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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Argun BALKAN
D.Sc., Research Assistant, Department of International Relations,
Ege University (Izmir, Turkey).
Tanju TOSUN
D.Sc., Professor, Head of the Department of International Relations,
Ege University (Izmir, Turkey).
Aydin IBRAHIMOV
D.Sc., Professor, Department of Geography, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (Çanakkale, Turkey).
THE MAIN PARAMETERS OF TURKISH FOREIGN POLICY AND THE POST-2008 CENTRAL CAUCASUS
Abstract
Turkey is obliged to maintain a dynamic foreign policy in the Central Caucasus for a variety of historical, eth-nocultural, and geopolitical reasons. This fact is underlined by the 2008 South Os-setia War. Formulation of Turkey's foreign policy is based on several factors, including Turkey's wider relations with the West, the Russian Federation, and the Middle East. This article examines Turkey's post-
2008 engagement in the Central Caucasus and concludes that Turkey achieved mixed outcomes as a result of its efforts. The complexity of the regional interests and clashes are beyond Turkey's individual capacity to manage regional crisis situations. Turkey is required to cooperate with the West and Moscow to achieve substantial results. In addition, local dynamics will continue to play their autonomous role.
Introduction
Despite the fact Turkey is not a direct party to any of the conflicts in the Central Caucasus, it cannot remain indifferent to the developments in the region for various historical, ethnocultural, and geopolitical reasons. This concise study examines some of the major causes and aspects of Turkey's engagement in the Central Caucasus with regard to the general driving forces behind Turkey's foreign policy.
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Firstly, the main parameters of Turkey's foreign policy will be introduced.
Secondly, the Russian and Georgian vectors of Turkey's foreign policy in the region will be discussed.
Thirdly, the Turkish-Armenian rapprochement process will be examined with references to Turkey's proposal for a Peace and Stability Pact in the Central Caucasus.
And finally, the paper will conclude with a general assessment of the topic and a brief review of the major possible developments and dynamics ahead.
The Main Vectors of Turkey's Foreign Policy
To explain Turkey's foreign policy in the Central Caucasus, it would be helpful to keep some prominent determinants of Turkey's general foreign policy in mind. Apart from the domestic variables, generally speaking, Turkey's contemporary policy has at least three major vectors: the West (the U.S. and the EU), the Russian Federation/former Soviet Union area, and the Middle East. To understand Turkey's complex engagement in the Central Caucasus, first we need to take a look at Turkey's critical bilateral foreign relations with the West and the Russian Federation. Details of the rising Middle Eastern dimension in Turkey's contemporary policy and the somewhat secondary (although also important) interconnection between the Middle Eastern and Central Caucasian vectors of Turkish foreign policy are beyond the scope of this article. Frankly speaking, the Turkish and Middle Eastern leaders seem to rarely, if ever, talk about what is going on in Turkey's Central Caucasian policy, unlike their inclination to be more voluble in the Turkish-Western or Turkish-Russian talks. Nonetheless, it must be stressed that Middle Eastern issues (especially those related to Iran-Azeri-Armenian relations) are not entirely isolated factors if we are to adopt a wider view of Turkey's foreign policy. It is just that Middle Eastern issues play a more indirect role in the Central Caucasian vector of Turkey's foreign policy.
Turkish-Russian and Turkish-Western Relations
The disintegration of the U.S.S.R. meant new prospects and new risks for Turkey's foreign policy in its Eastern neighborhood. The Turkish leadership pragmatically perceived this new situation as a way to improve Turkey's international prestige. Nonetheless, just as in the Cold War era, Moscow remained a key factor to be reckoned with in Turkey's Central Caucasian policy. Turkish-Russian relations gradually evolved from being conflict-prone to becoming more coherent, especially in the last decade, mainly thanks to the rising importance of the Russian Federation as one of Turkey's major energy suppliers.1
This slow and uneasy transformation took place despite the original and still hard-dying preferences of Turkey and the West regarding the fate of the Central Asian and Central Caucasian energy resources and the transnational energy delivery infrastructures in the region (e.g. the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Nabucco project). A second accompanying variable was the new Turkish-
1 See: R. Weitz, Global Security Watch: Russia—A Reference Handbook, Praeger Security International, Westport, CT, 2009, p. 107.
