Turkish-Greek Relations

The Security Dilemma in the Aegean

Mustafa Aydin, Kostas Ifantis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135775193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The discord between Turkey and Greece has grown deeper and wider over time, over a series of seemingly vital issues, which have at times brought the two countries to the brink of war. Yet in 1999 the two countries opened a dialogue on non-sensitive issues such as trade, the environment and tourism.The causes of the current rapprochement progress are explored in this book in relation both to the international environment which is increasingly conducive to this progress, and the significant domestic changes that both Greece and Turkey have experienced since the end of the Cold War. This book confronts each of these important dimensions by addressing issues of continuity and change in Greek-Turkish relations.

PART I
FROM CONFLICT TO RECONCILIATION?

1
Contemporary Turkish-Greek Relations: Constraints and Opportunities

MUSTAFA AYDIN

INTRODUCTION

The Turkish-Greek problems are not new, are well-delineated and have proved unsolvable until very recently when a flurry of interrelated events brought them into the limelight once again: mutual understanding created by the earthquakes that hit both countries in late summer 1999; Turkish acceptance of the EU Helsinki Summit (1999) decisions, comprising acknowledgement of Turkey’s candidature, lifting of Greek veto and veiled Turkish acceptance of the Union’s relations with Cyprus; agreement to refer Greek-Turkish problems to the International Court of Justice should they not solve them by the end of 2004; EU’s promise at long last in the Copenhagen Summit to consider starting membership negotiations with Turkey at the end of 2004 or soon thereafter; imminent Greek Cypriot EU membership on behalf of the whole island; successful Greek efforts to involve the Union into the Cyprus problem; and finally a protracted plan by the UN Secretary-General to solve it within a timeframe concomitant with the EU enlargement agenda.

However, it would be naive indeed if we attempt to understand the long-standing Greek-Turkish entanglement from the lenses of recent developments and fail to judge the impact of the not so recent past, marred with its frequent ups and downs, various attempts to solve the problems, and many odd incidents. A Turkish coaster named Figen Akat, for example, ran aground on 25 December 1995 over one of the hitherto unnoticed rocks in the Aegean, 3.8 nautical miles off the Turkish coast. At the time, nobody could foresee that this simple incident would start a series of events that brought two allies to the brink of war, which, thanks to US mediation, was only just avoided. This was only one of the recent occasions when Greece and Turkey almost went to war with each other. Judging by their size, the Kardak/Imia Rocks do not seem like much to fight over. But there were serious issues at stake and the incident might well have escalated to full-scale war between two allies. Though the whole affair took less than five days to be played out, the nature of the crisis over a couple of barren rocks, the speed by which it escalated, and the manner in which it was resolved, underscored the delicate state of relations between the two countries in the Aegean.

The majority of long-standing disagreements between them could have been overcome years ago had the leadership in both countries acted responsibly by abandoning the policy of making use of those disagreements in domestic power struggles, and had they, with a nationalistic myopia, not turned a blind eye to the other’s needs and fears. However, as this has not been the case, we end up with a fearful state of ‘security dilemma’, on the brink of war and with populations on each side thoroughly ‘educated’ to distrust each other at every level. Although the thaw in relations since 1999 has provided renewed hopes for a comprehensive reconciliation, we have not yet reached the point where the ‘security dilemma’ can be overcome to make way to a peaceful coexistence, or better still to a creation of a ‘security community’ between the two states. The main reason for this, which is also the basic proposition of this paper, is that the existing disagreements and problems between the two states, further complicated by years of distrust and prejudice, require the creation of a comprehensive understanding between the nations, and which cannot be solved easily and summarily. Therefore, trying to create a general understanding and trusting environment between the two states and more importantly, between peoples, would have much better chances, in the long term, than running after magical formulas for rapid reconciliation.

