Security in Shared Neighbourhoods

This edited volume addresses the perceptions and practices of foreign policy by the European Union (EU), Russia and Turkey, toward their shared neighbourhood: the Black and Caspian Seas, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and Central Asia. These territories represent key strategic interests for each of the three regional powers which need to be protected by active foreign and security policies. In return, European, Russian and Turkish policies are essential for the stability of these areas and for the overall peace and prosperity in this common security complex. Those regions are also characterised by fast changing dynamics of political and social change within a sphere of geostrategic competition.

When the European Union (EU) interacts with Russia, in a setting prior to the crisis over Ukraine, it does not do so in the first place on the basis of what Russia has actually done. Rather the EU acts on the basis of what it believes Russia has become. The Union and its member states redefine the identity of Russia, aggrandise differences between perceived ‘European’ and Russian identities and eventually — in a context of rather acrimonious relations — read bad intentions into Russia’s behaviour. Something similar happens the other way around. Russia is primarily led by the images it holds of the EU. It redefines the EU’s identity up to the point where any move is understood negatively as aimed against Russia. Identities of both actors are not given, but change in the process of interaction itself. Over roughly the last decade this process has resulted in a competitive logic between the two big neighbours over their respective roles and policies in the overlapping neighbourhoods.

The evolution of Russian foreign policy since the end of the Soviet Union has revealed linkages between the domestic and external dimensions of the foreign policy agenda, the multiplicity of actors involved in the shaping and making of decisions, and the variety of instruments available in both bilateral and multilateral contexts. Russian foreign policy rests on a multivectoral formula adopted soon after the end of the Soviet Union. This means it is organised around multiple vectors of a geopolitical nature, with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) constituting the most important vector, followed by the ‘Western’ (e.g. European Union (EU) and US) and ‘Eastern’ (e.g. China) vectors. The international system is understood by Russian foreign policy as polycentric with asymmetric power constellations promoting fundamental shifts in the international order, as demonstrated for example by the BRICS alignments. Also, normative considerations based on the United Nations (UN) Charter principles governing international security, such as the respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs of states, indivisibility of security, human rights and freedoms, are in line with ‘Russia’s definition of a great power’. This ‘entails a normative dimension based on a type of order enshrining sovereignty, non-interventionism and a pluralism of regime types’ (Sakwa, 2012: 322).

After the enlargements of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007, the importance of the Black Sea region, including the Caucasus (Wider Black Sea), increased in the agenda of the Union, and Russia became a geographical neighbour of the EU. Whereas the EU started showing interest in the region only after its enlargement, Turkey emphasised its importance by initiating the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) already in 1992, immediately after the end of the Cold War. By doing so, Turkey demonstrated its intention to focus on a multilateral regional approach, until the international conjuncture and the surprise effect of the changes in the international scene following the 9/11 attacks forced Turkey to address other priorities. Similarly, for more than two decades, Turkey has been making efforts towards strengthening its relations with Russia while balancing its policies towards the west and the east. The first part of this chapter analyses Turkey’s regional policies in relation to the EU, the second part in relation to Russia. The chapter concludes by answering questions regarding Turkey’s perception of the EU and Russia in the region, its own role and its EU accession ambitions. The questions that the chapter tackles include: How does Turkey perceive the other two actors and their policies in its neighbourhood? How does Turkey see its own role in its neighbourhood?

The European Union (EU) and Russia have developed an intense dialogue that has been deepened and enlarged from the year 2000 onwards. Despite growing misunderstandings, the interaction in the institutional framework of cooperation has shown that the existence of a dialogue has been valuable to partially bring together mutual perceptions (especially the EU28 and the more assertive Russia). In some cases, the dialogue may be compared to a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ because Brussels would like to interact with a more European Russia and one which is convergent with its political values and economic rules; whereas Russia wants to be recognised as an equal partner, and is willing to redefine some rules of the international game.

