By Antonia Dimou
The
following analysis is part of a research project conducted in Jordan
the period of November 2011-January 2012. The full text is to be
released by the Institute for Security and Defense Analyses, Athens
(Photo from: http://geopoliticsdailynews.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-post_554.html)
Turkey has become more focused on the Islamic world and its Muslim tradition
in its foreign policy, though it remains a blend of western institutions and
orientation. Turkey
pursues a mix of traditional western oriented foreign
policy however it has incorporated two new ideological
elements, the “zero-problem/conflicts” and neo-ottomanism. Neo-ottomanism is a Turkish political ideology that
promotes greater engagement with areas formerly under the Ottoman Empire and
has profoundly become the new conceptual framework of the Turkish foreign
policy.
The dominant traditional foreign
policy centers on the country’s cooperation and integration with the West,
namely NATO, the efforts to access the EU and the customs
union with the EU. The EU is Turkey’s major trading partner accounting for 42
percent of the country’s total trade while the US is important in the military,
energy and aviation sectors. The Turkish military is heavily dependent on the US supply and technology, while Turkey realizes that turbulence in its immediate
entourage from Libya
and Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan necessitates close
cooperation with the West and NATO. Equally
interesting is the fact that the Turkish leadership
acknowledges that part of the country’s allure in the Middle
East stems from its key position in Western
clubs and institutions.
Borrowing from the Western rhetoric
that Turkey is a bridge
between the East and the West, its worldview as expressed by its leadership
envisions an economically and culturally integrated Middle
East as the driver for a peaceful and not the crisis-ridden
periphery of today. It is in this context that Turkey
supports that as the legitimate successor of the
Ottoman Empire should be the focus of the re-establishment of strong Middle
East and Eastern Mediterranean regions exploiting
the ideological elements of the “zero-problems/conflicts” with neighbors and
neo-ottomanism which employs the concepts of Islamic solidarity and of
Turkish-Islamic synthesis.
The new ideological foreign policy element
of the “zero-problems/conflicts” concentrates on Turkey’s efforts to resolve
problems with its immediate near abroad. This new
element contradicts the traditional policy of
letting long-term frozen conflicts fester. Upon this, Turkey pursued an opening
to Armenia that climaxed with the sign of recognition protocols, and the acceptance of
the Anan Plan to resolve the Cyprus
question.
The second foreign policy element
incorporates the conceptual ingredients of neo-ottomanism which solidifies Ankara’s aspirations to re-engage estranged neighbors and
to serve as mediator in conflicts in the Middle East
and elsewhere. It is in
this framework that Turkey was instrumental in mediating between Syria and
Israel and in opening dialogue with all groups within Iraq, including the Kurds. The
idea of Turkey employing its cultural and religious links to the Middle East
for the advancement of Turkish interests and regional stability has gained
momentum by veteran Turkish diplomat and foreign minister Ahmed Davutoglu. His
theory, best expressed in his book Strategic
Depth (Stratejik Derinlik), is that most of the
regional regimes are undemocratic and illegitimate, and therefore, Turkey by
capitalizing on the alleged admiration among Middle Eastern populations for its
economic success and soft political power, reaches over the regimes to the Arab
street.
In
the mindset of the Arab street, Turkey is multi-dimensional for a number of
reasons and thus appealing; first, Turkey represents a successful economic model that managed to
move the country from the developing countries level to the powerful economic
elite of the G-20;
second, Turkey represents a soft power of Islamic governance that alternates
the democracy exercised by Israel. In the Arab mindset, Israel used to
represent the best model of democracy in the region rooted in solid principles
and institutions.
This Arab position started to gradually change
when Israel
took the decision to proceed in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and
failed to deliver peace dividents, especially during the last 10 years. Due to
the political facts on the ground, Turkey has managed in large to replace Israel as the
sole source of democratic admiration.
To capitalize in its rapport with the people and its Ottoman
experience as well as its supposed diplomatic expertise, Turkey has
thrown itself deeply into the waters of the Arab Spring envisioning to patron
it. The Turkish patronization is attempted with its Islamic orientation, ties to religiously
conservative constituencies and alleged widespread popularity among the Arab
critical mass. After the effervescent phase of social networking, the Arab
Spring has entered a critical curve depicted in the electoral advances of
Islamic parties, which have profoundly filled a political void in those
countries where transparent political institutions and secular parties have
been absent and therefore could not be created by immediate and
post-insurrectionary improvisation.
