Draft:Venizelism outside of greece (1910-1932)

Venizelism had a big influnce in Greece and Greek politics even to this day but it was influincial in other countries as well, especially within the Greeks in those foreing nations due to the Greek diaspora.

After the Balkan Wars the Greeks in Asia Minor were clear in their backing of Venizelos due to the backlash from the Turkish minority in the area, support for Venizelos reached at an all-time high in 1915 when Venizelos wanted to complete the Megali Idea and side with the Entente while king Constantine I was more skeptical about it and wanted Greece to remain neutral.

After the Entente won World War I and carved up the Ottoman Empire Venizelos managed to secure Entente support for the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna. However, due to the inability to keep the zone secure from Turkish Nationalists so in 1919 the greek goverment comanded a deeper push in Anatolia which almost suceeded but ultimately ended up in a huge loss for the Greek Army, a hastly done retreat to Smyrna and an unsafe evacution of the citizens of Smyrna.

Due to Venizelos' support for the Megali Idea a lot of Egyptian Greeks were Venizelists, another reason for the Egyptionites' (Egyptian Greeks) was due to policies from Athens that helped the Greek population of Egypt. The Greek population of Egypt was also huge numbering around 80.000 in 1917, 1/3 Egyptian Greeks lived in Alexandria which just like Smyrna had a majority Greek population.

The Elite of Alexandria had very close ties with the Greek goverment and soon enouch Venizelos gained the support of the two most influncial Alexandrian Elites. Emmanouil Benakis who became a goverment minister and Georgios Roussos who (under Venizelos) became the diplomatic representative of Greece in the United States, the merchants of Alexandria heavily supported Venizelos as he was also a merchant. In the period between Venizelos' dismisall from the king and the founding of the Greek provisional govermnent in Thessaloniki.

After the Asia Minor Disaster the Greek liberal party dismissed all of it's operations in Alexandria (and all of Egypt) in 1928 Venizelos attempted to re-instante relations as they were before but all he could do was set up programms to make the Egyptian Greeks remeber their greek heritage because his priorities were to counter italian influnce in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In October 1916 over 10.000 Greeks came together and formed the ''Venizelos party'' which was mostly a pledge of alleigeince to the provisional goverment in Thessaloniki and Venizelos, over 90% of American Greeks supported this cause.

The Venizelist goverment in Greece fought reguraly to increase the influnce of Greek-American community which included persuading the Panhellenic Union into prioratising supporting the Megali Idea and a bunch of other initiatives to expand Greek-American influnce, not all people of Greek-Ameican decent agreed with this, one notable Greek-American figure that disagreed with this was Solon Vlastos who wrote about it in his Greek-American newsapaper.

The Venizelos admistiration wanted to strenghen its position in the Greek communities of America by foundinmg the Greek-American newspaper ''National Herald '' that was created to bolster Venizelism within the Greek-American community and as a counter to Vlastos' royalist newspaper ''Atlantis''. The Liberal Party of Greece had branches in several American cities, including Boston, Chicago, Memphis, New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and the American capital of Washington, DC.

In the period between 1917-1920 there was a conflict within the Greek-American communtiy between the Venizelists who claimed that Atlantis was disloyal to America by supporting greek neutrality in WW1 and that it was ''pro-German''.

As in Egypt after the Asia Minor Disaster all Venizelist iniciatives in the United States ceased to exist but Venizelos still had the loyality of thousands of Greek-Americans, the Venizelist newspaper ''National Herald'' was still active with the same views during the Interwar period in 1931 the Greek Orthodox church in America assured Venizelos that the majority of Greeks still supported him.

The Greek State and the Diaspora: Venizelism Abroad, 1910-1932^[1]

New York Times- GREEKS HERE FORM A VENIZELOS PARTY^[2]