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Turkey and the World Since World War II |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Summer 2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
Turkey: Anglo-American Security Interests 1945-1952, by Ekavi Athanassopoulou. 274 pages, bibliography, index. London, UK: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999. $59.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7146-4855-8 The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion, by Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig. 268 pages, bibliography, index, appendix. London, UK: I. B. Tauris, 1999. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 1-86064-439-2 Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy, by Yasemin Çelik. 176 pages, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999. $59.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-275-96590-2 Turkish foreign policy appears to have reached a critical crossroads. Under current conditions, the historical rule of thumb that the Turkish policymakers have used―that their country should never remain aloof from major institutional developments in Western Europe―can no longer be as easily implemented as it had once been. The European Union for which Turkey was granted candidacy has put forth a set of criteria that the state finds difficult to meet in light of the political philosophy that has prevailed since the beginning of the republic, with its emphasis on the unitary and fully sovereign nation-state and the prevalence of state over society. The end of the Cold War and the demise first of the Warsaw Pact and then of the Soviet Union has also modified in major ways the arrangement on which Turkey’s security has been based since the end of World War II. The Turkish political establishment is encountering dilemmas and challenges on many fronts, and the field of foreign policy is no exception. At first sight, three books published in 1999 would seem welcome contributions to the study of Turkish foreign policy at this critical time. Athanassapoulou’s Turkey focuses on a watershed event in Turkey’s external relations, the accession to NATO. O’Malley and Craig investigate another major event in Turkey’s external relations, the Cyprus intervention, that introduced an issue of contention between Turkey and her allies which still awaits resolution and proves a difficult hurdle in all aspects of Turkey’s relations with the West. Finally, Çelik’s Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy, examines the country’s foreign policy from the beginning of the republic to the present, with greater emphasis on the post-World War II period. The three books should complement each other. Çelik’s work might offer a general framework, with Turkey’s entrance to NATO and the Cyprus intervention constituting two major events that deserve to be examined more closely. This is a nice fit in theory, but does not work in reality. Athanassapoulou’s book is an excellent and well-documented study of the first enlargement of NATO. The author demonstrates that the US defined its security interests in the eastern Mediterranean gradually, becoming aware that the implementation of Western defense could not be achieved without including that region in its system. In this endeavor, the US competed and cooperated with Great Britain, a country that had come to view the eastern Mediterranean as its special area of interest, until it finally became convinced in 1951 that Turkey and Greece should become a part of the alliance in order to build a comprehensive defense system. Athanassapoulou does not adopt the perspective of a single state, but looks at the process through which Turkey joined NATO as a process of interaction between actors that had common interests, but each with its own agenda and goals. This constitutes a particularly strong point in her effort. Turkey’s accession to NATO is usually treated as a single chapter in books on Turkish foreign policy. It is to her credit that Athanassapoulou has conducted such detailed and comprehensive research, using mainly archival materials and other original sources, such as memoirs, to produce a well researched, highly readable book that goes beyond other writings on the subject. For those interested in Turkish foreign policy, as well as those whose focus is on the historical post-war alliance, this is obligatory reading. The Cyprus Conspiracy by O’Malley and Craig constitutes a remarkable contrast to Athanassapoulou’s book. The two authors are journalists by profession and, by all indications, experts in general foreign policy rather than focused either on Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, the security of the Eastern Mediterranean, or US or British foreign policy. They are convinced that Turkey’s intervention on the island (which clearly is not to their liking) was the result of a conspiracy, long planned, to ensure that the US would be able to continue its intelligence gathering and spying against a possible communist victory on the island. They rely mainly on British and some American sources, and do not consult Greek or Turkish sources. Since Turkey was the country that carried out the intervention, it is absolutely critical to mobilize evidence from Turkish sources to support their hypothesis about an American conspiracy. Instead, they base their argument on data that lends itself to more than one interpretation. Their hypothesis may or may not be correct. The reader can easily develop the impression that the authors have an ax to grind with the US, and especially with Henry Kissinger, while they are at pains to explain that Her Majesty’s government was, for the most part, an innocent actor in this affair that Kissinger engineered. The authors would have done well to discuss the aftermath of the intervention and demonstrate how the Turkish intervention served the goals the conspiracy was designed to achieve. By way of reminder, an arms embargo was imposed on Turkey by the US Congress, NATO security was seriously compromised, and Turkey’s relations with all her allies became and have remained strained. Did the American plan really fail so miserably, or was there no plan but simply a Turkish refusal to tolerate the tipping in favor of Greece of the Turco-Greek balance established at Lausanne? Is it conceivable that the US feared that stopping the Turks would terminate their link with the NATO alliance. The authors might have investigated the reaction of the Warsaw Pact and some member countries to the Turkish intervention, to develop a more comprehensive perspective on what happened and why. The book reads well and for those who are interested in conspiratorial explanations of what happens in the world, it is fun reading. For experts interested in the topic, I would recommend a lot of other titles over this suspense novel. Çelik’s Contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy is a short book that describes the history and the broad topical areas of Turkish foreign policy. Sadly, it is mostly description. It suffers from the lack of a central question or a set of important issues. Rather, often a less than systematic summary of developments and structures is presented with no conceptual framework that might help the reader determine what is important and relevant and what is not. For example, while the domestic politics of the country are summarized on several occasions as background to foreign policymaking, there is no analysis of how policy is in fact made and how each domestic actor might contribute to it or constrain it. Similarly, the discussion of the foundations of foreign policy in the first chapter is elementary and does not tell us much about why Turkey behaves the way it does in its external affairs. A person who would like to learn about Turkey’s foreign policy, to understand how policy is made, what Turkey’s fundamental external concerns are, and how policy has evolved and changed over time would need to consult other sources. At a time when the world order has been changing and when such changes are beginning to affect Turkey’s external relations in important ways, when Turkey’s domestic politics and economic problems appear to be constraining the country’s ability to adjust to a changing environment, it is important that we get innovative writing on Turkish foreign policy. We still have to wait, however, for that |
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