Living History

Among the obstacles that prevent not only the solution but even the discussion of the ‘real’ problems is the distrust between the two nations created by their ‘living history’. In both Greece and Turkey, ‘history is not past; indeed, the past continues to live in the present’.¹

This anomaly stems from the fact that both Turkey and Greece have obtained their national identities by fighting against, and interacting with, each other. Therefore, it would not be possible, for example, to understand modern Greek history without taking the ‘Turkish factor’ into account. Almost every corner of today’s Greece had been under Turkish rule for about four hundred years, and modern Greece was born out of the struggle against the Ottoman Empire. The popular Turkish image of Greek ‘Independence War’ is that of a rebellion, instigated and supported by the Great Powers of the nineteenth century, who ‘used’ the Greeks for their own purposes to break up the Ottoman Empire. In a similar fashion, modern Turkey earned its nation-state status only after defeating Greek occupation forces in Western Anatolia following World War I. For the Greeks, this struggle, which is revered as the ‘War of National Liberation’ by the Turks, is still remembered as the ‘Asia Minor catastrophe’.²

The fact that these two states earned their national identities by fighting each other has undoubtedly affected their subsequent relations. It also reinforced identity crises of both peoples. Both Turkey and Greece–maybe more so Turkey–have felt insecure about their situation between East and West. Though ‘they share a common heritage’, i.e. Ottoman-Levantine, neither Greece nor Turkey, for different reasons, wishes to acknowledge it. This creates an important problem as ‘neither state is at peace with itself, because, to deny one’s own past which lives on in the present, is to deny one’s own very identity’.³ In order to compensate for this denied common heritage, both nations have to remember their national struggles for independence unceasingly and cling to the best delineated parts of their identities, i.e. their nation-stateness, defined in terms of opposition to the ‘other’. In this way, they are not only pushing the common heritage into a forgotten past, but are also creating a living part of history by advancing confrontation and conflict to the forefront.⁴ This, then, only helps to reinforce and widen mutual mistrust. Therefore, as argued by Clogg,

… even if a rapprochement between two governments is achieved, it would be a much more difficult and arduous process to overcome the mistrust between two peoples, mutual stereotypes and fears that are fundamental for existing confrontation. Until a fundamental change in mutual (mis)perceptions has been achieved, we will continue to see a mutual proclivity towards suspicion and crisis in the relations between two states.⁵

As is often the case between long-suffering neighbours, locked in chronicled enmities, the history of relationship between Greece and Turkey is littered with a long list of past failures and deceptions. However, the symbolic strength of this history in defining current and future relations is often misunderstood by outsiders, who usually trivialize the nature of the ‘love–hate’ relationship between the two countries. This then leads to leaving them alone, an act that helps prolong the disputes and makes them insoluble. Because, ‘although both sides stress their willingness to engage in dialogue to resolve outstanding grievances’, the danger is that, in the absence of an external threat or ‘encouragement’ to move closer, ‘neither lacks examples to cite of the other’s perceived intransigence or paranoia’.⁶

It is clear that threat perceptions on both sides of the Aegean have not been symmetric and will not be in the foreseeable future. Given the disparity between the two countries’ history, resources and population, the fact that most of the Greeks consider Turkey as a ‘threat’, and that in turn, most of the Turks do not attribute priority to a ‘Greek threat’ is understandable.⁷ However, distrust that has been created by the ‘living history’ is a sense that is shared and continually reinforced on both sides of the Aegean. Therefore, when dealing with Greek-Turkish relations, it is necessary first to take into account the lack of faith in each other’s reliability; then, in order to overcome such an overwhelmingly negative psychology, both sides have to be resolute in sustaining a long-term commitment to non-political confidence-building measures. Such a determined effort has not been made so far by either side. Although the two foreign ministers have engaged for the first time in years in what seems to be a ‘dialogue’, and individuals and NGOs on both sides of the Aegean have created a lively atmosphere of cooperation and exchange of views, it is still too early to argue that these efforts have produced irreversible results. It is clear that, given the excessive baggage of distrust both sides bring to discussions and the effects of the importance of third-party related developments (especially Turkey’s relations with the EU) on bilateral relations, even the good- intentioned efforts on both sides would not be enough by themselves to ensure real harmony. The past record of ethnic conflicts throughout the world has shown that temporary measures ‘do not provide much hope for the eradication of wholesome memories of real or imagined past mistakes. Also, it is impossible to reduce the existing Greek-Turkish confrontation to mutual misunderstandings’.⁸ Therefore, only a sustained long-term effort and increased cooperation could heal the wounds of a living history and put it into its proper place–the past.

Exceptions That Prove the Rule

Cooperation is very easy and tempting to advocate, but difficult to realize in Turkish-Greek relations. As even a rudimentary analysis of past record could easily demonstrate, the dominant trend in Greek-Turkish relations is conflict and competition, and that cooperation is the exception.

