The Crisis of Nationalism, Political Opposition and the Consolidation of the Nationalist Right

This chapter examines the way in which the nationalist Right took shape in the 1940s successfully rallying a full array of organised schemes and ancillary agencies. I do so by considering the various levels of party, trade union, agrarian, local, etc. In particular, I focus on the first ever island-wide party of the nationalist right in Cyprus, the Cypriot Nationalist Party (KEK), and the different organisations associated with the Right: the trade union SEK, the agrarian union PEK, the extreme Right paramilitary group ‘X’, and the many youth associations. Nationalism in this period had an organisational and an extra-parliamentary dimension which marked an important difference with the past. The chapter emphasises the unifying influence of anti-communism, which seems to verify Duverger’s (1954) argument that the Right followed the Left in terms of organisational development.