TURKEY’S TRANSFORMERS (II): ANKARA’S AMBITIONS
Morton Abramowitz/Henri J. Barkey
Hurriyet Daily News
Nov 10 2009
Turkey
Turkey has never before had a foreign minister with the drive, vigor
and vision of Ahmet Davutoglu. Even before he took the post last May,
Davutoglu had been promoting a forceful vision of Turkey’s role in
the world.
He has gathered an A-list of senior officials at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and set forth an ambitious policy advocating "zero
problems with neighbors," with the hope of settling long-standing
differences through a high degree of engagement with the leaders and
the people of Turkey’s neighboring countries.
The aim is to turn Turkey from a "central," or regional, power into
a global one in the new international order. Implicitly, this is also
a project to demonstrate to the world that a Muslim country can be a
constructive democratic member of the international community. More
explicit is Turkey’s ambition to better deal with the Muslim nations
of the Middle East and beyond, whether friends or foes of the West.
The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government has been
enormously active, though with mixed results, despite the acclaim
it showers on itself. Most successful in expanding its trade and
investment abroad, it has been far less so in making progress toward
satisfying the European Union’s accession requirements. It has also
failed to come to grips with the question of whether the Ottomans’
treatment of the Armenians a century ago constituted genocide.
It is still unclear whether the AKP has the will to break much domestic
crockery on matters of foreign policy. Its major breakthrough so far
has been to end Turkey’s political isolation of Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara
no longer pretends the region does not exist and that it need only
deal with Baghdad. This 180-degree turn was in part prompted by the
recent U.S. decision to begin withdrawing its troops from Iraq.
Turkey is trying to anticipate the evolution of Iraqi politics in the
absence of U.S. combat units in the country. The AKP government wants
Iraq to remain whole, but realizes that if tensions in Iraq devolve
into all-out violence and the country breaks apart, Turkey would be
better off with a friendly partner in Iraq’s energy-rich north.
The AKP government managed to convince the Turkish military that an
opening to the Iraqi Kurds would not exacerbate existing difficulties
with the Turkish Kurds and would increase Turkey’s influence in Iraq.
The Turks have come to understand that for the Iraqi Kurds, having
better relations with Ankara is a strategic choice: Turkey is their
door to the West. Yet the Turkish authorities and their Kurdish
counterparts in Iraq still have to sort out some explosive issues,
such as the contested status of the oil-rich area of Kirkuk. The Turks
believe that it is essential to keep control of the city out of the
hands of the Regional Kurdish Administration, both to help prevent
the breakup of Iraq and to limit the aspirations of the Iraqi Kurds.
The Turkish government also made an impressive move earlier this year
when it reversed its long-standing policy of isolating Armenia. In
April, despite an apparent promise to U.S. President Barack Obama,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delayed opening Turkey’s
border with Armenia after nationalists in Turkey and Azerbaijan
protested. But in another surprising about-face, Turkey approved in
August the text of two protocols establishing diplomatic and economic
relations between the two countries and an agreement on opening the
Turkish-Armenian border.
This is a major step forward for diplomacy in the Caucasus. Turkey
also hopes that the initiative will help its case with the EU and
reduce the pressure on the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution on the
Armenian genocide next year.
It remains to be seen whether the AKP will stand up to opposition.
Erdogan has promised the government of Azerbaijan that Turkey will
not open its border with Armenia until Armenia relinquishes control
over the regions it holds surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, a landlocked
province in Azerbaijan. Erdogan seems to be betting that a diplomatic
solution to this issue will somehow be found this fall. But it is
quite possible that Erdogan’s deals with Armenia will fail to pass in
the Turkish Parliament because of Azerbaijani and Turkish nationalist
pressures.
Cyprus and Nabucco
The issue of Cyprus continues to be the main hurdle to Turkey’s
accession to the EU. Despite Turkey’s renewing negotiations with the
two Cypriot parties for the umpteenth time, there is no great hope for
settling the island’s contested status. The Turkish government will
also have to decide soon whether it will open its ports to shipping
from the Greek part of Cyprus, as it has pledged it will do to under
its agreement with the EU.
The European Commission is expected to release a report on Turkey’s
progress in November, and that could set the stage for recriminations.
The fact that in 2003, the Turkish government displayed the courage,
at least in domestic political terms, to drop its traditional
obstructionist stance in favor of a pro-European one seems to hold
little water today. The EU failed to reward the Turkish Cypriots
for the dramatic change in their patron’s policy by providing them
with trade opportunities, thereby undermining the AKP government’s
diplomacy and its credibility on this issue at home.
Until its recent Armenian initiative, the Turkish government seemed
to have grown mostly inert when it came to enhancing its standing
with the EU.
Turkey did score a big win last July by signing an agreement with
six other countries to build a pipeline that would bring natural gas
from the Caucasus and Central Asia through Turkey to Europe. Whether
the Nabucco pipeline will ever be built is uncertain: The costs
of construction and whether enough gas will be available to fill
the pipeline are issues that still need to be worked out, and the
Turkish government will have to maneuver delicately with both the
West and Russia.
But the pipeline project has already raised Turkey’s importance in
the eyes of the EU’s energy-hungry countries, though several Turkish
foreign-policy initiatives have given Western governments pause. One
is Turkey’s closer relationship with Russia, a rapprochement driven by
a vast expansion in Turkish-Russian trade. During a highly publicized
visit to Ankara by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin soon after
the Nabucco pipeline deal was signed this summer, the Turkish and
Russian governments struck a potentially conflicting agreement to
develop the South Stream pipeline to bring Russian gas to Europe
through Turkish territory.
As soon as the Georgian crisis hit in August 2008, Erdogan jumped on a
plane and tried to broker negotiations between Moscow and Tbilisi. His
intervention, which was notably uncoordinated with Turkey’s allies in
NATO and the EU, yielded little more than Turkey’s call for a Caucasus
Stability and Cooperation Pact – an idea that pleased the Russians but
appeared to vex Western governments. Whatever suspicions Turkey may
continue to harbor about Russia, Erdogan has significantly improved
the tenor of the two states’ relations. He is also in no hurry to
see Georgia’s NATO aspirations fulfilled.
But perhaps the AKP government’s most ballyhooed effort has been its
diplomatic activism in the Middle East. The Turkish government took
advantage of the vacuum created by U.S. President George W. Bush’s
unpopular policies in the region to participate in indirect talks
between Israel and Syria. It injected itself into the negotiations
following the crises in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in late 2008 and
early 2009. French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited Davutoglu, then
a foreign-policy adviser, to join the French delegation that traveled
to Damascus to discuss the Gaza crisis.
Ankara has taken partial credit for the agreement governing the
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq; it reportedly deserves some for
hosting talks between U.S. representatives and Iraqi insurgents earlier
this year. And Foreign Minister Davutoglu jumped at the opportunity
to mediate Iraq and Syria’s recent dispute, in which Iraq claimed
that bombings in Baghdad’s Green Zone in August were carried out by
insurgents from Syria.
* Morton Abramovitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation,
was U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1989 to 1991. Henri J. Barkey
is a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and a professor of international relations at
Lehigh University. This piece was published in the November/December
2009 edition of Foreign Affairs.