Greek-Turkish relationship: from the experts to the visionaries
Dimitris Keridis1
One of the greatest dangers a student of the Greek-Turkish relationship could
encounter is to be dragged into the details of the rivalry while losing the bigger
picture. In the case of the Greek-Turkish relationship focusing on the tree almost
always leads to missing the forest; and, the forest is the demands of globalization and
the efforts at modernization that both nations, with various degrees of success,
attempt.
Usually the danger comes from the experts. After all, they are the ones who have
spent their professional lives studying and endlessly arguing the problems of Cyprus
and the Aegean. They have vested interests in the conflict. They sincerely know the
difficulties involved in overcoming it. But, by focusing on the difficulties they
underestimate the opportunities that arise for a new thinking. More often than not,
diplomats, officers, professors and media analysts are a force of stagnation rather than
change. History, first-hand knowledge and experience, access to information,
legitimacy, even the grand theories of international affairs are on their side. Often,
anybody who comes with an out-of-the-box mentality is but an ignorant, naïve,
dangerous and even treacherous amateur who must be silenced at once.
Of course, the various inter-connected components of the Greek-Turkish differences,
from the delineation of the Aegean continental shelf to the militarization of the Greek
islands in the Eastern Aegean to the most complex issue of all, the very future of
Cyprus, are very important and a good grasp of them is essential in the search for a
resolution. But as important as they are, they are not and they should not be the end of
the story. Maybe it is high time to stop concentrating on the competing Greek and
Turkish claims that, in any case, are by now very well known. Otherwise, we run the
risk of ending up with a static picture that fails to appreciate the dynamism of the
situation both Greece and Turkey find themselves into, in relation to each other and to
the rest of the world.
Above and beyond the perennial historical and legal arguments, the Greek-Turkish
relationship is dynamic and ever-changing; strategically inter-linked and influenced
by developments elsewhere; multi-faceted and broadening; domestically driven and
media sensitive. For example, elections in Germany, the U.S. invasion of Iraq or
Libya’s volte-face have a strong and direct impact on the Greek-Turkish relationship.
How come? The defeat of the Christian-Democrats and the ascendancy of Gerhard
Schroder to power opened the way for Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the
European Union. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq caused the most
serious crisis in US-Turkish relations for decades and made Turkey, in many ways,
more European and less Atlanticist in its foreign policy orientation. The abrupt and
radical change in Qaddafi’s behavior vis-à-vis the West delegitimized further any
Third World alternatives in the Eastern Mediterranean while opening a new market
for trade, investment and increased economic cooperation. If Libya is willing to think
differently, come out of its marginalization and engage the world, can Greece and
1
Assistant Professor of International Politics, University of Macedonia, Greece; member of the board
of the Kokkalis Foundation and Athens Information Technology, Greece.
Turkey afford to remain indifferent and obsessed with their “national rights” when
greater national interests say otherwise?
Due to broader changes, domestic and international, the Greek-Turkish relationship is
today more dynamic than it has ever been in the past three decades. Internationally,
the Cold War has gone long ago together with its “straightjacket” while the
unstoppable rise of East Asia reminds political leaders of the benefits of globalization
and economic growth. Domestically, old nationalist taboos come under attack by the
democratic openings in both nations as they ill serve them in the new era.
Suddenly, the horizons of political leaders have broadened tremendously. Old radar
screens that could only cover Cyprus and the Aegean are misleading and useless. New
ones that can cover Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East all the way to Central
Asia and beyond are what the day demands. Sharp geographic distinctions have been
replaced by a new transregional environment while a series of functional issues (i.e.,
trade, terrorism etc) cut across traditional geographic lines.2
This has enlarged beyond recognition the field where the Greek-Turkish “game” is
played, although some of the players are not always fully aware of the change. Even
the audience has grown to include merchants and businessmen, artists and civil
society leaders, journalists and all sorts of opinion leaders. Extra powerful spotlights,
i.e. new electronic media, cast their light where none was before. Even the rules of the
game have multiplied. It is no longer the old security rivalry with the US as the sole
and undisputable referee. New, softer and often less conventional issues have come
into play with their own rules. In this larger field all sorts of new variables interact in
an unprecedented complexity, but one, i.e., Europe, stands out and above all others.
We live in a rapidly changing and ever-closer connected world. In Southeastern
Europe the greatest force of change is “Europeanization” or European integration.
Through EU widening and deepening, the Southeast European periphery, with Turkey
as its largest component, feel the full force of globalization as a process of opening
borders, accelerating exchanges of goods, services, capital, technology, ideas and
even people, and subscribing to the post-war Western modernity of markets,
democracy, inter-dependence and the denunciation of force.
The transformation of traditional nation-states into European partners, their
subscription to the European project as a mechanism of managing effectively and
mutually beneficially economic interdependence and their partial giving up of
sovereignty in exchange for increased prosperity, make them more sensitive to
developments elsewhere.
Today, the greatest force of change in the Greek-Turkish relationship is undoubtedly
Europe. It is because of Europe, Turkey’s aspirations to join and Greece’s efforts to
remain at its very core, that a new willingness to resolve problems instead of
accumulating new ones has been found. Movement is already evident in Cyprus and
in the position of the corresponding minorities of Greeks in Turkey and vice versa.
2
See Ian O. Lesser etc, Greece’s New Geopolitics, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, 2001, pp. 8-9.
Europe as an integration project is based on trade and economic interdependence.
