Evenementen
Met trots delen we het winnende essay van Konstantinos Chelios, geschreven voor een essaywedstrijd die we samen met de Nederlandse ambassade in Griekenland organiseerden. Onlangs mochten we Konstantinos ontvangen op ons kantoor. In zijn essay reflecteert hij op de nalatenschap van Max van der Stoel en het belang van morele moed: het lef om je uit te spreken tegen onrecht, juist wanneer zwijgen makkelijker is.
Lees het essay hieronder!
The Courage to Speak: Max van der Stoel’s Legacy in Greece Today
By Konstantinos Chelios
Moral Courage in Everyday Life
It is a busy day in Athens. You take the metro to go to your University, listening to your favorite song with your headphones. Suddenly, you notice people turning their heads. A passenger is shouting at a migrant woman for no clear reason. The tension is obvious, yet no one wants to get involved. Then one person steps forward – not aggressively, just calmly – and says: “that’s enough, please stop”. A simple act breaks the silence that held everyone else in place. This moment captures what we call moral courage. What makes moral courage so striking is that it «requires” from someone to put their own safety or comfort at stake, by being fully aware that speaking up may come with consequences (Miller, 2000).
Moments like this are not present only in the everyday life. History is filled with such instances where many remain silent while only a few choose to act. This pattern appears again and again: the hesitation of the majority, and the rare individual who steps forward despite the possible risks. One of the clearest examples in Greek history comes from the years of the military dictatorship, when Max van der Stoel was one of the very few international voices willing to speak openly against the regime.
Between 1967 and 1974, Greece went through a period that almost broke its democracy. Imagine waking up in Greece in the early 1970s and turning on the radio, only to hear the same controlled broadcasts that regime allowed to reach people’s homes (Papaeti, 2013). The streets might look normal, but the atmosphere doesn’t:
soldiers are standing on the corner, posters with the junta’s slogans are everywhere and people suddenly stop talking when someone they don’t know walks past them.
Some testimonies even describe families whispering in their own kitchens, turning up the radio or water tap to mask conversation because they believed that even “the walls had ears”, a phrase that appears in several oral accounts from that period (Georgakakis, 1992). At the same time, many European governments responded with diplomatic restraint, maintaining formal relations with the junta despite reports of torture, censorship and repression (Papaeti, 2013). For ordinary citizens, this external silence made the internal fear even heavier, creating the sense that Greece was tolerating its crisis alone (Klapsis et al., 2020).
In this kind of suffocating atmosphere, where silence dominated both inside the country and beyond its borders, the moment a foreign voice finally chose to speak carried an entirely different weight. As Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Max van der Stoel openly condemned the human-rights violations of the Greek military regime at a time when many European governments preferred a cautious or neutral stance. His action played a central role in bringing the Greek case before the Council of Europe, where he supported the investigation that exposed torture, censorship and political persecution under the junta (Klapsis et al., 2020).
But beyond what is widely remembered, his contribution goes deeper. As Rapporteur in the Council of Europe, van der Stoel brought to light evidence of torture that later shaped the official condemnation of the regime (Leuprecht, 2011).
His work also laid the foundations for a historic precedent: that membership in European institutions is not unconditional but depends on respecting democracy and human rights, a principle that shaped the Council of Europe’s approach to authoritarian states for decades (Papaeti & Nafpliotis, 2024). As a result, historians argue that the Greek case at the Council of Europe, in which van der Stoel was a key figure, was the starting point where European institutions began to consider human rights as a real political criterion and not just rhetoric (Fernández Soriano, 2017).
After the fall of the dictatorship, he became the first foreign Minister to visit Athens in 1974, and contemporary accounts describe crowds greeting him with a gratitude that reflected how rare it was, in those years, to have someone abroad speak for them when almost everyone else stayed silent. The significance of van der Stoel’s legacy for Greece today becomes clearer when we consider what it meant for someone to break the silence at a time when staying silent was the easiest option.
Breaking the silence when silence is the safest path is never a simple act.
Silence protects you: from conflict, from attention, from consequences. Speaking out exposes you – socially, professionally, and sometimes even physically. Perhaps naturally, people tend to follow the group, especially in moments of fear or uncertainty, because conformity may feel safer than standing alone. We may have all felt this at some point: that strange pressure to blend in, even when something feels wrong. This is why the person who finally speaks shifts the entire atmosphere; they disrupt a pattern everyone else has quietly accepted. In oppressive situations, one voice can feel like a flickering light in a dark room, a reminder that fear has not won completely. When someone chooses to speak despite the risks, their act becomes larger than themselves – it becomes a signal to others that courage is still possible.
To understand why Max van der Stoel’s legacy matters for Greece today, we need to look beyond the historical moment itself and recognize what his stance represents. His intervention was not just a diplomatic gesture; it was a reminder that democracies survive only when people – and institutions- are willing to defend them.
Greece today may no longer live under the heavy silence of a dictatorship, but it faces different kinds of pressures: social division, political polarization, the rise of extremist voices and challenges linked to the treatment of refugees, minorities and vulnerable groups. He showed that safeguarding human dignity is never “someone else’s responsibility”, and that silence – even polite, institutional silence – can slowly erode the foundations of a democratic society.
If Max van der Stoel was alive today, the battles he would face would be different, but the moral compass guiding him would remain the same: standing with those whose rights are easiest to ignore. He would likely open the dialogue for refugees whose dignity if often lost in political debates, for people struggling with mental health who are still treated with stigma instead of care, for minorities facing hostility both online and in everyday life. He would probably try to shift Europe’s attention toward every place where silence has begun to replace responsibility – from overcrowded camps at the borders to the quiet discrimination that happens in schools, hospitals, workplaces.
Perhaps, this is the clearest way in which a legacy survives: not in statues or history books, but in the choices ordinary people make when their meet their own moments of silence. In that sense, van der Stoel is not a figure confined to the past.
On the contrary, he remains alive through us – if we choose to act with the same courage he once showed.
As the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote, “the true aim of the state is freedom”. His words echo an idea deeply rooted in Greek political thought since antiquity: that a polis is held together not only by laws, but by the courage of the citizens to protect freedom when it is threatened. By speaking when others chose caution, van der Stoel acted on this shared democratic principle.
His legacy invites us to ask ourselves what it means, in our time, to speak up when staying quiet is easier, and how the courage of one individual can encourage a whole society to resist indifference. And so, the real question is: when the moment comes, will we have the courage to speak?
References
Fernández Soriano, V. (2017). Facing the Greek junta: The European Community, the Council of Europe and the rise of human-rights politics in Europe. European Review of History, 24(3), 358–376.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1282432
Georgakakis, G. (1992). Martyries [Testimonies]. Delfini.
Klapsis, A., Arvanitopoulos, C., Hatzivassiliou, E., & Pedaliu, E. G. (2020). The Greek Junta and the International System. Routledge.
Leuprecht, P. (2011). Max van der Stoel: A tireless defender of Greek democracy. Security and Human Rights, 22(3), 183–185.
Miller, W. I. (2002). The mystery of courage. Harvard University Press.
Papaeti, A. (2013). Music, Torture, Testimony: Reopening the Case of the Greek Junta (1967–1974). The World of Music, 2(1), 67–89.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24318197
Papaeti, A., & Nafpliotis, A. (2024). The 1969 ‘Greek Case’ in the Council of Europe.
A Game Changer for Human Rights.
