“Μοντέλο” Ελληνοτουρκικών στις Διεθνείς Σχέσεις: Το πάρε-δώσε και το Διεθνές Δίκαιο

The “Grecoturkishification” of international relations: Balancing between Transactionalism and International Law

Can allies end up fighting one another? That is the question that has been hovering over the Aegean, with wavering intensity, since decades.

Greece and Türkiye, both NATO members since 1952, have traded (carefully scripted?) barbs verging on war or war-like incidents many times in the past: in 1974, 1976, 1987, 1996 and 2020. Note that in all those cases with only one exception, that of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, tensions arose from differences relating to disputed maritime delimitations that effectively determine where each country can drill for hydrocarbons, send troops or conduct search and rescue operations, among other things.

A war between NATO members would be something unprecedented of course, if it ever happened.

When faced with the challenge of constraining the Greco-Turkish front as then NATO Secretary General (1971-1984), Dutch Joseph Luns opted for (evasive?) neutrality or impartiality, by claiming that NATO should not get entangled in the bilateral disputes its member countries might have.

Fast forward a few decades, in October 2020, Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg would, as then NATO Secretary General, oversee the establishment of a military de-confliction mechanism between Greece and Turkey, that was “designed to reduce the risk of incidents and accidents in the Eastern Mediterranean”.

Wars are not accidents, but accidents can certainly happen and, when the field is already mined with disputes and bad blood, any accident can have wider ramifications, especially in an already tense and volatile region such as the Eastern Mediterranean.

Back in August 2020, Turkish frigate Kemal Reis collided with Greek frigate Lemnos near the Greek island of Kastellorizo. A few weeks prior to that, Turkey had announced that Oruç Reis, its “flagship” survey vessel, would carry out seismic research in contested areas south of Kastellorizo. In August 12 of that year, when the collision occurred, Kemal Reis was escorting Oruç Reis and Lemnos was shadowing them, while Greek and Turkish fleets were already facing off on high alert across the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. 

To provide some context, tensions were running high between the two neighboring countries since 2016 (see Turkish coup attempt, the breaking down of Greco-Turkish exploratory talks) and even higher since 2019 due to a combination of factors related to energy explorations, maritime jurisdictions, sovereignty claims and refugee/migrant flows, while Türkiye’s purchase of Russian S-400 missile defense system and Erdogan’s post-Arab Spring feuds with neighboring countries contributed to Türkiye’s growing sense of isolation and encirclement.

When Türkiye unilaterally opened its land border to Greece in Evros in February 2020 with the aim of allowing the free passage of refugees and migrants to Europe, Greece reacted militarily by closing and reinforcing this border. From Greece’s perspective, Ankara was just trying to extort EU’s unequivocal support for Turkish positions, and probably appease Turkish public opinion, by using migrants and refugees as leverage, right after news broke out that 33 Turkish soldiers had been killed in Syria’s Idlib. “But what were Türkiye’s soldiers doing in Idlib?”, one could ask.

From 2016 onwards, Türkiye intervened militarily in Libya’s and Syria’s civil (or proxy, if you prefer) wars, sent seismic research vessels to areas contested with the Republics of Greece and Cyprus, and signed a far-fetched memorandum of understanding on maritime delimitations with Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), while trading barbs with Egypt’s Sisi (by siding with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood), Israel’s Netanyahu (by siding with Hamas), Saudi Arabia’s MBS (because of Khashoggi’s murder) and UAE’s MBZ. Note that when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt severed diplomatic ties with Qatar in mid-2017, after accusing Doha of supporting terrorism (see Muslim Brotherhood), Türkiye sided openly with Qatar. In other words, Greco-Turkish relations deteriorated within an environment of growing peripheral tensions, regroupings, reorientations and antagonisms.

However, Turkish leadership under Erdogan has shown time and again that it is capable of making, or of at least attempting, u-turns when it sees fit. “We have no prejudice, hostility or animosity toward anyone”, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in December 2020, channeling the launch of a new era or phase in Türkiye’s foreign policy. Under this newfound “no animosity” banner, Türkiye would attempt to gradually restore its relations with neighbors and NATO allies after 2020.

Fast forward a couple of years, disaster struck. On 6 February 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, the most devastating to hit earthquake-prone Turkey in decades, struck in southern Turkey, killing more than 50,000 people and razing entire neighborhoods. 

At that moment, as if they were already ready and just waited for an opportunity, Greece and Türkiye went into rapprochement mode. It wasn’t the first time that a disaster brought the two earthquake-prone countries closer together. Something similar had happened back in 1999, after another 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck İzmit in northwestern Turkey on August 17, 1999.

February 2023 marked the beginning of a new phase in Greco-Turkish relations. The waters in the Aegean suddenly turned calmer, paving the way for what would follow. On December 2023 the president of the Republic of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the prime minister of the Hellenic Republic, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, signed the “Athens Declaration on Friendly Relations and Good-Neighbourliness” in the Greek capital. In a spirit of goodwill and renewed cooperation, the two leaders agreed to engage in constructive consultations based on three pillars: those of Political Dialogue, Positive Agenda and Confidence Building Measures. In a spirit of realism though, the two sides underlined that “this Declaration does not constitute an international agreement binding upon the Parties under international law” and that “no provision of this Declaration shall be interpreted as creating legal rights or obligations for the Parties”.

In the 12 months that have followed since then, the two sides in the Aegean have managed to keep the waters relatively calm and the channels of communication open and working. As far as the long standing Greco-Turkish disputes are concerned though, there has been no newsworthy progress and the reason for this is very simple.

Turkey and Greece come to the table from different starting points, with disjointed, non-overlapping agendas. For Greece, there’s only one issue to be discussed under the provisions of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea-UNCLOS to which Greece is a signatory (but Turkey isn’t), that of maritime (continental shelf, EEZ) delimitations and this issue, if both sides agreed, could be brought before an international court such as the ICJ in Hague. For Turkey on the other side, the issues should be dealt of bilaterally and are not one but many: the demilitarization of certain Greek islands in the eastern Aegean, the sovereignty status of the uninhabited Aegean islets and rocks that are not explicitly mentioned in international treaties, Greece’s possible extension of its territorial waters from 6 to 12 nm and, among others, the status of the Muslim minority in the Greek region of Western Thrace which Ankara chooses to present as solely ethnic and “Turkish”, thus undermining the Greek approach that views this minority as religious (Muslim) and multi-ethnic (consisting of Greek citizens of Turkish origin, Pomaks and Roma) as stated in the Lausanne Treaty.  

Athens and Ankara have agreed to disagree. The issues, however, that Türkiye brings to the table have been piling up and expanding in scope through the decades and this causes additional concern to the Greek side that feels threatened and encircled. And it was precisely this sense of growing encircling threat that made Athens revisit its ties after 2016 with countries such as Israel, Egypt, UAE, USA, France et al. and work towards bolstering them with renewed determination via new bilateral and multilateral incentives. The Turkish demand for the demilitarization of inhabited Greek territories; the so called “grey zones” of disputed sovereignty in the Aegean; the Turkish-Libya (GNA) MOU on delimitation of maritime jurisdiction areas in the Mediterranean that disregards even the slightest notion of Greek EEZ; the overflights of Turkish fighter jets over inhabited Greek islands; "Mavi Vatan” (“Blue Homeland”) as Turkiye’s official doctrine (taught in Turkish schools); the turning of Greek-Orthodox churches into mosques… were not always there, on the table. They were added along the way, not many decades ago but in recent times, and this creates suspicion and skepticism on the Greek side regarding the revisionist extent of what Ankara can unilaterally ask and use as a bargaining chip in negotiations. By the way, not only Greek or Western, but also Turkish analysts have criticized the Turkish-Libya (GNA) MOUs as well as the Mavi Vatan doctrine as scarcely credible, shallow and unsubstantiated by international law.

So, where do we stand at the moment (Dec. 2024)? From a values-based approach, Greece and Turkey seem to be far away from each other. One wants to maintain the post WWII order, while the other wants to rewrite it by creating a new “axis of Türkiye” in “a world is bigger than five” approach. One is always going back to referencing international law and UNCLOS, while the other brings forward more transactional approaches. However, both Mitsotakis and Erdoğan seem to “own” this process on a personal level this time, much more than they did in the past, as they have taken it upon themselves to resolve whatever can be resolved.

Do all these -the balancing between international law and transactionalism; the personal relations approach- remind you of something? Maybe American president elect Donald Trump and his approach to international relations?  

Mitsotakis and Erdogan try to balance between transactionalism and international law, while Trump’s approach to international dealings confirms this tendency. It is a “Grecoturkishification” of international relations, or a “Trumpization” of foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean region?

So, where does this lead us? The easy -and politically convenient from a domestic prism- way would be to not discuss. After all, we cannot even agree on the issues that we want to discuss, right? On a very practical level though, there are issues that have to be dealt with and this is where transactionalism sets in.

Does it work? Well… yes. On trade, tourism and the issue of controlling migrant flows, Greece and Turkiye have worked out results during this recent “calm waters” period. Could these results lead to other bigger and deeper solutions? Well… it is going to be difficult, but if it happens, it will probably come via a combination of transactional and values-based approaches.

* Ο Γιώργος Σκαφιδάς είναι δημοσιογράφος με έδρα την Αθήνα. Από τα μέσα της δεκαετίας του 2000 καλύπτει τον τομέα των διεθνών ειδήσεων. Εργάζεται στην Kathimerini.gr και συνεργάζεται με το Amynanet.gr. Άρθρα του έχουν δημοσιευτεί στα  Insidestory.gr, Νews247.gr, Ethnos.gr, Hellasjournal.gr και Geopoliticalcyprus.org.