Why do NATO and the EU intervene little in the dispute between Greece and Turkey?
The italics of Teodoro Dalavecuras on the tensions between Turkey and Greece, with the role of NATO and the EU
While the Foreign Minister of Germany Heiko Maas met the foreign ministers of Athens and Ankara, engaged with a moving sense of duty (I say without the slightest irony) in an attempt, condemned from the start, to ease the crisis, the most serious after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, of relations between Greece and Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a one-minute video in the infosphere, celebrating the battle of Manzikert (August 26, 1071) when the armies of the Seljuk dynasty under the orders of Alp Arslān inflicted a ruinous defeat on the army of the Byzantine Empire, capturing the Roman emperor IV Diogenes. Thus began the descending parable of the New Rome, destined to end on May 29, 1453 with the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II the Conqueror. An unequivocal message, if it were still needed, of the determination with which Erdogan pursues his own neo-Ottoman plan of territorial expansion, after having squandered the last coins of the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder, in three decades of rather precarious economic expansion. Turkey's secular national state.
While Maas, the "political" representative of EU foreign affairs in the semester of Germany's presidency, consumed the futile attempt, the "bureaucratic" representative of these same EU foreign affairs, the Catalan Josep Borrell , "justified" the now substantially explicit threats of Turkish military aggression against Greece, with the very recent Greece-Egypt agreement on their respective Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), an agreement that would have “unnerved” the Turks. The exit of the High Representative has – that yes – deeply irritated the government of Athens not resulting that Borrell himself had been equally concerned about the mood of Greece (a member of the EU) last autumn when Turkey signed with the Libya by Fayez Al-Sarraj a similar agreement "making its own" a strip of the Mediterranean Sea that crosses, among others, the territorial waters of islands such as Rhodes and Crete: an agreement preceded by a cartography distributed by the Turkish government, in which even a portion the same island of Crete was absorbed in the area of Turkish influence.
Borrell's attitude is anything but casual, of course: on the one hand he aligns himself with his "colleague" NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who always tends to turn away when the temperature rises between Greece and Turkey, given that both countries are part of the Atlantic Alliance; on the other hand, it takes into account the historical, as well as economic ties of Germany (and also of Italy for that matter) with Turkey, and above all of the fact that the European Union is not a subject of international politics because it lacks that negligible requirement of the international personality which is sovereignty: worse, it has 27.
It is not elegant to mention this "detail", perhaps it is even politically incorrect to mention it because the EU prides itself on being a community of values and rules that, as such, would have even overcome the Westphalian myth of sovereignty with more "advanced" institutional forms . As for values, not being able to be severe with Turkey for a thousand reasons, Brussels “consoles itself” with an inflexible attitude towards Belarus. Regarding the rules, however, that of relations with Turkey risks becoming a problem: Erdogan is offered the opportunity to demonstrate with facts that the EU, in addition to being politically disjointed as never before (just think of the respective positions of Germany and France on Turkish expansionism), it is not even a community of rules.
There is a side of the issue of relations between Greece and Turkey that does not concern the merit of their respective positions, but the role of international law. By now, Turkey's claims are less and less anchored to an – albeit specious – argument of international law, but only to the determination “of the Turkish people” to claim their rights; recall the Mussoliniian "we will pull straight" or perhaps the story that "takes us by the throat", with a tactic of accomplished facts (systematic violations of Hellenic airspace and, recently, real or alleged geological prospecting with an abundant supply of military ships in maritime areas belonging to the Greek continental shelf). It is also significant that Turkey is among the few countries in the world that have never acceded to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982, which also constitutes the legal framework for the EEZ agreements.
Of course, the theme is not only nor mainly that of international law (in legal questions, as in religious women, the Napoleonic “Paris is worth a mass” always applies). The main point is that the expansion of Turkey in the Mediterranean, if it does not have valid legal reasons, still has a concrete foundation. Over the past sixty years, Turkey, from the agricultural nation of less than 30 million inhabitants that it was, has grown into a regional power of nearly 90 million, with a developed economy albeit on a fragile basis, a substantial exporting military industry and today a very dangerous capacity. decision-making based on the dictatorial powers, albeit "at term", of the President of the Republic. It is inevitable that Turkey “elbowing” in the Mediterranean (as it does in Africa, by the way), with or without Erdogan, and that some negotiated redistribution of areas of influence, even on a formal level, will sooner or later have to arrive.
But if on the one hand it is the laws of physics that suggest that Greece is certainly not able to handle this negotiation alone, the EU continues to lack the decisive instrument, sovereignty, to play a role. And, what is even more serious, the organs that guide the European public continue to pretend that the problem is not this (indeed, must not have a right to speak, faithful perinde ac cadaver to the "doctrine Monnet") but is made by the “sovereignists”, a word with respect to which even “populism” has the precision of a mathematical formula.
Unfortunately, the challenges of history do not wait and that of these days is much more dangerous than the European media suggest; this is demonstrated by the telephone conversation of 26 August with the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and with Erdogan of Donald Trump from the republican convention (who probably does not care about the war drums in the eastern Mediterranean but is concerned about the vote, on 3 November, of the numerous heirs of the Greek immigrants in the States).
The Monnet method suggests – if the EU wants to play a role in the Aegean crisis – that, to buy time, try to make new economic or other concessions to Turkey, inventing some compensation for Athens.
At this point, however, perhaps it would be better for the EU to give up any role, give Borrell a well-deserved vacation and take a pause for reflection to decide if she wants, and how, to become an adult, or prefer to give up on adult games. such as "foreign affairs", which unfortunately are not always nor just "business".
If after having effectively renounced to impose "values" internally, such as the mocking story of the Hungarian parliament's self-suspension "due to Covid", and after having promoted them in a totally accidental way, or rather blatantly opportunistic, on the outside, Brussels also renounces the primacy of international law as it is forced to do in the conflict between Greece and Turkey, having no title and no instrument – apart from the typography where the euros are printed – to make it valid, what remains ? And, above all, in a world increasingly dominated by physiologically aggressive nationalisms, what are the odds that a union stubbornly subjected to the authority of 27 governments and the uninterrupted bureaucratic bargaining of Brussels with the 25 governments that do not count, will not fall apart in a few years?
Very few, but in the meantime there have been tens of thousands of people, including quite a few former ministers and former heads of government, all pupils of Jean Monnet, who in recent decades in Brussels have had a blast.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-nato-e-ue-intervengono-poco-nella-disputa-tra-grecia-e-turchia/ on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 13:00:34 +0000.