Nevertheless, this effort cannot be
translated into unfettered Turkish sway over Arab countries like Egypt, where
the protests sparked
and flared. Besides the fact that Egypt
is too nationalist and too big to simply fall under Turkish influence, the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood resentment of Turkish influence is historically
persistent while the Egyptian Nour party is inclined towards the fundamentalist
Wahhabis mainly controlled by Saudi
Arabia. For its part, Libya is too complex
and laden with resources to the point that one country cannot singlehandedly
wield significant control over it, while it cannot escape from the Libyan
political thinking that Turkey has initially defended the former Libyan
President by condemning NATO military action to overthrow him.
The only country that Turkey seems to have a significant ideological
and political leverage is Tunisia,
though it is too far and too Francophone. The Tunisian
al-Nahda party that has won the elections imitates
the rhetoric of the Turkish ruling AKP and upholds it as a democratic party
that has won three elections fairly and which has avoided the excesses of the
Iranian clerical political system as well as the salafi banner supported by
Saudi Wahhabis. The
degree of intermeddling and Turkish ideological influence over the majority
Tunisian political party is denoted by the fact that the leader of the al-Nahda party, Rachid Ghannoushi, has published his political
writings in Turkey and maintains close relations with the Turkish Prime
Minister.
In pursuit of its posturing as a
leading Muslim power that determines the regional currents, Turkey has aimed to uniquely position itself in
the case of Syria.
Turkey’s apparent motive is that the end of the Syrian President Assad’s
rule in Damascus could mark a period of much
increased Turkish influence
in Syria.
It is in this context that since the beginning of the Syrian protests and while
Syrian-Turkish official diplomatic efforts were intensified for solving the
crisis, Ankara has concurrently played an active role in organizing the
opposition lending it invaluable international legitimacy by hosting a series
of meetings. The Syrian Conference for Change with the attendance of 300
participants in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya took place on May 31st to June 2nd, 2011, and produced a final declaration which called on the Syrian
President to resign from all of his duties and positions and to hand over
authority to his vice-president in accordance with constitutional procedures
until the election of a transitional council that will draft and implement a
new Syrian constitution that shall call for free and transparent parliamentary
and presidential elections within a period not to exceed one year from the
resignation of President Bashar al-Assad.
After
sustained efforts by Syrian opposition groups and Turkey
as the host country of a series of opposition meetings since April 2011, the Syrian National Council (SNC) was officially announced in Istanbul on October 2,
2011. The efforts of Turkey towards
the internationalization of the Syrian crisis have been instrumental by supporting the formation of the SNC and its
political program that seeks
to delegitimize the Assad regime in the Arab and
international arenas. Towards this end, according
to a prominent advisor to the Secretary General
of the SNC, “the SNC aims to exert political pressure to further isolate the
regime politically, diplomatically, and financially by breaking down its
pillars of support both domestically, regionally and internationally”. Most
prevailing among the goals of the SNC is to deliver the voice of the Syrian protests and their demands to the International
Community since key grassroots organizers and
activists allegedly serve
on the SNC membership, Secretariat General, and the Executive Committee. It is in this context, that the Turkish government invited a
delegation of the SNC to attend the World Economic Forum conference titled
“Platform for International Cooperation” held in Istanbul on
November 23-25, 2011. The
conference was an
important venue attended by government officials
and businesspeople from more than 40 countries where the SNC delegation was offered the opportunity to address
the whole assembly and present
their political agenda.
Turkey has
methodically managed to enjoy significant political clout in the Syrian
opposition with the aim to be uniquely positioned in
the post-Assad Syria.
The view of the SNC towards Turkey
is best summarized as; "Turkey has been supportive
of the Syrian revolution and considers Syria’s security and stability a
matter of national interest for the entire region. Turkey and other countries
may play a positive role during the transition, but it will be up to the Syrian
people to draft the path of their future. At the same time, it is natural to
expect Syrians to remember who sided with the people of Syria and who
supported the Assads".
The policies of Turkey against the
Syrian regime have been intensified with the provision of logistical support to
the Free Syrian Army that employs defectors from the Syrian army as well as of political support for the
formation of a Military Council whose main goal is to topple the regime and
protect citizens, public and private property and preventing chaos once the
regime falls while its members cannot participate in any political party or
religious movement.
