Turkey's Entente with Israel and Azerbaijan

State Identity and Security in the Middle East and Caucasus

Alexander Murinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415778923
• eBook ISBN: 9781135182434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

With the end of the Cold War came a new political instability in Turkey and a shift in relations with the West, leading the government to adopt new foreign policies and forge alliances with neighbouring states. This book offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the trilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel, and Azerbaijan.

Drawing both on first-hand interviews and on research not previously available in the English language, Alexander Murinson brings a new perspective to the study of the relationship between the three countries. In particular he examines the commonalities of state identities that brought the countries together, the role of state institutions, the security dimension and the influence of globalization. In a period of growing concerns about European energy security, the book provides an extensive discussion of the activities carried out by various think-tanks, especially in Washington, regarding the regional and domestic politics of the three countries.

An original contribution to study of regional processes in the expanded Middle East after the end of the Cold War, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on the regional politics of the Middle East and the Caucasus. As such, it will be of great interest to anyone studying international relations, security studies and Middle Eastern politics.

1 The entente of Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan
A new type of alliance in the post-Cold War era

Introduction: the tripartite entente

The end of the Cold War brought confusion and new sources of instability into geopolitical calculations of the Turkish foreign policy elite. In the early 1990s, Turkey was hard pressed to replace its relationship with the West based on the security aspect of the transatlantic community. With the end of the Cold War, what were the Turkish geo-strategic options? The new trend in Turkish foreign policy was to replace reliance on the West with an extension of Turkish influence into areas that were historically part of the Ottoman Empire, and to penetrate the Turk Dunasi (“Turkic world”) building upon historical, cultural and ethno-linguistic ties. Ottoman and Azeri Turks, for example, are connected by bonds of common descent and language, and supported each other throughout the centuries, especially, during the dramatic period of the short-lived independent republic of Azerbaijan (1918–20).

The traditional Turkish policy was based on the principle of noninvolvement in regions to the north (formerly under Soviet control) and to the east (the countries of the Middle East region), practiced by the foreign policy elite of the Republican Turkey since the collapse of the Baghdad Pact in 1958.¹ If, in the previous four decades, Turkey had a clear-cut role of the “frontier state,” embedded in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the future seemed less predictable.² Thus, the emergence of a Turkish–Israeli entente, which later included Azerbaijan in the post-Cold War era, was a major geopolitical departure in Turkish foreign policy. This book presents an analysis of this tripartite entente using a novel approach that utilizes the core concepts of the Constructivist School in international relations and the theory of Trans-nationalism. The time framework of my research will be limited to the period between 1992 (the independence of Azerbaijan) and 2005 (the beginning of consolidation of AKP’s power in Turkey).

The term entente is used in this work in its conventional meaning reminiscent of the Entente Cordiale among France, Great Britain and Russia in the period of World War I. Entente means, in other words, an arrangement or understanding between nations to follow a particular policy with regard to affairs of international concern.³ However, entente is more a tenuous arrangement than an alliance, since it more susceptible to fluctuations in domestic politics and shifts in the foreign policy calculations of its members.

Turkey, since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, had an ambivalent relationship with regional neighbors in the Middle East. The Republic has a Muslim population, but it chose to align itself with the Western alliance. Because of the half-hearted support of the West for its desire to join Western regional organizations such as the EU in the beginning of the 1990s, Turkey sought other strategic options. The new post-Cold War reality dictated a search for a replacement of Turkey’s role as a “Northern Tier” state. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey changed its foreign policy rather creatively. So new factors, such as cultural and historical links, emerged to drive Turkish foreign policy. If earlier it was a Western alliance within NATO that defined Turkish state identity, the post-Cold War reality transformed Turkey into a frontier state of a different kind. Because new threats arose, namely militant Islam and Kurdish ethno-national separatism as well as other ethnic conflicts in the Turkish frontier, Turkey needed to reinvent itself and find a new strategic vision in response to the new challenges.

The history of the Israeli–Turkish diplomatic romance goes back to the late 1950s. It was then, after the dissolution of the Baghdad Pact, that Israel extended a secret alliance with Turkey as part of its “peripheral strategy.”⁴ However, only with the dissipation of the Soviet threat did Turkey and Israel realize that their strategic interests in the Middle East and Eurasia strongly overlap. Turkey also sought to re-energize its relationship with the Jewish people, both in the United States and Israel. This linkage was rooted in the historical amity and mutual appreciation between the Ottoman Turks and the Jews who fled the Christian persecution on the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century. Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal became permanently interwoven in the fabric of Ottoman society as the Sultan’s physicians, diplomats and financiers in subsequent centuries. Israel’s relationship with Azerbaijan is also embedded in the history of the long co-existence of two people. The core territory of modern-day Azerbaijan, i.e. Shirvan, Quba and other Azeri Khanates in the Caucasus, served historically as place of refuge for Persian and later Russian Jews.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey sought to develop its ties with the former Soviet Turkic republics. At the same time, it sought to reinvigorate relations with the “unseen or invisible member” of the Western alliance, Israel. It also turned its gaze to its Near Eastern neighbors in the Balkans as an alternative to its role as purely an East–West corridor, concurrently pursuing its policy of integration into Europe. Success of the Turkish journey to its European vocation is not guaranteed; moreover, the process of European integration is a long and complicated one. Membership in the European Union is based on acquis communautaire and the fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria.

This trilateral axis of Turkey–Israel–Azerbaijan flourished very quickly after its inception in 1992, but after reaching its peak in 1999, the entente began to unravel. The entente encountered important limitations of domestic and structural nature. The rise of “Islamic politics” (election of Islamist Refah and “moderate” Islamist AKP) gained mass support in Turkey as the country began the process of liberalization. Turgut Ozal’s economic and political reforms of the 1980s unleashed the pent-up discontent of conservative religious strata against the secular regime. The newly urbanized class of former peasants of Central Anatolia underwent political mobilization and provided an electoral base for the Islamists’ success. The considerations of Turkish domestic politics weighed heavily against further improvement of Turkish–Israeli relations, which were seen by civilian authorities as an entanglement with the enemy of Islam. The Turkish government’s verbal attacks on Israel and accusations of “state terrorism” further cooled the atmosphere of bilateral relations. Especially damaging in this regard was the invitation extended by AKP’s leadership to Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader in Damascus, to visit Turkey on February 16, 2006.⁵

In the case of Azerbaijan, the particularistic interests of the Aliyev clan began to dominate domestic and foreign policy in 1999–2005. These interests necessitated rapprochement with Russia. The failure by the American Jewish lobby to strike down Section 907 in Congress during its 1998–9 session exposed the limits of its power. Azerbaijani authorities realized that an Israeli “connection” does not guarantee desirable outcomes in the high echelons of American government, and the value of an informal relationship with Israel has declined. Since 1999, Israelis, in their turn, encountered the policy of evasion on the part of Azerbaijanis and a lack of progress in the diplomatic sphere.

There have been few comprehensive works addressing this new foreign policy strategy of Turkey. My work is an attempt to fill this lacuna. This book will attempt to answer questions about the causes of the formation of this entente or axis. Some scholars call this relationship a strategic relationship,⁶ a security relationship,⁷ axis,⁸ alignment or pact.⁹ The multiplicity of terms used to define the relationship between the countries in question suggests a lack of clarity about its nature or its novelty. My argument is that there was a brief period of convergence of foreign policy interests among the three countries, but that it was not strong enough to support a lasting relationship as Turkey reasserted its Muslim identity following the election of an Islamist AKP in 2002. We cannot explain this relationship exclusively by power politics or economic interests, as other forces were clearly at work. The subject of this book is to explore these forces. I propose that this relationship can be better understood as a manifestation of shared state identities actualized through subnational agents and transnational networks in the globalized international polity. The conventional wisdom in IR focuses on realpolitik explanations for the formation of alliances. The earlier assumption that alignments are driven exclusively by rational calculations of power balances is insufficient to explain the complex dynamics that characterize the new types of alliance in the post-Cold War era. These new combinations of states that do not correspond to classical alliances require elaboration in the alliance formation theory. Which forces brought this entente into existence? Why is the formation of the triple entente intimately linked with the issue of the state identities of the three nations? What in the ideational make-up of these states compelled the three nations to realize the complementarity of their interests? How did transnational factors affect the shape of this alignment? How did shared traditional security concerns bring these countries together in the 1990s? What are the ideational forces in the three countries that counteracted or limited the maintenance of the entente?

Central to this book is the examination of such social constructs of state identities of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Israel as (1) garrison-states, i.e. states whose political and territorial integrity is threatened by internal ethno-national conflict or secessionist movements (the Nagorno-Karabagh Armenians, the Kurds, the Palestinian Arabs); (2) secular and Western-oriented states; (3) constitutionally nationalist states; and (4) “lonely” states—states rejected by their neighbors due to religious, ideological or ethnic differences.

