1 Back to the future
Institutionalist international relations theories and Greek–Turkish relations
Bahar Rumelili
Greek–Turkish relations have remained in close conversation with broader developments in institutionalist theories in International Relations (IR). This chapter traces the interaction of the case of Greek–Turkish relations with IR theory in four phases. Greek–Turkish relations from the early 1980s until 1999 has figured in the IR literature as an anomalous case that shows the potentially perverse effects of international institutions. Following the 1999 Helsinki European Council decisions, Greek–Turkish relations transitioned from an anomaly to a landmark case of the EU’s conflict resolution capacity. Subsequently, the case gradually fell into neglect, and therefore critical developments by the latter half of the 2000s that indicated a gradual weakening of conditions that facilitated the EU impact were overlooked. As a result, the potential to use Greek–Turkish relations as a test case for rival institutionalist explanations was missed. Recent tensions in the bilateral relationship challenge institutional theories and Europeanization perspectives in IR which had staked their bets on the transformation of Greek–Turkish conflicts with the incentives and socialization provided by the EU. At the same time, there is opportunity to identify both the EU-level and domestic conditions that shape the impact of institutions on conflicts, and to map out factors that sustain or disrupt processes of conflict transformation.
Introduction
In the past several years, Greek–Turkish relations have begun to exhibit the malaise of the past. The Aegean disputes have been rekindled with aggressive rhetoric and action on both sides (Reuters 2018). Greek court decisions to grant asylum to eight Turkish soldiers who escaped in a helicopter following the botched coup attempt of July 2016 (Washington Post 2018) and Turkey’s seemingly retaliatory arrest of two Greek soldiers who trespassed the border on espionage charges1 have obliterated mutual trust. At the urging of Greece, the European Union has issued statements expressing solidarity with Greece and condemning Turkey (European Council 2018).
None of this would take someone who time-traveled from the mid-1990s to the present by surprise. After all, throughout the 1990s, the very same pattern of provocative actions and escalatory rhetoric was the norm. The two states almost came to war over the Imia/Kardak islets in February 1996. Greece routinely denied Turkey’s extradition requests, and Turkey accused Greece of harbouring PKK terrorists (Independent 1999). The two countries remained each other’s most convenient and plausible scapegoat in cases of forest fires and other tragedies (Kathimerini 2011).
However, recent events are a profound disappointment to many Greeks and Turks – peace activists, intellectuals, past policymakers, civil society, and the like – who have invested in Greek–Turkish peace both emotionally and intellectually, and who saw in the post-1999 Greek–Turkish détente the fruits of their efforts and the building blocks of a stable peace (Karakatsanis 2014). Indeed, as will be explained in this chapter, rising economic interdependence, growing cultural and people-to-people links, confidence-building measures, and successful functional cooperation radically transformed Greek–Turkish relations in the post-1999 period. The question that remains is whether the recent tense encounters are temporary deviations sparked by politicians for internal political reasons or whether they are signs of a headlong rush to the parameters of the pre-1999 past.
In light of current developments, this chapter provides a critical reassessment of the IR literature on Greek–Turkish relations of the past two to three decades. As will be discussed, since the late 1980s the trajectory of Greek–Turkish relations has remained in close conversation with broader developments in institutionalist theories in IR. Briefly put, these theories postulate that international institutions, such as NATO and the EU, alter the costs and benefits of different policy options available to states: they generate mutual trust and shared interests, and socialize states into peaceful resolution of disputes (Keohane 1988). On the one hand, the ongoing conversation between Greek–Turkish relations and institutionalist theories has often introduced critical refinements to the latter; the case of Greek–Turkish relations led IR theorists to underscore the ‘perverse’ effects of international institutions (Krebs 1999), the significance of self/other distinctions produced by these institutions (Rumelili 2003), and the interaction between different forms of institutional impact on conflicts (Rumelili 2007). On the other hand, this conversation has also possibly clouded assessments about the state of Greek–Turkish relations, the prominence of institutionalist explanations and Europeanization perspectives enticing analysts to overestimate the impact of the EU and to overlook the domestic and international conditions of EU impact and their variation across time.
