Out of all international actors, the most logical choice for a mediator in the latest Turkish-Greek confrontation in the Eastern Mediterranean is seemingly the European Union. After all, Greece is a member of the European Union and Turkey has been negotiating its membership since 2005, when the accession process formally began. Besides, all key EU members have vested strategic and economic interests in and around Turkey, and they would prefer to prevent any crises and instability from reaching the European shores.
Ensuring cooperative relations between Turkey and Greece on one hand and maintaining Turkey’s European orientation on the other is vital to the EU’s interest in protecting itself against all kinds of security challenges that might potentially emanate from Turkey’s neighborhood. For example, Europe's ability to stem the tide of migrants flows across its borders over the last five years could not have improved had Turkey not cooperated with EU institutions and European capitals.
At a time of declining American commitment to the management and resolution of regional security crises in the wider Middle East, it would benefit the European Union to play such roles.
However, the EU seems to fall short, in particular concerning the dynamics of Turkey-EU relations. Let alone the fact that Ankara would likely view any European efforts to mediate the conflict between Turkey and Greece quite biased in favor of Athens, the European Union’s declining leverage on Turkey’s domestic and foreign politics will also influence the EU’s potential role in this regard.
To start with, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) leadership no longer needs to prove its undiluted commitment to Western European norms, a habit that decreased following the third electoral victory of the party in the parliamentary elections held in June 2011. It was after this election victory that the AK Party leadership began to decisively emphasize Turkey’s central country identity and quest for more strategic autonomy.
The fact that diehard AK Party critics attempted to engineer a constitutional coup attempt in 2008, following the party’s second electoral victory and the election of the AK Party’s candidate Abdullah Gül as president in the summer of 2007, seems to have pushed the party's leadership to put more emphasis on political survival than on fulfilling EU membership criteria.
The strengthening of the survival mentality has gradually led the AK Party leadership to adopt more illiberal tools in domestic politics, putting the hard-won liberal democratic gains and the EU accession process at risk. The survival strategy was strengthened following the Gezi Park protests in the summer of 2013. The party leadership opted to view the protests across the country as well-orchestrated attempts on the part of its internal and external critics at ousting the legitimate government through non-democratic means.
As EU institutions and member states began to criticize Turkey's allegedly nonliberal turn more vociferously, Ankara’s enthusiasm to meet the membership criteria has steadily decreased. In fact, just after the opening of the accession negotiations back in 2005, the core members of the EU, namely Germany and France, aired the view that the best the EU could offer Turkey was a privileged membership rather than full accession.
The big-bang enlargement of the EU in 2004 and rejection of the EU constitution in national referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005 offered early indications that Turkey’s eventual accession to the EU would continue to remain a distant possibility no matter whether the accession negotiations took off.
The reluctance of the EU, suffering from enlargement fatigue, to offer Turkey credible membership prospects and move from one chapter to another during the accession negotiations has further increased following the financial crisis in 2008 and gradual empowerment of anti-integrationist, anti-enlargement and anti-Muslim political parties and movements across the continent.
When Europeans fell out with each other as to how to save their union in the face of emerging financial, political, social and security challenges over the last decade, and in particular following the COVID-19 outbreak, the question of Turkish membership has continuously dropped on the agenda.
The rise of illiberal populism in many member states, the deterioration of security in the wake of Russian actions in Ukraine, Crimea and Eastern Europe, the growing exposure of European nations to never-ending migration flows, the widening rifts between rich northerners and poor southerners inside the union, the weakening of security bonds among member states in the face of diverging security priorities and the decision of the British people to exit from the union have all combined to produce a negative environment in the context of Turkey-EU relations.
The allure of EU membership has precipitously decreased in the eyes of Turkish rulers and people alike in the aftermath of European responses to the failed coup attempt in July 2016. Rather than demonstrating their support for the elected government at the early stages of the coup attempt, many EU members preferred to wait and see how the events would unfold in the following hours and days. This seems to have caused strong consternation on the part of many Turks.
The EU’s diminishing influence on Turkey’s internal and external policies also seem to fit in well with Turkey’s preference to build its foreign-policy cooperation with the EU based on common strategic interests and practical needs. The AK Party leadership seems to have approached the EU from an instrumental and interest-based perspective from the very beginning.
Believing that Turkey inherited the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and is an independent strategic actor on its own, pursuing a multidimensional and multidirectional foreign policy course would be more feasible in an environment of diminishing Western and European influence in global politics.
Given that the EU has been extremely busy with internal problems and failed to develop a credible foreign and security strategies outside its border, it has proved to be more risk-free for Turkey not only to demonstrate its geopolitical claims in its neighborhood more assertively but also improve its strategic cooperation with non-European regional and global powers based on its own needs.
Given such a background, the EU would likely fail in adopting a common position on the latest Turkish-Greek standoff and push Turkey to step back from its position.
* Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Antalya Bilim University