This is rapidly happening today between Greece and Turkey, albeit starting from a
very low basis. Greek-Turkish trade between 1999 and 2005 has grown 10 times and
the same goes for investment and tourist flows.3 The number of Greeks learning
Turkish and vice versa has increased even more, perhaps 100 times. This is not a
simple change. It’s a complete break with dead ended past.
Because and beyond Europe, the number of factors that influence the relationship is
exploding. In conditions of post-Cold War confusion and commotion, an adequate
analysis is becoming more and more complex while short term predictions more and
more difficult.
The fact that in the Turkish elections of November 2002, only two parties made it into
parliament while two more were disqualified by a small margin, gave the ruling AK
party a two-thirds, constitution-changing majority that solidified Erdogan’s political
hegemony and ability to stir Turkey’s course away from the Kemalist certainties of
the past and into a European future. In equal terms, the fact that Kostas Simitis, the
most European of Greek leaders, won the premiership of Greece in January 1996 by
the smallest of margins, after two rounds of voting in PASOK’s parliamentary group
and only thanks to the divisions and infighting of his more nationalist opponents,
proved catalytic for the transformation of the Greek-Turkish relationship later on.
Nobody knows if Schroder wins the next elections and what a CDU Germany might
think of Turkey’s European future. Or, what the implications of a British no to the
European constitutional treaty might mean for Britain’s position inside Europe and its
ability to exert a positive influence on Turkey’s aspirations to join.
We have entered a stage of great motion and evolution. Things are no longer static.
Today’s losers are tomorrow’s winners; today’s victims are tomorrow’s victimizers.
Speed, quick reflexes, agility and imaginative new, out-of-the-box thinking is the new
game in town. Old-fashioned, privileged bureaucracies and slow-moving, oldthinking political leaderships are ill-suited for this.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the give and take at the European Councils.
Alliances are stroke on an issue by issue basis away from traditional friendships and
understandings. Greece sides with the smaller member-states against the threat of
increased institutional power of the larger ones, with the poor South in defending
subsidies and the CAP, with Germany in enhancing the political union, with France in
strengthening Europe’s defense identity and with Britain in supporting Turkey’s
candidacy. On the other hand, Turkey, a country of impeccable Atlanticist credentials,
questions US Middle East policies and sided with France and other “anti-Americans”
in abstaining the Iraqi operation. Far from becoming one more US Trojan horse in
Europe, Turkey is getting closer and closer to the European mainstream in its foreign
policy orientation and definitely away from the British example.
Suddenly the Greek-Turkish diplomatic game has become faster, unexpected,
surprising and interesting to watch. For the time being, Erdogan, as a good old
football player, seems better in scoring, although his defense remains vulnerable. It
took only two months for the Greek side to lose its traditional diplomatic advantage in
3
Cyprus and have Turkey on top in April 2004. It took one misstatement of Erdogan at
the European Council of December 2004 for Greek Cypriot leader Tassos
Papadopoulos to regain some of his lost political capital.
In this great game of change and turn-around, a few things are certain. Both Greece
and Turkey realize that the continuation of their rivalry directly contradicts their
European aspirations and condemns them to increased marginalization. This rivalry
has had serious political, economic and social costs that at an age of increased
international competition for markets and growth neither nation is willing to sustain
indefinitely. Europe, and the drive to complete modernization and respond to the
challenges of globalization, are the driving force of Greek-Turkish rapprochement.
Thus, as long as the European project doesn’t run out of steam, the pressure for this
rapprochement in the long run, putting aside the inevitable deviations here and there
in the short run, is inexorable.
The Greek-Turkish relationship is becoming a European problem with the strategic
role of the United States, which for fifty years was the dominant third-party broker,
rapidly diminishing. This is a great historical change. Traditionally, the Eastern
Mediterranean was the privileged domain of the dominant naval power in the
Mediterranean, initially Britain and after 1947 the United States. The US continues to
be the unrivalled military force in the Mediterranean. But the game has changed a lot
and EU subsidies, trade relations and political capital have become equally if not
more important. Meanwhile, the events of September 11th have accelerated the US
process of disengaging from Southeastern Europe and focusing on the Middle East
and the pressing problems elsewhere.
Increasingly, the Greek-Turkish relationship escapes the confines of the foreign
ministry and the secretive diplomatic service and becomes the domain of the business
community, the media and civil society at large. Similarly, it is escaping the confines
of hard power antagonism and is increasingly explained by soft power calculations.
Traditional realist assumptions are becoming less relevant. What was a zero sum
game is turning into a positive sum one. The enemy cannot be Turkey or Greece but
poverty, unemployment, terrorism, environmental degradation and ultimately
economic and technological competition from far away places.
In reality, the Greek-Turkish relationship is becoming closer than the continuation of
political differences allow to appear. In a sense, the rapprochement is becoming
insulated by the existence of political differences that are “frozen out” of the rest of
the relationship. For the first time, there are credible fire brakes against crisis
escalation, powerful interests that benefit and advocate the rapprochement and are
ready to defend it from potential nationalist/populist highjackers.
The Greek-Turkish relationship is becoming more and more “European”, acquiring a
depth and substance it never had before. At last, the two rival nation-states find a way
to productively coexist benefiting each other. If the Franco-German post-war
reconciliation is any measure, the potential benefits are enormous and hard to
exaggerate.
Let there be no misunderstanding. Problems continue to exist. The Europeanization of
Turkey will be a long and tortuous process. It will be a surprise if no backlashes
occur. Nationalism is alive and kicking, at least in Cyprus. But for the first time there
is a credible way out of the mess both sides made of their relationship. Powerful
structural forces in the international system and within inexorably drive the
normalization of the relationship.