Turkey's transformers (II): Ankara's ambitions

Turkey has never before had a foreign minister with the drive, vigor and vision of Ahmet Davutoğlu. Even before he took the post last May, Davutoğlu had been promoting a forceful vision of Turkey’s role in the world.

He has gathered an A-list of senior officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and set forth an ambitious policy advocating “zero problems with neighbors,” with the hope of settling long-standing differences through a high degree of engagement with the leaders and the people of Turkey’s neighboring countries.

The aim is to turn Turkey from a “central,” or regional, power into a global one in the new international order. Implicitly, this is also a project to demonstrate to the world that a Muslim country can be a constructive democratic member of the international community. More explicit is Turkey’s ambition to better deal with the Muslim nations of the Middle East and beyond, whether friends or foes of the West.

The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government has been enormously active, though with mixed results, despite the acclaim it showers on itself. Most successful in expanding its trade and investment abroad, it has been far less so in making progress toward satisfying the European Union’s accession requirements. It has also failed to come to grips with the question of whether the Ottomans’ treatment of the Armenians a century ago constituted genocide.

It is still unclear whether the AKP has the will to break much domestic crockery on matters of foreign policy. Its major breakthrough so far has been to end Turkey’s political isolation of Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara no longer pretends the region does not exist and that it need only deal with Baghdad. This 180-degree turn was in part prompted by the recent U.S. decision to begin withdrawing its troops from Iraq.

Turkey is trying to anticipate the evolution of Iraqi politics in the absence of U.S. combat units in the country. The AKP government wants Iraq to remain whole, but realizes that if tensions in Iraq devolve into all-out violence and the country breaks apart, Turkey would be better off with a friendly partner in Iraq’s energy-rich north.

The AKP government managed to convince the Turkish military that an opening to the Iraqi Kurds would not exacerbate existing difficulties with the Turkish Kurds and would increase Turkey’s influence in Iraq. The Turks have come to understand that for the Iraqi Kurds, having better relations with Ankara is a strategic choice: Turkey is their door to the West. Yet the Turkish authorities and their Kurdish counterparts in Iraq still have to sort out some explosive issues, such as the contested status of the oil-rich area of Kirkuk. The Turks believe that it is essential to keep control of the city out of the hands of the Regional Kurdish Administration, both to help prevent the breakup of Iraq and to limit the aspirations of the Iraqi Kurds.

The Turkish government also made an impressive move earlier this year when it reversed its long-standing policy of isolating Armenia. In April, despite an apparent promise to U.S. President Barack Obama, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delayed opening Turkey’s border with Armenia after nationalists in Turkey and Azerbaijan protested. But in another surprising about-face, Turkey approved in August the text of two protocols establishing diplomatic and economic relations between the two countries and an agreement on opening the Turkish-Armenian border.

This is a major step forward for diplomacy in the Caucasus. Turkey also hopes that the initiative will help its case with the EU and reduce the pressure on the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution on the Armenian genocide next year.

It remains to be seen whether the AKP will stand up to opposition. Erdoğan has promised the government of Azerbaijan that Turkey will not open its border with Armenia until Armenia relinquishes control over the regions it holds surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, a landlocked province in Azerbaijan. Erdoğan seems to be betting that a diplomatic solution to this issue will somehow be found this fall. But it is quite possible that Erdoğan’s deals with Armenia will fail to pass in the Turkish Parliament because of Azerbaijani and Turkish nationalist pressures.

Cyprus and Nabucco

The issue of Cyprus continues to be the main hurdle to Turkey’s accession to the EU. Despite Turkey’s renewing negotiations with the two Cypriot parties for the umpteenth time, there is no great hope for settling the island’s contested status. The Turkish government will also have to decide soon whether it will open its ports to shipping from the Greek part of Cyprus, as it has pledged it will do to under its agreement with the EU.

The European Commission is expected to release a report on Turkey’s progress in November, and that could set the stage for recriminations. The fact that in 2003, the Turkish government displayed the courage, at least in domestic political terms, to drop its traditional obstructionist stance in favor of a pro-European one seems to hold little water today. The EU failed to reward the Turkish Cypriots for the dramatic change in their patron’s policy by providing them with trade opportunities, thereby undermining the AKP government’s diplomacy and its credibility on this issue at home.

Until its recent Armenian initiative, the Turkish government seemed to have grown mostly inert when it came to enhancing its standing with the EU.

Turkey did score a big win last July by signing an agreement with six other countries to build a pipeline that would bring natural gas from the Caucasus and Central Asia through Turkey to Europe. Whether the Nabucco pipeline will ever be built is uncertain: The costs of construction and whether enough gas will be available to fill the pipeline are issues that still need to be worked out, and the Turkish government will have to maneuver delicately with both the West and Russia.

But the pipeline project has already raised Turkey’s importance in the eyes of the EU’s energy-hungry countries, though several Turkish foreign-policy initiatives have given Western governments pause. One is Turkey’s closer relationship with Russia, a rapprochement driven by a vast expansion in Turkish-Russian trade. During a highly publicized visit to Ankara by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin soon after the Nabucco pipeline deal was signed this summer, the Turkish and Russian governments struck a potentially conflicting agreement to develop the South Stream pipeline to bring Russian gas to Europe through Turkish territory.

As soon as the Georgian crisis hit in August 2008, Erdoğan jumped on a plane and tried to broker negotiations between Moscow and Tbilisi. His intervention, which was notably uncoordinated with Turkey’s allies in NATO and the EU, yielded little more than Turkey’s call for a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Pact – an idea that pleased the Russians but appeared to vex Western governments. Whatever suspicions Turkey may continue to harbor about Russia, Erdoğan has significantly improved the tenor of the two states’ relations. He is also in no hurry to see Georgia’s NATO aspirations fulfilled.

But perhaps the AKP government’s most ballyhooed effort has been its diplomatic activism in the Middle East. The Turkish government took advantage of the vacuum created by U.S. President George W. Bush’s unpopular policies in the region to participate in indirect talks between Israel and Syria. It injected itself into the negotiations following the crises in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited Davutoğlu, then a foreign-policy adviser, to join the French delegation that traveled to Damascus to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Ankara has taken partial credit for the agreement governing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq; it reportedly deserves some for hosting talks between U.S. representatives and Iraqi insurgents earlier this year. And Foreign Minister Davutoğlu jumped at the opportunity to mediate Iraq and Syria’s recent dispute, in which Iraq claimed that bombings in Baghdad’s Green Zone in August were carried out by insurgents from Syria.

* Morton Abramovitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, was U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1989 to 1991. Henri J. Barkey is a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. This piece was published in the November/December 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs.