Azerbaijan’s relationship with Turkey, given the outwardly intimate nature of its dynamics, has often been described as a cornerstone underpinning Baku’s post-independence foreign policy strategy (e.g. Soltanov 2009). Yet few, including among policy advisers and policymakers in either of the two states, have attempted to look deeper into the forces that underlay the workings of the bilateral dynamics over the first two decades of the world free of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The result was a dual crisis in bilateral relations towards the end of the second decade of interaction (around negotiations on a bilateral gas deal and around Turkey’s attempted rapprochement with Armenia) on one hand and (particularly) an overall sense of distressful surprise, most notably within the Azerbaijani political and social spectrum, by which the crisis was met on the other (Goksel 2009; Kardaş 2009; Phillips 2012; Shiriyev and Davies 2013; also Osipova and Bilgin 2013). While policymakers on both sides have now taken steps towards addressing the omissions of the past that the recent crisis served to lay bare, few if any within academia have ventured into the study of the underlying causes that shaped and conditioned the dynamics within the structure of bilateral relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan since the time of the latter’s independence. It is this question that the introductory essay – and the collection of chapters that follow – is meant to address.
Several factors, many often overlooked and their interpenetrating linkages often neglected, need to be accounted for if one is to develop a clear understanding of the evolving nature of Azerbaijan–Turkey relations and the constitutive influences behind their dynamics. Perhaps most importantly, the nature of bilateral dynamics between Baku and Ankara has been subject to, and in many ways a reflection of, the two states’ own evolving self-perception as to their geography and geopolitics the latter prompted, state capacity and ambitions it worked to generate and ultimately the nature of state polity and indeed its identity.
With Azerbaijan emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union and Turkey coming out of the ashes of the Cold War, the starting phase of Azerbaijan–Turkey fraternal partnership in the early 1990s fell on the period when neither of the two states had yet to develop a clear grasp not only of the other side, but also – and even more dramatically – of its own self. Neither Ankara nor Baku had yet to advance a clear ‘post’ identity – a post-colonial, post-Soviet identity for Azerbaijan and a post–Cold War identity for Turkey – and a definite foreign (and domestic) policy agenda the latter understanding would entail. As the Cold War ended, Turkey found its role as a US and NATO-backed “regional gendarme” (ICG 2010, 1) in the backyard of the Soviet Union increasingly redundant and was prompted to search for a new regional identity to embody (cf. Cowell 1990). Consequently, the quest to fill the ideational gap left by the end of the Cold War formed a motivational backbone behind Turkey’s foreign policy engagement choices over the past two decades. Following independence and given territorial losses amidst which the latter emerged and the overall regional security context in which it was set to survive, Azerbaijan, in turn, was left to look to devise numerous strategies conducive to its assuming full sovereignty over the territory it was legally meant to govern, besides and in addition to the need to address the challenges associated with post-colonial state-building. In many ways, with some 16 percent of its territory left occupied by Armenian forces and Nagorno-Karabakh consequently enjoying de facto independence, reversing the consequences of the war and restoring the territorial integrity of the state has since arisen as the most powerful stimulus, and the conditioning force, behind the emerging pattern of foreign policy engagements of Azerbaijan in the early years of its independent existence.
Given the above, Azerbaijan – at the time of its post-independence encounter with Turkey – had yet to formulate a post-Soviet foreign (and indeed domestic) policy agenda beyond a mere preservation of independence and responding to the occupation of its lands, while Turkey had yet to move beyond its quest to find a new – regional and/or international – purpose to follow. It was this sense of ambivalence surrounding a new contextual setup of their existence and the first – tentative – answers thereto they tried to develop that prompted Ankara and Baku to unconditionally embrace each other at the initial stage of their ‘post-identity’ encounter: each emerged as the best or the only choice for what was the other’s passing agenda, or – on one level – a lack thereof. For Ankara, a newly emergent sense of belonging with and assuming leadership of the rising Turkic world and a foreign policy hinged around the newfound Turkic, if post-Soviet, brethren (Azerbaijan and the four Turkic Central Asian republics) that the latter entailed came to be largely believed to provide a sought-for cornerstone to underpin the state’s new post–Cold War identity. And this, in many ways, motivated Turkey’s engagement in the early 1990s with Azerbaijan, which was viewed as a crucial gateway to the rest of the Turkic republics in Central Asia; a role embodied, in the first instance, by ‘the Bridge of Hope’ across the Araz River at Sadarak, Nakhchivan, inaugurated amidst pomp on 28 May 1992 as the first – and critical – tangible link tying Turkey to Azerbaijan and “the greater ‘Turkic’ world to the east” and, as such, “the first step in the dawning of the promised ‘Turkic’ twenty-first century” (Goltz 1999, 209). In Baku, in turn, Turkey was largely viewed as the sole friendly government amidst a largely unfriendly neighbourhood and, thus, the only potential ally in the country’s efforts to successfully address the effects of Armenian aggression on one hand and the looming danger that Russian and Iranian post-imperial ambitions stood to pose on the other.
