Building on 2023 progress
Despite being an election year, 2023 did not see any turbulence in Greek-Turkish relations. Indeed, it was probably the calmest year since the abortive coup in Turkey in 2016. Already, before the disastrous earthquakes that hit east Turkey last February, a quiet effort to de-escalate the 2020-22 tensions had been under way with a meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s close adviser Ibrahim Kalin and Ambassador Anna-Maria Boura, top diplomatic adviser to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on Turkey’s six submitted proposals. Thus, the earthquakes served as an accelerator, not a catalyst, in the de-escalation of Turkey’s outbursts and the threats directed at Greece and Greek citizens.
The most distinctive development of the past 10 months is the suspension of overflights and violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets, an unprecedented hiatus since 1974. Obviously, this change did not happen because Turkey stopped disputing our sovereignty over the airspace, but was the result of a methodical and effective policy by Greek governments in recent years. This policy succeeded in making Ankara’s relations with the West depend to a not inconsiderable extent on its behavior toward Athens and even, lately, Nicosia. Although Turkey still insists on a two-state solution in Cyprus and violates UN resolutions on Cyprus, it has lately avoided violating Cyprus’ continental shelf, as it had done over the previous eight years. Turkey’s distancing from the West, Greece’s even closer alignment with the US and Cyprus’ disentanglement from Russia, along with regional partnerships in the Eastern Mediterranean, have created a new reality.
Having set the basis for a new turn in Greek-Turkish relations, 2024 will certainly be an important year. It will be a transitional one that will determine whether bilateral relations will remain steady, content with the fragile equilibrium established by the Athens Declaration. The declaration may not be legally binding, but it is an international text of some importance, with specific provisions which either side can invoke to bind the other to a specific behavior framework.
Athens believes that, thanks to this recent agreement, Turkey will refrain from provocative actions that would once again ratchet up tensions, while Ankara is content with the provisions that the two sides will not turn to a third party to complain if a bilateral issue arises. The Greek side estimates, correctly, that, after the Oruc Reis (the “hydrocarbon research ship”) episode, we brought Turkey to the negotiating table without making concessions and forced it to seek a diplomatic, not military, solution. Turkey can be satisfied by the fact that, with its “responsible” conduct of recent months, without moving at all from its revisionist positions, it seems to have unfrozen the sale of F-16 planes and upgrade kits and created the basis for resetting its relations with the West. In any case, Turkey’s overall distancing from the West and its unreliability as a partner have come at a high cost. But we see that one or two gestures of goodwill on Erdogan’s part are enough to reverse, or, at any rate, mitigate, the West’s disappointment about his handling of issues on various fronts.
There are indications that the next couple of months will be crucial. US President Joe Biden has little time, before the election campaign starts in earnest, to deal with the F-16 issue (which, in any case, will happen only after Turkey ratifies Sweden’s accession to NATO), open the way to Greece’s acquisition of the F-35 aircraft and convince a skeptical Congress that Turkey’s F-16 acquisition will be coupled with more or less binding terms regarding future use and actions. Balancing these actions will require deft handling and constant communication between Washington and Ankara. Erdogan’s attention may turn to winning local elections in Ankara and Istanbul to consolidate his political domination, but he also does not want to lose further ground on weapons acquisitions. He would like to redeem his about-turn on Greece next year by also buying Eurofighter aircraft and with an upgrade of the customs union with the EU.
For Greece, it is desired to include Cyprus in the ongoing developments of relations with Turkey. The Athens Declaration makes pursuing a positive agenda a must, since in reality Greece and Turkey are self-restrained in fully exercising sovereign rights, in the name of ensuring calm relations. However, since Ankara, due to the assertive nature of its policy – and despite the constraints imposed by the West – can more easily revert to its own bad self, actions are needed that will bind it to a certain rule framework. To that end, the acquis of conditionality (broadly, being rewarded for meeting certain specified conditions) must be extended to economic and trade issues between EU and Turkey. Another of our main goals should be holding a regional conference on the Eastern Mediterranean immediately after the conclusion of Israeli operations in Gaza.
Constantinos Filis is the director of the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) and an associate professor at the American College of Greece (ACG).