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Russian consensus to leave aside the Chechen and Kurdish cards in their mutual relations. Turkey gradually developed a kind of win-win policy vis-à-vis the Russian Federation beginning from the last days of the then Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's coalition government, as reflected by the activism of the then Foreign Affairs Minister Ismail Cem and the early days of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).2
Indeed, Ahmet Davutoglu, long time Foreign Affairs Minister of the Justice and Development Party, was the one who actually provided a comprehensive intellectual and political road map for the new era in a way that was largely unprecedented in conventional Turkish politics. Having an academic and intellectual background, Davutoglu introduced key concepts like "strategic depth" and "zero problem policy" with neighboring countries into his analysis and making of Turkish policy.3
So, as noted above, Turkish-Russian relations have been enjoying an unprecedented upward trend in the last decade with promising implications for Turkey's foreign policy in the Central Caucasus. But this does not necessarily mean that omnipresent Russophilia has come home to roost in Turkey. On the contrary, the Russian Federation is far from being the dominant factor that influences Turkey's Central Caucasus and wider former Soviet area policy. Indeed, Turkish-American relations and, to a lesser extent, Turkish-EU relations, have strong repercussions in this policy domain. The Western vector has long been the primary driving force behind Turkish policy in a way that overshadows the Russian and Middle Eastern vectors in the general sense.
In contemporary international politics, it is common knowledge that Western and Russian interests and perceptions do not readily end up in a harmonious "win-win" sum even though things are not as acute as they were during the openly "win-lose" days of the Cold War era. Besides, there are also evident drifts within the West especially regarding the formulation of the "right" Western approach to the Middle Eastern issues, particularly those relating to Iraq.4 Of course, all these matters deserve to be elaborated in greater depth in their own right. For the purposes of this article, we will briefly note that these challenging aspects of Western-Russian and intra-Western relations have their inevitable implications for Turkey's foreign policy.
Given this context, it is not surprising to see some international comments and analyses which question the side Turkey is on.5 Is Turkey moving closer to the Russian Federation and the Middle East and deliberately loosening its ties with the West? Without going into much detail for the reasons stated above, we adhere to the answer that Turkey's overall engagement is still with the West (first the U.S. and then the EU), whereas Turkish-Russian relations are more important than ever before regarding the Caucasus, Black Sea, and energy-related issues with wider repercussions for Central Asia. Incidentally, this applies to Middle Eastern affairs too. It is also worth adding that Turkey would like to have as much room to maneuver vis-à-vis the West and the Russian Federation as possible without, however, completely upsetting the overall balance in its relations with them. So, having provided this necessary general framework of Turkey's foreign policy, we can proceed to the specifics of Turkey's policy regarding the Central Caucasus in the light of the regional conflicts.
2 See: T. Aybak, "Russia and Turkey: An Ascendant Strategic Partnership in the Black Sea Neighbourhood," in:
The Black Sea Region and EU policy: The Challenge of Divergent Agendas, ed. by K. Henderson, C. Weaver, Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 2010, pp. 107-118.
3 See, for instance, Davutoglu's magnum opus: A. Davutoglu, Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye'nin Uluslararasi Konu-mu, Küre Yayinlari, Istanbul, 2001.
4 See: S.A. Kashmeri, America and Europe after 9/11 and Iraq: The Great Divide, Praeger Security International, Westport, Conn., 2007.
5 See, for example: S. Cagaptay, "Is Turkey Leaving the West?" Foreign Affairs, Online Article, 26 October, 2009, available at [http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65661/soner-cagaptay/is-turkey-leaving-the-west], 7 November, 2009.
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Implications of the 2008 South Ossetia War
The 2008 South Ossetia War is a major factor explaining Turkey's increased diplomatic involvement in the region, even though these dynamics have lost much of their power over the last one or two years due to the complications of the Turkish-Armenian-Azeri triangle and the relative military stability after 2008. Moreover, Turkey has been spending much of its foreign policy energy on Middle Eastern issues recently. A second explanation of Turkey's regional dynamism is the country's worries about America's loss of interest in the Central Caucasus after the war, particularly in the Obama era. This trend is reflected, first, by the frozen NATO accession process of Ukraine and Georgia and, second, by America's hesitation to help Georgia recover its military capabilities damaged by the war.6 So it appears that even though Turkey would be glad to have room to maneuver vis-à-vis the West whenever necessary, it does not seem to be ready or willing to handle America's (partial) withdrawal from the region. This fact is underlined by the military non-presence of the EU anywhere near the Central Caucasus. The Turkish leadership may be thinking that such a vacuum will not readily serve the delicate balance in the Turkish-Western-Russian triangle.