Looking to the future, Greek–Turkish relations are likely to remain a prominent case study for institutionalist IR theories. In particular, the current signs of backsliding call for a number of refinements in the form of specifying the conditions under which institutions transform conflicts irrevocably as opposed to being transformed temporarily, as well as on how the transformative impact of institutions withstands changing internal and external conditions.
The subsequent sections of this chapter trace the dialogue of the case of Greek–Turkish relations with IR theory in four phases. The first section discusses how Greek–Turkish relations from the early 1980s to 1999 have figured in the IR literature, first in the form of descriptions of respective nationalist positions, and later as an anomalous case that shows the potentially perverse effects of international institutions. Subsequently, the second section discusses how Greek–Turkish relations transitioned from an anomaly to a landmark case of the EU’s conflict resolution capacity following the 1999 Helsinki council decisions. The third section underscores how the potential to use Greek–Turkish relations as a test case for rival institutionalist explanations was missed as the case fell into neglect in the absence of headline-gripping crises. Finally, the fourth section discusses how current developments in Greek–Turkish relations can contribute to the further refinement of institutionalist theories by drawing insights from ontological security theory.
The first phase: Greek–Turkish relations as an anomaly
For scholars interested in the role of international institutions in facilitating peace and cooperation among member states, Greek–Turkish relations have long been a critical case study. Greek–Turkish relations have figured in the IR literature on international institutions in different ways from different theoretical vantage points at different time periods. In the 1970s and 1980s the course of Greek–Turkish relations provided strong support to realist/neorealist claims that international institutions matter very little in constraining states and/or changing their conceptions of national interest (Ayman 1998). After all, Greece and Turkey’s co-membership in NATO since 1952 neither prevented Turkey’s 1974 military interventions in Cyprus nor stopped the two states from escalating their disputes in the Aegean to near-war situations on three occasions from 1976 until 1996 (Kourvetaris 1988; Meinardus 1991). That full-scale war was ultimately prevented was explained by the pressure exerted by the hegemonic state, the US (Couloumbis 1983).
The literature on Greek–Turkish relations in this period was dominated by Greek or Turkish scholars, often adopting manifestly nationalist perspectives (Coufoudakis 1996; Bahcheli 1990). Given the highly securitized nature of the Greek–Turkish disputes in both countries, scholars shied away from more critical approaches, took the conflicts between the two states as givens, and focused on defending the diametrically opposed national positions. Apart from brief discussions as an anomalous case in democratic peace theory (Russett 1993), Greek–Turkish relations did not attract much wider attention in the IR discipline.
As the end of the Cold War brought heightened expectations regarding the role of international institutions in spreading peace and democracy, and as institutionalist approaches made greater headway into IR theory, the continuing tensions in the Greek–Turkish relationship begged further explanation. Scholars began to present Greek–Turkish relations as a puzzle that called for further refinement of institutional theories. This formulation attracted a wider range of non-Greek/non-Turkish IR scholars to the case of Greek–Turkish relations. Krebs argued that NATO mattered but in case of Greek–Turkish relations it mattered by creating an incentive structure that intensified, rather than mitigated, the allies’ conflicts. According to Krebs (1999, 360), membership in NATO provided Turkey and Greece with a security blanket against the Soviet bloc and thereby gave them the ‘incentives to ride free on the efforts of their more powerful allies and to shift the focus of their foreign policy from the Soviet threat to their more parochial conflicts’. In addition, the Alliance gave Turkey and Greece the opportunity to ‘manipulate [issue] linkages to their political and strategic advantage, broadening the conflict and producing escalating levels of tension’ (Krebs 1999, 365).
