in Athens are run by the workhorses of the industry – the wire agencies – which act as a press pool for their clients. Besides them, few news organisations here offer salaried positions. Even active freelancers are few, and a press ministry demand that their dispatches be their chief source of income is a bit of a joke.

The dearth of news-gathering cash is leading to travesties; wire agencies now see their stories cannibalised by would-be correspondents, or sometimes stolen wholesale by desk editors in London and New York who can’t afford to field a journalist (or can’t be bothered to).

Greece is also partly a victim of each country’s natural introspection. With so many foreign nationals visiting (they were the majority of 16 million arrivals last year), any deaths during the news-starved summer months will cause disproportional headlines back home and displace other, perhaps more important, stories.

But if Greece cares about its image globally – and all the indications are that it does – it only seems to remember half the time. Television talkfests buzz with concern over the fallout on tourism and national pride every time a foreign medium criticises Greece; but when the furore is forgotten, it does not seem to occur to anyone that the country’s self-determination is its biggest story.

In the postwar stories, the political and social revolution that was the coming to power of Pasok in 1981, in being the eurozone straggler in 2001 and the country with the lowest expectations to hold the Olympics for some time, Greece was seen as striving for something. Our spectacular foreign policy turnaround in 1999 took Turkey by surprise and we leveraged the European Union effectively enough to nearly solve the division of Cyprus in 2004.

Increasingly, though, Greece seems to be getting bogged down in complacency and an inability to pass economic and social reforms. Either they are not passed to the extent that they are necessary (each administration seeming to be in conversation with the next) or not addressed at all. That is the case in the environment and the perception of corruption and lack of transparency, meritocracy and accountability in the public sector.

When a country seems to be at a stalemate with itself the media tend to lose interest. When it seems to be on the cusp of change the microphones come closer. Without a slew of reforms Greece will only be subject to the stories it cannot generate or suppress – human tragedy and natural disaster. It will be in terms of the media and real terms in the hands of fate.

One foreign correspondent speaking to this newspaper put it best: “There’s no sense of the country having any specific task to complete.”

[Via]

These things hurt. They hurt every Greek, inside or outside Greece.

By the way, the Athens News has some insights on this issue.

Something amazing happened on August 13, when, at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics, Athens 2004 president Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki welcomed the world to the Greek capital, declaring to a live audience of 72,000 and a TV audience estimated at 4 billion, “Greece is going to fire the world’s imagination.”

Against the odds, it did.

Suddenly, the intense skepticism that had built up in the media for months – about Athens’ preparedness, security, etc. – transformed into a sense that one of the most anticipated and doubted Olympic spectacles in history might just turn out to be one of the best.

Perceptions were shifted dramatically. It was as if the world had agreed that the moral of the 2004 Athens Olympic story would not be the familiar caution coined by 6th century BC Greek fable writer Aesop – “Look before you leap” – but rather his lesser-known enjoinder: “The greater the risk, the greater the honor” (an ancient version of Nike’s “Just do it”?).

Or perhaps: “He laughs best who laughs last.”

Another bout of skepticism quickly ensued over attendance and TV viewership – but once again the Olympics appear to have met, even exceeded, expectations. Early coverage focused on empty arena seats, raising questions about whether TV viewers would in turn tune out.

As of press time, Athens 2004 was close to its sales target of 3.4 million tickets. Attendance was lower than in the last (pre-recession, pre-9/11) Summer Games, but comparable to that of Barcelona in 1992 (3 million) and Seoul in 1988 (3.3 million).

Even more important, TV viewership was up 18% compared to Sydney, according to NBC. That increase is striking. Since 2000, the challenges to securing a mass TV audience have become far more onerous, but Athens delivered an even more massive mind share.

Rebranding Greece

One can still argue that the Olympics continue to be among the most prominent platforms for branding on the planet. Despite the challenges and expense of organizing, hosting, securing, and sponsoring the Olympics in an increasingly complex, post-9/11 world, the Games remain a powerful way for brands to make broad connections with deep impact.

Arguably, the brand that had the most at stake in this summer’s Olympics was the country of Greece itself. Hosting the Olympics can help countries boost tourism, attract investment, and create new infrastructure. With 11 million people, Greece is the smallest country to host the Games since Finland in 1952. Since 2000, its economy has expanded by 4% annually, with the Olympics contributing an estimated quarter of that total.

Perhaps the most valuable and enduring benefit for Greece, however, is the opportunity the Olympics provided to influence perceptions and redress negative stereotypes. Hosting the Games gave Greece a priceless, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “re-brand” itself on a world stage.

When construction delays began to cause concerns about Athens’ readiness as far back as 2000, it looked as if the old stereotype of Greece as a nation of friendly procrastinators might be reinforced. Particularly following 9/11 and the scrutiny on Athens as the Summer Games’ first host following the attacks, the skepticism escalated, reaching a fever pitch in the months before the opening.

(Indeed, a Turnkey Sports Poll of 400 senior-level sports-industry executives in the US conducted in July found the biggest perceived threats to a successful summer Olympics in Athens were terrorism [55.7%] and unfinished facilities [24%], far outpacing concerns about scandals relating to performance-enhancing drugs [3.6%].)

The opening ceremonies (which were produced by our firm) defied stereotypes and broadcasted a positive image of Greece to a global TV audience, merging pride in the country’s ancient past with a new image of its contemporary place in the world. According to NBC, which holds US broadcast rights, they were the most-watched non-US opening ceremonies, with a 14.6 rating/27 household share. It is no exaggeration to say that the ceremonies – which in 2000 were the most-watched event during the entire two-week Sydney Games – are the biggest three-hour ad a country could have.

Greece is on the warm side, no question. You can get there in about two hours, there are lots of packages and it’s not wildly expensive. And this year they’re doing the Olympics, one of those national Great Leap Forward things.

But everyone’s as anxious about Greece getting the Olympic Village built in time as they might have been about Bobby Acropolis having his new hotel in Rhodes finished when they’d got 200 couples from Blackburn booked.

Is Greece in Europe? On every conventional snobbish European criterion it sort of is. From Ancient Greece on – what middle-class baby-boomer didn’t have “the Glory that was Greece” in the childhood kit, along with the key classic translations in those purple Penguins – it seemed to hit the cultural buttons. And Robert Graves with his olives and ouzo was a pre-Tuscany ad for ex-pats.

But the reality of post-war Greece – the dodgy politics, the never-quite- made-it economy, and the food – made you wonder whether it was really in Europe or somewhere altogether hairier. Individual Greeks – Golden Greek entrepreneurs on their yachts and my enterprising friends in Wood Green – seemed modern and adaptable, but overwhelmingly they were somewhere else, runaways.

There are monographs about this sort of thing (“The Greek Paradox: promise vs performance” sums it up). And the clever people at the Future Foundation, re-thinking European alignments post-accession, seem to think Greece is a problem; whichever way they segment Europe, Greece is an oddity, out there on its own, a funny single-country sector.

The Greek National Tourist Office commercial does all the usual stuff, beaches and amphitheatres, with shafts of sunlight everywhere. They’re on about having the most sunshine in Europe, combined with silly stuff about how long people stand amazed at ancient sites or how quickly they forget work when they dive off a white boat into blue-green water. “Your best time yet,” they say. The re-branding is calling it Greece 2004, meaning Olympic Greece.

It isn’t enough, in fact it’s positively anxious-making. They should be concentrating on something a bit less commoditised than sun and ancient ruins.