Post-2008 Turkish foreign policy has been paying special attention to fixing the long- time problematic relations with Armenia as the weakest link in Turkey's Central Caucasian policy. Moreover, Turkish-Georgian and Turkish-Azeri relations were already stable enough in their own right. In actual fact, Turkey's new approach toward Armenia was not an entirely new initiative; Turkey had undertaken earlier steps in the 1990s, which were soon blocked by the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Turkish-Armenian relations completely deteriorated after Turkey closed the Turkish-Armenian border in 1993 as a solidarity gesture toward Azerbaijan.7 The Armenian genocide problem and the lobbying pressure of the Armenian diaspora on the Western and Armenian governments made their negative contribution to the situation.
Given this problematic background, the Justice and Development Party took the liberty to use the 2008 South Ossetia War as a legitimate opportunity to normalize relations with Armenia. Furthermore, Turkish-Armenian relations were of critical importance not only within the Central Caucasian context, but also in Turkish-American and Turkish-EU relations due to the fact that the Western governments were directly engaged in the international debate on the Armenian genocide issue. Naturally enough, however, Turkey was completely against the Armenian genocide allegations. Another pressing factor was Turkish-Azeri relations, which almost solely determined the disappointing fate of the post-2008 Turkish-Armenian talks.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul paid a momentous visit to Erevan in September 2008 to watch a Turkish-Armenian football match in the company of Armenian President Serzh Sargsian. Gul's visit to Armenia was a historic turning point in the promising dialog process between Turkey and Armenia.8 The visit opened the way to a busy tour of diplomacy, the objective of which was to normalize mutual affairs. This ambitious diplomatic endeavor led to the mutual talks held in Zurich in 2009. As a result of the Zurich talks, Turkey and Armenia signed two joint protocols to establish diplomatic relations and create an environment of broader regional partnership.9
However, the endeavor to stabilize relations with Armenia resulted in severe problems in Turkey's normally good relations with Azerbaijan. The Azeri leadership was worried that rapprochement
6 See: F.S. Larrabee, "Turkey's Eurasian Agenda," Washington Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2011, pp. 106-107.
7 See: M. Aydm, "Changing Dynamics of Turkish Foreign and Security Policies in the Caucasus," in: Reassessing Security in the South Caucasus: Regional Conflicts and Transformation, ed. by A. Jafalian, Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 2011, pp. 123-124.
8 See: "Turkish-Armenian Relations: Football Diplomacy. It May Take a Long Time to Restore Relations between Two Old Enemies," The Economist, 3 September, 2009.
9 See: "Armenia and Turkey Normalize Ties," BBC, 10 October, 2009.
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in Turkish-Armenian relations would diminish Armenia's compliance to make compromises in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. The promising rapprochement with Armenia rapidly turned into a troublesome question in Turkey's domestic policy due to the negative attitude of the opposition parties in Turkey as they moved to take advantage of Azerbaijan's displeasure by severely criticizing the Justice and Development Party's government for turning its back on Azerbaijan.
In order to avoid a severe split in mutual relations with Azerbaijan, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan guaranteed Azerbaijan that relations with Armenia could not be stabilized without parallel progress toward settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This turn in Turkish foreign policy openly established a clearly official, although one-sided, connection between the normalization process in Turkish-Armenian relations and the achievement of a solution in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This new Turkish attitude essentially changed the whole route of Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, and evidently not too successfully.
Armenia firmly rebuffed any official connection between stabilizing relations with Turkey and resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan, asserting that these were two unrelated matters. Armenian politicians stated that the protocols signed in Zurich on 10 October, 2009 made no references to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. So Armenia viewed the connection with settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as an indication that Turkey had been moving in an insincere manner from the very beginning. Consequently, the process of Turkish-Armenian rapprochement came to a standstill and soon began to collapse. When the Turkish Parliament did not approve the Zurich Protocols as a requirement for their entry into force, Armenia shelved its diplomacy to hold talks with Turkey by the end of April 2010.10
Lessons of the Post-2008 Process
On second thought, Turkey seems to have come across some bottlenecks that undermined the attempt to stabilize relations with Armenia even though there was a serious level of enthusiasm in Ankara. The Turkish government was forced to revise its position due to the Azeri response and its power to encourage the Turkish opposition parties to start a successful protest campaign against the Turkish-Armenian negotiation process and the Zurich Protocols. Due to the ruthless and competent performance of the Turkish opposition parties, the Justice and Development Party's government was compelled to officially relate the rapprochement process to settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem. It comes as no surprise that this attitude aggravated the Turkish-Armenian negotiation process since it was obvious from the very beginning that Erevan would not approve the establishment of any connection between the two matters.
