Christos Ziogas*: Confidence Building Measures or a calming slide?
The picture in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean is more suited to the implementation, on Turkey's part, of a strategy of coercion and change of the status quo.
Christos Ziogas Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Mediterranean Studies of the University of the Aegean and Postdoctoral Researcher at Panteion University
Confidence Building Measures or Appeasement
EUROKINISSI
Confidence Building Measures (CBM), as an international policy practice, emerged after the Greek-Turkish crisis of March 1987. The Greek-Turkish talks between the then Foreign Ministers of Greece Karolos Papoulias and Turkey Mesut Yilmaz on the adoption of CBM began in May 1988 in Vouliagmeni. Following negotiations, the two sides reached the eponymous memorandum which provided that: i) both parties would recognize the right to use the high seas and international airspace. ii) When conducting national military activities, they would seek to avoid obstructing smooth navigation and air traffic. iii) the planning of exercises, which require the issuance of NOTAM, would be implemented in a manner that would avoid the isolation of areas. iv) With the aim of achieving the above, the two sides would communicate through diplomatic channels.
A few months later, in September 1988, they signed a second memorandum in Istanbul, which contained the following provisions. i) Ships and aircraft would act in accordance with international law and the rules of good conduct. ii) The naval units of the parties would refrain from acts of harassment. iii) The naval surveillance units would not obstruct the ships of the other party, during exercises, with or without fire. iv) The pilots of the aircraft of the two sides would exercise the utmost caution when they were near an aircraft of the other side and would not make dangerous maneuvers for the safety of their flight or mission. v) The two sides would in principle inform each other through diplomatic channels, before making official statements.
Thirty years of practice have shown that the CFEs are not applied on the basis of reciprocity, but are violated at will by Turkey without substantial consequences, neither during their violation nor afterwards. To avoid misunderstandings, in general, the CFEs are a tool that has a positive effect on crisis prevention, only when they are applied reciprocally, otherwise they operate counterproductively and constitute self-restraint on one side. Obviously, compliance with the current CFEs must be a prerequisite for concluding new ones. Unless we are negotiating for the conclusion of new expanded CFEs, while the agreed ones are not being observed. If this is the case, it will constitute a global originality; it is unnecessary to mention how Turkey will perceive such an event.
After the Imia crisis, in January 1996, the then political leadership adopted the strategy of Turkey's accession to the EU as a means of normalizing Greek-Turkish relations. Its basic concept was that the European framework would lead Turkish foreign policy to normative paths. Apart from the incorrect assumptions of this strategy, twenty years later Turkey's accession process is in tatters, but above all this policy has evolved into a backdoor process of accepting Turkish hegemony. The paradox is that instead of the influence of such perceptions decreasing, because the main factor of change in Turkish foreign policy is missing - namely the process of its Europeanization - a tendency to accept an ever-increasing Turkish hegemony is observed in Greek society. Both individually and collectively, the steps towards rationalization and acceptance of Turkish revisionism were conceptualized on the basis of some supposedly objective criteria and mutual rights. Of course, this specific process was initiated from the top to the bottom of society, co-forming a peculiar collective “Stockholm syndrome” regarding the acceptance of Turkey’s revisionist policy by Greece and Cyprus.
At the present juncture, where Turkey is increasingly distancing itself from the Western strategic framework, the supporters of accepting Turkish hegemony are not deterred, neither by its authoritarian evolution, nor certainly by the deterioration of US-Turkish relations. Turkey's recent actions in the Cypriot EEZ not only require a different -from the usual- approach, but also deconstruct in the clearest way the dominant perceptions of the last two decades, regarding the course of Greek-Turkish relations. The transformation of Turkish society and the emergence of a new -with purer characteristics- Turkish revisionism, would logically bend the arguments of this strategy. Two decades after the “Europeanization” of Greek-Turkish relations, the internalization of Turkish aggression in Greek society is gradually taking the form of rights on the one hand and a (ex)rationalization on the other. The unwilling abandonment of clear and defined sovereign rights by international law may be considered an honest and fair compromise; perhaps even an anti-imperialist agreement against American targets.
The Turkish President, due to his immoderation, is in a "geopolitical vice"; no matter how much time Erdogan has gained, he has to decide between the cost that the US can impose on him or what Russia can inflict on him. Obviously, Washington can - and is already doing so - cause him multiple damages. However, a rational retreat by the Turkish President towards the US will "crumple" his image at home, as if he had retreated towards a superior opponent. In this bad situation for the neighbor, why such fervor for the reorganization or expansion of the CFE, let alone from an outgoing government?
Let the current and future competent ministers not confuse Ankara's targeted effort to change the status quo in the Aegean to its advantage and to impose its positions in the eastern Mediterranean, based on military correlations, with avoiding an accident and a crisis. The picture in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean is more consistent with Turkey's implementation of a coercive strategy - changing the status quo through the threat of using force - than with the mutual pursuit of avoiding an accident.