Consequently and as commendable a trajectory as Azerbaijan’s early stage of relations with Turkey were (e.g. Goltz 1999, ch. 15), the particular – transitionally passing – context to which the latter owed its rise rendered the bilateral dynamics that followed contingent on the further unfolding of the parallel processes of self-reflection in which Baku and Ankara engaged and the states’ individual, often divergent, pursuits of foreign and domestic policies in which these processes found their expression. While this process of self-reflection was partly (more so for Baku than for Ankara) a continuously evolving product of bilateral interaction, it was also a function of a number of other factors, including the states’ individual engagements with the rest of the international community, the evolution of their individual material capacities and their perception thereof and domestic political changes of sorts. It is these latter factors – and their evolution – that need to be accounted for if one is to understand how and why the nature and structure of Azerbaijan–Turkey relations today are different from what they were two decades ago; and it is some of these contingencies to which the discussion now turns.
Georgia
Georgia has been among the key contingencies upon which bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey evolved the way they did over the past two decades. In many ways, Turkey’s post–Cold War engagement with Azerbaijan had until recently (indeed until the 2008/9 crisis) never been inseparable from the dynamics within the trilateral setup among Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Georgia and emerged and unfolded across this trilateral terrain. Economic and geopolitical factors underlying the essence of bilateral relations between Baku and Ankara – including energy and pipeline politics on one hand and European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations of the two states on the other – worked simultaneously, indeed primarily, to boost and mould trilateral channels of communication and discourse, with every single item on the bilateral agenda working to prompt the need for, and feeding the dynamics within, the trilateral institutional setup with which the bilateral dynamics was tightly conjoined (and without which it was unimaginable in the form and shape it has grown to assume). Cooperation in regional transport infrastructure development in particular (including multibillion-dollar energy pipeline projects and the soon-to-be completed Kars-Baku railway) – the very lifeline of bilateral relations as it was – has evolved and unfolded on a strictly trilateral terrain and was technically inconceivable without Georgia’s direct involvement.
Indeed, among the only elements within the structure of bilateral relations to have been independent of the trilateral dynamics are such practices as the engagement of Turkish businessmen in Azerbaijan and mutual student exchanges, as well as the operation of Turkish educational establishments (including numerous lyceums and the Qafqaz University) and Turkish-sponsored mosques in Azerbaijan, none of which was indeed unproblematic. 1 It is only now – with Azerbaijan’s direct investments in the Turkish economy significantly augmented following the 2008/9 crisis (Socor 2013) and as a function of Baku’s dramatic rise in economic power on one hand and bilateral cooperation in the military sector sizably intensified (e.g. Day.az 2 013a, 20 13b) on the other – that the bilateral engagement between Azerbaijan and Turkey has started to generate some notable dynamics of its own; a development still paralleled by a significant upgrade of relations within the trilateral setup as well, including as embodied in the Trabzon Declaration the three states signed in June 2012 and regularly held foreign ministerial trilateral meetings to which the declaration paved the way (Cecire 2013; Veliyev 2014).
Iran
Iran has been another regional contingency both driving the two states further together and pulling them apart. On the one hand, the continuously looming threat that Azerbaijan perceived Iran as posing to its sovereignty and indeed independence, particularly in light of Iran’s rising nuclear challenge across the region, has always served as among the key factors drawing Azerbaijan closer into, and keeping it firmly within, Turkey’s “orbit of gravitational attraction” (Harvey and Maus 1990, 83). Ideologically divergent from, and thus alien to, a secular vision of statehood that Ataturk’s Turkey and post-Soviet Azerbaijan had come to share by the time of the latter’s independent rise, Iran and its regional presence stood to engender rather negative security dynamics across the region upon which Azerbaijan’s brotherly bonds with Turkey materialised into a tangible alliance and by virtue of which bilateral relations thrived (Yanarocak 2013; Zasztowt 2012). Iran’s relations with Turkey had also been traditionally tense and, following a brief period of Davutoglu-inspired rapprochement in 2008–2010, were shattered again in 2011 under the weight of the Syrian crisis and Ankara’s expressed commitment to hosting elements of NATO’s missile defense system.
Adding to these historically conditioned negative dynamics in Iran’s interaction with Azerbaijan and Turkey has bee...