Given the protests of Azerbaijan and the Turkish opposition parties, the Turkish government could not sufficiently tackle the capability of the Armenian diaspora to orchestrate the mainly anti-Turkish domestic opposition groups in Armenia in order to manipulate and essentially sabotage rapprochement in Turkish-Armenian relations. It is widely accepted that Erevan and the Armenian diaspora do not always share ideas on the formulation of Armenia's foreign policy toward Turkey. However, it was seen that the Armenian government had very little willingness and capacity to follow its own policy line. This was largely, if not totally, a result of Armenia's deeply troubled financial circumstances and political isolation from its neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and even, Georgia and Iran. Thus, the Armenian government has been relying on the political and economic support of
10 See: S. Markedonov, "Unfreezing Conflict in South Ossetia: Regional and International Implications," in: Reassessing Security in the South Caucasus: Regional Conflicts and Transformation, pp. 36-37.
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the Armenian diaspora to a great extent. This dependence enables the diaspora to exert substantial power over Armenia's more or less flexible domestic and foreign policy steps.11
The Russian vector of Turkey's foreign policy did not really appear useful in the Turkish government's plans to manage the crisis between Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Turkey reasonably expected that the development of Turkish-Russian relations would induce a significant Russian contribution to the improvement of Turkish-Armenian relations. However, even though the Kremlin did not actually contest rapprochement in Turkish-Armenian relations, it did very little to actually persuade Erevan to show flexibility in settling the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute in parallel with the Turkish-Armenian talks. Instead, the Kremlin seems to have moved in a more pro-status quo manner regarding the fate of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The Russian Federation and Armenia took further steps to advance their de facto military alliance in the Central Caucasus. The Russian Federation gave Armenia additional security guarantees in the process as a result of the new Russian-Armenian agreement signed during Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's visit to Erevan in 2010.
The 2010 Russian-Armenian military cooperation treaty gave the Russian Federation the opportunity to maintain its military base in Gumri for another 24 years. Moreover, the Russian Federation made a more comprehensive promise to secure Armenia's territorial integrity not only vis-à-vis Azerbaijan as before, but also with respect to Turkey and Iran. Paradoxically, the context also enabled the Russian Federation to take advantage of Azerbaijan's disillusionment with the Turkish-Armenian diplomacy process. The Russian Federation managed to create pro-Russian sympathy in Baku at the same time. Interestingly enough, the renewed Russian-Armenian military cooperation implied that Azerbaijan had been warned against using any kind of military force against Armenia to impose some kind of settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Needless to say, the new military treaty also increased Armenia's dependence on the Russian Federation.12 The short-term result was consolidation of the mainly pro-status quo Russian-Armenian-Azeri relations at the expense of a Russian-backed Turkish-Armenian (and Azeri) resolution process regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh problem and wider Turkish-Armenian relations.
Given the difficulties that appeared in Erevan, Baku, and Moscow, the Turkish initiative to find a balance between Turkish-Armenian and Turkish-Azeri relations in the post-South Ossetia War era failed to fulfill the expectations. The Turkish-Armenian rapprochement process entered a new and apparently lengthy stalemate process, which also happened in the 1990s for almost the same reasons. There seems to be a more dramatic climate of distrust and disappointment among the parties regarding the issue. Domestic political processes in Turkey and Armenia are also far from encouraging new initiatives in the foreseeable future.
Turkey's post-2008 efforts to fix relations with Armenia were part of Turkey's wider proposal for a Caucasus platform of cooperation and stability. Despite being a grand step toward regional peace in the Central Caucasus, the platform proposal came up against more than one obstacle. Georgia did not show substantive sympathy for the platform idea as it provided a legitimate space for the continuation of Russia's involvement in Central Caucasian politics. As discussed above, the Turkish-Ar-menian-Azeri disagreement over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute had a negative effect on the success of the otherwise promising Zurich Protocols. Additionally, Russia's engagement in the platform was not really supportive enough to resolve the Turkish-Armenian-Azeri quagmire in the post-Zurich period. To worsen the likelihood of success of the platform proposal, American and EU involvement in the process were not directly mentioned in the plan.13 However, this last factor was a result of
11 See: T. De Waal, "Stuck in 1915: How Turkey and Armenia Blew Their Big Chance at Peace," Foreign Policy, Online, 15 April, 2010, available at [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/15/stuck_in_1915], 7 May, 2010; B. Gultekin-Punsmann, "Azerbaijan in the Changing Status Quo: Adaptation Strategies," in: Reassessing Security in the South Caucasus: Regional Conflicts and Transformation, pp. 75-90.