Turkey
allegedly seeks the de jure establishment of a no-fly zone over Aleppo
in Northern Syria following the example of Libya. Specifically, the aim
of the no-fly zone is
to create a secured zone that would serve as
humanitarian corridor and
to turn Aleppo
into a Syrian Benghazi much like the Libyan city
that served as the political and military base of the Libyan opposition. This however is a risky game as the experience with
no-fly zones over countries such as Iraq has shown that such measures
in the absence of any viable political
solution can complicate the situation. The case of Iraq
is indicative, where the imposition of a no-fly zone
over the Kurdish areas in Northern
Iraq and the Shiite regions in the south of the country, without a
prior mandate from the UN Security Council, has enjoyed limited success between
1991 and 2003. Under the protection of US forces, that destroyed the
anti-aircraft defense
of Iraq and the military
bases on the ground, the Kurds established de
facto autonomy in Northern Iraq. At the same time, the southern part of the country continues
to be under a state of complete lack of security and daily armed clashes,
taking for granted the entry of militants of Islamist organizations such as
al-Qaeda.
On a parallel basis, Turkey supports the economic sanctions against Syria as proposed by the Arab
League. Having considered its improving relations
with Syria as a key foreign
policy success during the last decade, Turkey has invested heavily and
solidified economic cooperation with its Arab neighbor. More than 50 agreements
and memoranda of understanding in fields ranging
from transportation and security to energy and water are in place, the most
strategically important envisioning the irrigation of 150,000 hectares of farmland in the province of al-Hasakah using water from the
Tigris river as well as the construction of a dam on the Orontes river for
power generation and irrigation. The allocation and
use of the Tigris River waters forms
the traditional core of political and strategic considerations for Syria,
therefore the sharing of benefits and expertise between the two countries presented a major shift from the intractable approach of the
past.
Equally important has been the agreement for the linkage of Syria’s natural gas
pipeline that is part of the 1,200 kilometer
“Arab Natural Gas Pipeline” that exports Egyptian natural gas to Jordan, Syria
and Lebanon, with a separate line to Israel to the proposed Nabucco pipeline that
crosses Turkey from central Asia into Europe, and which aims
to constitute another vein that will support the
Nabucco project. It is important to note that Syria
purchases around 1.5 billion kilowatts of electricity from Turkey annually
to meet its increasing energy needs.
Also, trade
between the two countries expanded to such levels that Turkey’s trade volume reached 1.8 billion dollars as of 2009, while investments of Turkish companies in Syria account to
nearly 260 million dollars. The
signing of agreements on “Preventing
Double Taxation”, “the Reciprocal Stimulus and
Protection of Investments” as well as the
establishment of the “Free Trade Agreement” provided
the legal foundations that bind the two counties and which foresee that in a 12-year period, industrial products
exported from Turkey to Syria will be free from custom taxes in increments,
while products entering Turkey from Syria
are currently entirely free from customs taxes.
Therefore, Turkey’s suspension of all financial relations
with Syria and the freezing
of Syrian government assets in the country have the potential
to cause a serious setback in bilateral trade and economic relations overall between
Turkey and Syria. Syria for its part has
already struck out at Turkey by placing a 30 percent
tariff on Turkish imports thus increasing the prices of all Turkish products
that jumped 30-40 percent overnight. In response, Turkey
opened two additional crossings to Iraq in order to assist local merchants to
bypass Syria in trade with
the Gulf and Egypt.
On a parallel basis, Turkey announced that it
will stop all transactions with the Commercial Bank
of Syria,
except for the existing ones,
and that it will halt
all credit agreements signed with Eximbank to finance Syrian infrastructure
projects.
Turkey’s Regional Motivations
It is
no secret that Turkey under
its current leadership has invested major political capital in methodologically
deepening relations with Syria and constituted a ready mediator willing to help Damascus
mend its strained relations with neighbors such as Israel. Turkey has facilitated a
series of Syrian-Israeli peace talks that ended in December 2008 with the main focus on that if
Syria were able to achieve peace with “security” and obtain greater US and Turkish involvement, it might be
willing to pull away from Iran’s orbit. Therefore, the
change in Turkey’s posture
toward Israel
has been largely a tool to advance the country’s re-orientation rather than any
sense in its cause. The decline of Turkey’s relationship with Israel that started in Davos
in response to Israel's
December 2008 invasion of Gaza and later on over
the flotilla episode aboard the Mavi Marmara
provided the basis for Turkey’s ambitious regional agenda, one that primarily targets Iranian posture.