Next, state “drivers” of the entente will be identified, and their structural role explicated. Another integral aspect of this study is the investigation of the role played by epistemic communities and transnational actors, including transnational corporations (TNCs), religious networks and ethnic diasporas, in shaping this trilateral relationship. According to Colonomos, it is the “intermediate actors in international relations with various forms of autonomy-business firms, NGOs, and indeed networks of professionals which occupy a significant place in a number of supranational spaces” in the new international system.¹⁰ The transnational networks function as the essential conduits of what Wendt called the “two systemic processes” of interdependence and transnational convergence of domestic values in the international system.¹¹ In particular, it is important to elucidate the roles of TNCs, which, acting in para-diplomatic roles, operate at the intersection of “state logics and transnational dynamics.”¹² Many trajectories of these transnational networks converge on the United States as their meeting point. So it is essential to highlight the role the United States plays, not only as an instigator of transnational processes, but as their target or their political arena. Colonomos notes that “the logics of networks in their transnational variant very often includes a ‘stopover’ in the US.”¹³ Consequently, it is crucial to elucidate the impact of the ethnic lobbies, in particular the Jewish lobby, in the United States on the formation and maintenance of this strategic alliance.

The blind men and the elephant: identity politics, transnationalism and security as factors in international relations in the post-Cold War era

The end of the Cold War and globalization are the quintessential features shaping the international environment in the twenty-first century. The formation of two informal Eurasian strategic alliances in the expanded Middle East in the last decade of the twentieth century is neglected in international relations literature. They are the US-supported informal alliance of Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan (and possibly Georgia), which is counter-balanced by the Russian-backed alliance of Armenia, Iran and Syria (and possibly Greece).¹⁴ After the removal of the Soviet threat at the end of the Cold War, both Turkey and Israel faced a dilemma concerning the role they should play in the US-dominated unipolar world. The new geopolitical realities of the post-Cold War era compelled both countries to reinvent themselves as “pillars” of the American strategy in the expanded Middle East.

The depth and scope of the ongoing trilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan, Turkey and Israel requires special mention. An Israeli scholar recently commented that the “Israeli friendship with Azerbaijan (allied with Turkey) dovetails with Israel’s deepening relationship with Turkey.”¹⁵ According to the Turkish Daily News, “The Turkey–Israel partnership has silently been expanding to include one of the most important countries in the region, Azerbaijan.”¹⁶ Neill Lochery quotes Turkish international relations experts noting “the role of Azerbaijan in the new regional strategic structure,” adding that, “There is an obvious intersection between the Turkey–Israel, Israel–Azerbaijan and Turkey–Azerbaijan partnerships.”¹⁷ Several Iranian scholars also point to the strategic cooperation between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Israel.¹⁸ According to Eldar Namazov, a former chief advisor of Azeri President Heydar Aliyev, the idea of an informal alliance between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Israel was quite popular among the military–political elites of the three countries in the mid-1990s. This strategic amalgamation not only reflected the logic of the budding Azerbaijani–Turkish strategic alliance, but also purported to reinvigorate the Azerbaijani historical relationship with the Jewish people.¹⁹ This idea also had strong backing among the Israeli foreign policy elite and the Jewish lobby in the United States.

Attempts to explain the genesis of this tripartite relationship by focusing exclusively on one aspect (e.g. security) seem to this author off the mark. It would be the paradigmatic tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant.²⁰ There is a dearth of analysis in international relations of a new type of alliance formed in the post-Cold War period. Ian Lesser identified this new type of alliance as the “new security geometries” in critical regions.²¹ It is noteworthy that two examples of these informal strategic alliances came into being in Eurasia in the early 1990s.²² A multi-causal model of this relationship seems more appropriate and useful in shedding light on a parallel Near Eastern counter-alliance of Russia, Iran, Armenia, and Syria (and possibly Greece). This study of the trilateral relationship intends to contribute to the field of international relations on substantive and theoretical levels. By advancing a multi-causal model, the book aims not only to contribute to the study of particular post-Cold War geopolitical alignments, but also to expand the theoretical debate in international relations. Traditional “neorealist” accounts of strategic alignments fail to produce multidimensional representations of interactions that generated post-Cold war alignments due to their preoccupation with “hard” security issues. Radical Constructivist accounts suffer from their detachment from the concrete and present dangers inherent in the possession of WMDs by totalitarian and unstable regimes, and from the absence of realistic scenarios of the use of primitive makeshift nuclear devices, such as “dirty bombs,” by terrorists.

The proposed model emanates from a symbiosis of the constructivist approach and the transnational studies approach. The model provides a more adequate description of alliance formation in the international system under conditions of globalization. I would like to elucidate the causes of the formation of this relationship, and to examine one set of domestic and transnational agents that reinforce/maintain this relationship, and another set that has the capacity to undermine it. The proposed study will also be of practical value to international security studies...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: The entente of Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan: A new type of alliance in the post-Cold War era
• 2: State identities as building blocks of the relationship, 1992–9
• 3: The military–security stranglehold: State agents as drivers of the triple entente
• 4: Foreign policy and its discontents in the age of globalization: Informal networks and transnational levers
• 5: The heart of entente: The security dimension of the relationship
• 6: Fluctuating zones of influence: Involution of the alignment, 2000–5
• 7: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography and sources