12 See: F.S. Larrabee, op. cit., p. 109.
13 See: Ibid., p. 110.
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Turkey's deliberate attempts to appease the Russian Federation within a more localized regional framework that did not readily impose Western involvement vis-à-vis the Russian Federation in the Central Caucasus. Indeed, it would probably be misleading to think that Turkey moved as a hasty free rider by totally ignoring Western perceptions on the matter. Turkey was otherwise more than willing to continue the whole process on a multilateral level, as seen in the case of the Zurich Protocols openly backed by the West and the Russian Federation in the past.
Nonetheless, there were also other obstacles preventing the success of the platform proposal. Due to Turkey's non-recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, these new entities were practically excluded from the picture despite their official recognition by the Russian Federation and some other countries. Turkey's reservations about Abkhazia and South Ossetia did not result directly from any anti-Turkish characteristic of these entities. On the contrary, Abkhazia in particular has long been willing to advance its contacts with Ankara and the North Caucasian diaspora in Turkey. However, understandably, Turkey had worries about the indirect pro-secessionist implications of the Abkhazia and South Ossetia cases for the Kurdish problem and the PKK terror in Turkey. This was the case even though the North Caucasian diaspora in Turkey has been frequently lobbying in Ankara to create more visible official sympathy and hopefully recognition for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.14
Another reason was Turkey's political and military support of Tbilisi in line with America's support of Georgia in this country's (currently frozen) NATO accession process. Furthermore, the fate of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, one of Turkey's major energy import channels, was dependent on the future of Georgia's geopolitical stability. In sum, there were too many contradictions and challenges at the domestic, regional, and international level for Turkey to promote a post-2008 stability framework in the Central Caucasus, despite the good intentions and initially promising, albeit partial, success (i.e. Zurich Protocols) of Turkish diplomacy.
Conclusion
This article aimed to examine Turkey's Central Caucasian policy within the framework of the main parameters of Turkey's foreign policy. In general, Turkey's foreign policy is formulated on the complex and ever-changing interaction among at least three major vectors: the West, Russian Federation/former Soviet area, and the Middle East. Of course, domestic political dynamics and ideological preferences play their essential roles if we are to adopt a wider view. The Western and former Soviet (mainly the Russian Federation) vectors have a higher level of influence when explaining Turkey's post-2008 engagement in the Central Caucasian region. To put it briefly, Turkey's reaction to the 2008 South Ossetia War was an uneasy mix of balancing Western and Russian concerns and, more importantly, promoting a regional peace and stability pact in the region.
Given these parameters and rather challenging objectives of Turkey's foreign policy, we can conclude that Turkey has achieved mixed yet unsatisfactory success, at least for the time being, mainly due to factors that turned out to be well beyond Turkey's capacity to orchestrate the situation as a regional power. On the plus side, Turkey preserved the main balance in its relations with the West, the Russian Federation, and Georgia. But on the other hand, ambitious and promising Turkish-Armenian rapprochement failed to fulfill its potential despite the initial success shown by the Zurich Protocols. A major weakness of the process was the absence of the Azerbaijan factor in the equation. When Azeri considerations came into play in line with strong domestic criticism in Turkey, Turkish-Armenian relations entered a new stalemate. Armenia's domestic opposition and the unsupportive attitude
14 See: G. Winrow, "Turkey, Russia and the Caucasus: Common and Diverging Interests," Briefing Paper, Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House, London, UK, pp. 7, 13-14.
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of the Armenian diaspora also hindered the process. Another flaw of the platform proposal was its negligence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
So finally, one wonders how much Turkey could actually achieve given the multitude of conflicting interests and variables to be managed in the region? Post-2008 experience shows us that Turkey has a very promising, yet equally difficult neighborhood in its east (as well as south by the way). Even though Turkey has an emerging regional power profile, it has to deal with issues that go beyond its individual capacity. Currently, Turkish-Armenian relations are de facto frozen and the Caucasus stability pact has been shelved. However, the regional conflicts in the Central Caucasus are not over and it is not unreasonable to think that they could make an armed return to the international agenda in the future, which is exactly what happened in the 2008 South Ossetia War. Turkey essentially needs to be ready for such developments. Turkey is obliged to obtain the support of both the West and the Russian Federation to take substantial steps in the region. However, Turkey and the wider world also have to live with the fact that development of events in the Central Caucasus will continue to be mainly determined by the actual interaction among the local actors, i.e. the Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, and South Ossetians, in situ.