The motives of the unfolding Turkish policy vis-à-vis Syria lie
behind its commitment to re-affirm Turkey’s close relationship with
the US and its intention to outweigh Iranian
regional influence. The rivalry between Sunni
Turkey and Shia Iran
is not new. On the contrary, it is historically rooted since Turkey and Iran are widely viewed as the
diminished heirs of two major competing Muslim empires, the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shiite Safavid
Empire, and this rivalry has currently evolved to the egos level of Turkish
Prime Minister Erdogan and Iranian President Ahmadinejad.
In
certain aspects, Syria seems
to have become the focus of the Iranian-Turkish
rivalry that largely touches upon the interests and
expectations of regional countries and the West. Specifically,
regional countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain that maintain large
Shia minorities have invested heavily in putting forward Arab League sanctions
against Syria and support the increasing role of
Turkey in intra-Arab affairs since they view the
Syrian crisis as a golden opportunity to diminish Iranian influence and posture
in the heart of the Middle East. According to the Gulf States perspective, Iran anticipates that Shiite
groups in the GCC states are frustrated by their
failure to establish democracy and impose limits on authoritarian rule and
therefore it is a matter of time for these groups to turn to the Iranian “big
brother” for support.
Upon
this line of thought, an Iraqi official who meets
with Iranian policymakers on a regular basis has claimed that a group in Iran
announced a project involving “national Shia security”, and examines “the
Jewish experiment in exporting their idea slowly and calmly,” apparently a
reference to international Zionist organizations’ role in advocating pro-Israel
interests. The Shia protests in Bahrain in the
midst of the Arab spring were portrayed by the Gulf states as a sectarian Shia
plot indicative of the fear of the expanded Iranian and Shia influence on the predominantly
Sunni Arab world, and not as a discontent
stemmed chiefly from their lower standard of living, unofficial exclusion from
sensitive government positions, and Sunni domination of parliament. Gulf States widely perceived that a possible overthrow of the monarchy
in Bahrain whose 70 per cent
of the population is Shia could serve as springboard for Iranian ambitions that
perceive Bahrain as the 14th province of Iran.
The Gulf States’
interests coincide with those of the West and Turkey since Iranian dominance is also perceived as posing a strategic threat to vital security assets. For example, Bahrain
hosts the Naval Support Activity Bahrain (NSA Bahrain) and the US Navy 5th fleet headquarters. Literally
located in the heart of the Gulf, the naval base and the headquarters are a key
strategic asset for the US presence in the wider Middle East, as they permit
the overlooking of the oil installations and trade routes, the support of the
US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight against naval piracy in the Red
and the Arabian Seas.
It is in this geopolitical framework that Turkey
aspiring to broaden its horizons has got itself deeply into the waters of the
Syrian crisis to diminish the Iranian influence and present itself as the
neo-ottoman mediator and defender of the larger Sunni Muslim neighbourhood,
with the ultimate aim to serve as the anchor for a
new geopolitical alignment. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutogolu admitted in the recent past that “rather what we (Turkey) are
trying to do is to contribute to the establishment of a permanent peace in our
region. If by order this is Pax Ottomana,
Pax in the meaning of order, we (Turkey) are trying to establish an
order, it is not wrong to say such thing”.
The Turkish rivalry with Iran seems to take into account its
regional ambitions for establishing a regional
order with a watchful eye on the interests of greater outside powers. By encircling diplomatically and
possibly militarily Syria, Turkey estimates that Iraq and Lebanon will follow
suit and thus a coincidence of Western and Turkish interests will empower the
regional leadership role of Turkey with the blessing of the
former. Undoubtedly,
Iraq presents an arena of Turkish-Iranian competition and
Western interests where the Shia-Sunni divide is
dominant and where the Iranian influence has extended over religious Shia political parties that
shape Iraqi politics at the national level and at the provincial and local
levels in central and southern Iraq. Lebanon
for its part is largely perceived as the satellite of Iran and therefore Turkey concerns about further consolidation of Iranian influence
near its borders through the enhanced power of
Hezbollah.