Whereas the earlier literature on Greek–Turkish relations took the disputes between the two states as given products of their antagonistic history and geographical contiguity (e.g. Bahcheli 1990; Kourvetaris 1988), the 1990s also saw the emergence of a more critical literature that investigated the reproduction of conflicts through nationalist ideology. Alexis Heraclides’ (2001) seminal study of the ‘threat from the East’ (meaning the threat from Turkey as perceived by Greece) analyzed how Greek–Turkish conflicts attained a cultural and existential dimension in Greece under the influence of anti-Turkish nationalist historiography and history education, Hellenist/Orthodox nationalism set in opposition to the Catholic/Protestant West and Islam, and the dominance of classic geopolitical (actually perverse geopolitics of the German Geopolitik of the Midwar period) and power politics thinking. The 1996 crisis over the Imia/Kardak islands also brought about a critical look at the role of media in fuelling the conflicts (Ozgunes and Terzis 2000). These critical approaches were also supported by growing contacts between civil society actors and track-two diplomacy between diplomats, journalists, and political analysts (Belge 2004; Rumelili 2005).
Towards the end of the 1990s, constructivist perspectives, which paid greater attention to the identity formation and socialization processes that unfolded within international institutions, established themselves within the discipline (Adler 1997). In promoting peace and cooperation in Europe, the EU’s ambitious enlargement initiative towards the East shifted the spotlight from NATO to the EU. The deepening integration within the EU also raised expectations regarding the transformative power of the EU on member and candidate states. In this optimistic context, the EU was flagged as the prime example of ‘collective identity among states’, where states perceive one another as part of a broader Self rather than as Other, and a security community, where states neither expect nor prepare for war (Adler and Barnett 1998). Thus, at least in the European context, the bar for the impact of international institutions was raised; institutions were expected to ultimately transform interests and identities to make war unthinkable rather than simply making war costly or undesirable (Checkel 1999).
These theoretical advances brought about a reformulation of the ‘puzzle’ of Greek–Turkish relations. It was argued that the relations between Turkey and Greece constituted an anomaly in the security community of Europe because the feelings of mutual mistrust and threat perception between the two states have persisted in institutional contexts that should have led to the emergence of shared norms, understandings, and a sense of collective identity, paving the way for the peaceful resolution of their disputes (Rumelili 2003). In other words, the puzzle was why the EU failed to moderate the culturally produced perceptions of threat between Greece and Turkey, as it radically transformed inter-state relations elsewhere in Europe. From a constructivist institutionalist perspective, the persisting tensions in Greek–Turkish relations were explained as a perverse impact of collective identity construction by the EU (Rumelili 2003). As the discourse on European identity promoted by the EU positioned Greece and Turkey in liminal, insecure identity positions, both states resorted to intensified representations of the Other as non-European and as threatening in order to validate their identities as European.
Meanwhile in Greece, scholars began to analyze Greek foreign policy from the perspective of Europeanization (or lack thereof) (Ioakimidis 2000). The Europeanization perspective underlined the possibility of a gradual, underlying, and more transformative impact of the EU on the foreign policies of member states towards the preference of diplomatic solutions to disputes, friendly relations with neighbouring states, and the broadening of national security toward low politics and economics (Tonra 2001). Within the EU context, Greece’s continuing hard-line approach in foreign policy and tendency to adopt policy positions outside the general EU consensus, as in the unilateral trade embargo it imposed against the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) (Featherstone 1994), made Greece an outlier in the Europeanization framework. This compelled scholars of Greek foreign policy to debate and problematize why EU membership did not change Greece’s approach towards Turkey and in other traditional foreign policy issues.
Thus, towards the end of the 1990s, in the context of the growing salience of critical, constructivist, and Europeanization perspectives, Greek–Turkish disputes became anomalies to be explained, rather than national causes to defend. IR scholarship began to question why the disputes are being culturally produced, and how they have so far remained immune to the transformative impact of the EU.
The second phase: Greek–Turkish relations as a success story
By 1999, the theoretical expectations for change were born out, with a number of individual, societal, bilateral, and regional factors coalescing to produce a remarkable turnaround in the course of Greek–Turkish relations (Ker-Lindsay 2007). These were the expressed US concern with the spread of crises in the Balkans to Turkey and Greece; the diplomatic initiatives led by Turkish and Greek foreign ministers, Ismail Cem and George Papandreou; the outburst of sympathy following the earthquakes; changing attitudes in EU member states, notably in Germany and France, to support Turkey’s membership bid by granting Turkey its long sought candidacy status; Gree...