The political turmoil that affected the Middle East and North Africa since late 2010 caught many by surprise, including Turkey’s political leadership. It came at a time when Ankara was investing in the region, both economically and politically, in line with the new foreign policy principles progressively set in place by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).¹ These principles were based on Ahmet Davutoğlu’s concept of Strategic Depth, and they posit Turkey as a leading regional and international actor, responsible for promoting peace and development, in particular, within its immediate neighbourhood. Ankara’s foreign policy activism had, until the eruption of popular unrest across the region, been focused on the importance of political stability, presupposing that even authoritarian regimes such as those in Syria or Libya were solid and stable (Öniş, 2012) and could, therefore, be seen as perfectly legitimate partners for Turkey on the international stage. The sudden change in the regional context forced Turkey to revisit its strategy, with significant consequences, both internally and internationally: the Kurdish issue has jumped to the top of the political agenda, the millions of refugees in the country are generating social and political instability in Turkey and, internationally, Turkey is seen as having an erratic policy for the region, particularly in how it deals with the Islamic State (IS) threat.

The Arab Spring had a profound impact on international relations in the Middle East and beyond. The rising popular unrest in this part of the world provoked a new wave of debate about the hardships of transforming autocratic states into functioning democracies (Mansfield and Snyder, 2012; Przeworski, 2012). It has also revealed numerous challenges for countries mired in democratic transition. The incapacity of weak political institutions to address pressing social and civil needs, the difficulties of establishing a constructively functioning opposition, the danger of growing social imbalances and popular unrest against a background of intensified information exchange within and between countries constitute only a few such challenges. Moreover, the case of the Middle East particularly highlighted the perils of religious extremism once it becomes the last resort for expressing one’s disagreement. The enumerated challenges emanate from the conditions of tightly interconnected international and domestic environments and raise questions regarding optimal strategies for reforming hybrid regimes under these conditions. There have been voiced suggestions that the Arab Spring could have a potential spill-over effect for Central Asia, thus transforming the security situation in this overlapping neighbourhood between Russia, the European Union (EU) and Turkey and creating a belt of permanently politically unstable countries from Northern Africa to Afghanistan (Lillis, 2012; Zikibayeva, 2011).

The chapter maps and explains practices of foreign energy policies in the Caspian region of three regional actors, the EU, Russia and Turkey. This is to understand the strategy each of the actors has sought to implement regionally and to assess how these practices have influenced their respective neighbourhoods. A decade on from the key geopolitical moment represented by the political enlargements of the EU in 2004 and 2007, a renewed EU-Russia relation has emerged coinciding with the lack of success in accommodating Turkey into the EU project.

At the center of the Caspian Sea energy complex is a land of the periphery. A place on the margins, a place between places: Azerbaijan’s identity has forever been a contested proposition. It is a ‘liminal realm’, a place of the threshold, existentially ‘neither here nor there’. ¹ By assuming an identity defined in terms of energy, Azerbaijan has ‘centered’ its development on ‘Euro-Atlantic’ geopolitical preferences. But in neither a domestic order that is aggressively secular at a time of global Islamist mobilisation, nor a foreign policy that ostentatiously associates a Muslim polity with the state of Israel, nor a strategic decision to associate a country of the southern Caucasus with the Euro-Atlantic community, can this centering be considered a natural development. And, now, amidst crisis in Eurasia and uncertainty within the Euro-Atlantic system, Azerbaijan may be tempted, on the strength of its wealth and its attractions, to convert this centering into a strategic autonomy.

This book grew out of two major ideas. First, that power asymmetries in regional contexts lead to the formation of hierarchies and therefore to the emergence of regional powers. Second, that regional powers tend to develop policies of proximity in order to structure the environment around them in a favourable way. In the specific context of post-Cold War Eurasia, both processes of regional hierarchy formation and of projection of power towards neighbouring countries and communities have been actively contested. The debates surrounding the relevance of a regional hegemon for peace in Europe have taken many forms and recent developments support John Mearsheimer’s argument that Europe would be more prone to experience major crisis and war in the absence of a clear balance of military power between hegemons (Mearsheimer, 1990). Others underlined instead that institutionalism and norms, linked to domestic factors influencing the formation of preferences, could provide the necessary means to achieve peace and prosperity through cooperation (Hoffmann, Keohane and Mearsheimer, 1990; Russett, Risse-Kappen and Mearsheimer, 1990).