Turkey’s
Domestic Agenda and Its Relevance to Syria
There has been a certain degree of
artistry by the Turkish leadership in tilting Turkey towards the Middle East
with the redefinition of its domestic priorities and politics. Though few expected that the EU
will embrace Turkey membership, a Turkish ambition
viewed according to a former Jordanian Foreign
minister more like the hope of the devil in heaven,
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan exploited the profound EU rejection to undermine Ataturk’s
Westernizing legacy and to pursue
an ambitious domestic agenda.
Having realized the urgent need to address the issue of Turkey’s minorities and of a non-military solution to the Kurdish problem, with a
clear distinction between meeting the needs of the
Kurdish population and defeating the Kurdistan’s
Workers Party, the PKK, Turkey advertised the so-called National Unity project whose
nature directed towards the country’s minority groups most prominently the Kurds and the Alevis that maintain a significant presence in neighboring countries
like Syria.
The
Turkish government’s initial efforts to reach out to the Kurds to calm the turbulent internal front have
become futile. The early encouragement to start using the Kurdish language in
the political and public arenas was widely accepted
by the Kurds along with the Turkish government’s
agreement to receive a group of Kurdish returnees from Northern Iraq in 2009. Reforms
and gestures towards the Kurdish ethnic minority were accredited to the
National Unity project indicating that democratization is part of the solution
to the Kurdish issue to finally defeat Kurdish separatists. The argument that the strengthening of the society leads to a
strong state did not go hand in hand with reforming the constitution to
recognize that Turkey has certain minorities whose rights of religion and
freedom of expression are secured.
On a
parallel basis, the outline of a roadmap for an
opening to the Alevis viewed as adherents of a form of Islam influenced by
Shiism and Sufism was a major aspect of the National Unity project. The Turkish government sponsored a series of workshops to address
Alevi issues that pertained to granting cem houses the status of worship places, opening a special institute
to train Alevi clerics, and supporting financially the operational costs of the cem houses. Nevertheless, the opening has not
gained any traction due to lack of genuine engagement with Alevi organizations
except for Eyli Beyt widely seen as in bed with the Turkish government. Alevis
remained largely skeptical to the project as evidenced in a survey conducted by the Eurasian Public
Research Center which showed that 33.9 percent supported that they are target
of permanent discrimination, while only 11 percent believed that the Turkish
government was sincere with its National Unity Project.
The
Turkish government’s initial plans to reach out to the Kurds and the Alevis led
to increasing criticism of the project by all
segments of the Turkish media and the political
groups, thus de-generating the initial debate, and prompting
the Turkish government to abandon its rhetoric about the National Unity project.
Coming to today’s critical situation
in Syria and the conflicting relationship of Turkey with its once close ally,
there are increasing worries that the former is in position to exploit the
Kurdish and Alevi cards to create instability to the latter’s domestic front. The inability
of Turkey to
apply the “zero problems/conflicts
policy” with neighbors to its own Southeast with
the promotion of the National Unity project may prove,
under the current circumstances, detrimental to its
national interests. The Turkish leadership’s recent threats to increase its
military presence across the Syrian border may be insufficient to deter Syria
and Iran from subversively supporting Kurdish separatists, while the Prime
Minister’s late November 2011 apology for
expulsions and massacres against Alevis in the Eastern province of Dersim in
1937-1939 was perceived as provocative affront to
the Alevis.
For a comprehensive opening,
Turkey needs to have proceeded with the implementation of effective policies that would have over the long-term improved
the economic, political and cultural life of Turkey’s Kurds
and Alevis, therefore preventing their exploitation by regional players. The interview of President Assad at the
Syrian TV on August 21, 2011 sent a concrete
message to all directions with Turkey being considered as the main recipient
according to which “The consequences of any
action against Syria would exceed by far what they could possibly bear for two
reasons. First, the
geopolitical position of Syria and second, the Syrian capabilities only some of
which they would be able to bear… The countries that make threats are
themselves weak politically and socially. They are weak, much weaker than in the past”. Looking at Turkey’s domestic front, one cannot help but see that
nowadays it has to deal
with the landscape it faces not aesthetically but pragmatically to meet
emerging challenges.