There have been two cooperative periods between Greece and Turkey in modern times: the 1930s and the first half of the 1950s. During the first period, there was a common threat from Italy’s Mare Nostrum policy and encouragement from England to cooperate against it, and the two countries were engaged in friendly relations culminating in the establishment of the Balkan Entente in 1934. During the second period, there was Soviet threat and American encouragement. Judging from these examples, we may conclude that Turkey and Greece, as a rule, could improve their harmony only when there is a common threat and, at the same time, they are encouraged to cooperate against this threat by an outside power that has a leverage over them.⁹

Accordingly, during the Cold War, both Greece and Turkey were able to cooperate under the NATO banner in putting away their disagreements and, in an effort to prove their loyalty to the Alliance, often ‘subordinated their own national interests to the dictates of alliance cohesion and the need for collective action’. In the 1960s and the 1970s, however, ‘as the security consensus that had characterized the early post-war period began to erode’, most of the old problems and tensions, coupled with new ones, re-emerged, ‘complicating relations with the US and NATO’.¹⁰ What initially tipped off the disagreements between the two states were the developments related to the 1963–64 Cyprus crisis and, over the next decade, when relations were exacerbated by a number of other events, ranging from the continental shelf to the treatment of national minorities.

Since then the West has become a reference point in relations between the two states. Both sides have shown persistence in trying to explain their bilateral problems and complain about each other to the West, especially to the US. They have also quite consistently taken up positions that, instead of reflecting their strict national interests, have adopted those they thought would be favoured by the West. In this respect, Greece has been particularly attentive since it considered NATO membership as an insurance against Turkey, and tried to use its influence to curtail Turkey’s importance for the Alliance.¹¹ Moreover, after obtaining its EC/EU membership on 1981, Greece had utilized all the assistance that the European institutions could provide against Turkey, which has become vulnerable and disadvantaged as it remained outside and wanted to be let in.

On the other hand, one of the important consequences of accepting the West as a reference point in bilateral relations has been that both countries have attempted to utilize their bilateral disputes and confrontations in order to solidify their place within the western state system. In the early 1980s, for example, Greek Premier Andreas Papandreou, by exaggerating the threat perception that Greece had of Turkey, tried to obtain a better place in the western world for his country. His Turkish counterpart, Turgut Özal, on the other hand, tried to reach the same point from an opposite way. He affected a contemptuous attitude acting as if the existing problems between the two countries amounted to nothing, and thereby, while minimizing their importance, tried to create a favourable image in the western world both for himself and for Turkey. In short, the effects of external factors, especially western patronage and influence, on Turkish-Greek relations and on the decision-making processes of both countries’ foreign and domestic policies are obvious.

BILATERAL ISSUES

Since 1974, Greek-Turkish relations have been handicapped mainly by two sets of issues: Cyprus and the Aegean. Although, politically and legally, they are quite separate issues, there is ‘an obvious psychological linkage between them in the sense that a resolution of one would have an important psychological impact on the resolution of the other’,¹² because it is felt that a weakening of one’s position in one of the areas would have an effect in the other. Of the two, the dispute over the Aegean is more important because, unlike the Cyprus issue, it touches more directly on vital national interests concerning territorial sovereignty and security for both countries.¹³

Then, there are other thorny issues between the two countries such as the treatment of Greek population within Turkey and of Turkish minority within Greek borders, the Greek veto (until recently) of Turkish membership of the EU, and numerous other disagreements within NATO. Most of these issues are immensely complex, intertwined and hotly disputed. But, as much has been written on the issues involved and on the presentation of perspectives, only a simplified sketch of the disputes related with the Aegean and Cyprus will be attempted here, with some suggestions on how to deal with them.¹⁴

Confrontation in the Aegean

The Aegean issue is, in fact, a set of four separate issues. These include: (1) delimitation of the maritime boundaries and continental shelf; (2) breadth of territorial waters; (3) control of the air space beyond the territorial waters; and (4) Greek militarization of eastern Aegean islands. Each of these is entangled with the general mistrust between the two nations and with their attempts to gain political advantage in settling outstanding differences. However, as the Aegean is a semi-closed sea with unique geographical features and equal strategic, economic and political importance for its two littoral states, in order to reach a long-term settlement particular attention should be paid to the establishment and maintenance of a balance between the interests of the two countries.

The dispute over territorial waters relates to Greece’s claim that, though currently operating a 6-mile limit, it is entitled to a 12-mile territorial sea both for its mainland and for its islands in the Aegean. The Turks...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: From Conflict to Reconciliation?
• Part II: Building A Security Regime?
• Part III: Stabilizing Expectations?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography