Efstathios T Fakiolas 
How a Small State Expands 
Grand Strategy and Greece’s Territorial Expansion in the Balkans and Asia Minor

How does a small state expand and secure territorial gains? Does its grand strategy merit concern? The conventional wisdom in international relations theory is that small states scarcely have autonomy in the choice of action, and that accommodation and compliance with great powers is the persistent pattern of their strategy in return for survival. This book takes issue with this understanding and sets itself to make sense of grand strategies that small states pursue to expand and consolidate the status quo. Combining the empirical originality and richness of archival evidence with a consistent framework for analysis, it brings the perspectives of grand strategy and the external-internal synthesis together in a theoretically-informed way to explore how the small Greek state between 1909 and 1920 was able to attain and consolidate a greater Greece of ’the two continents and the five seas’.