GREEK-TURKISH RIVALRY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN SECURITY DILEMMA

By R. Craig Nation

Introduction.


In the best of all possible worlds, Greece and Turkey
would be pillars of stability amidst the turbulence of
southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. With
their privileged access to European institutions,
substantial economic prospects, and powerful state
traditions, they have multiple assets that could be brought
to bear to help promote development and security. In
reality, however, existing Greek-Turkish relations present
a depressingly diverse aspect. Athens and Ankara are arch
rivals, whose mutual enmity often approaches the level of
preoccupation. Rather than contributing to a resolution of
the Mediterranean security dilemma, Greece and Turkey
are among its biggest progenitors.
Greek-Turkish rivalry is unusual in that the
protagonists are very unevenly matched. Greece is a small
Balkan state with a population of 10.5 million, but also a
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European
Union (EU) member with an international agenda
dominated by its relationship with institutionalized
Europe. Turkey has a large and rapidly growing population
of almost 65 million. It has European aspirations but also a
significant Asian frontier, and it confronts an international
situation that is extremely threatening and complex, “at the
centre of a crescent-shaped wedge of territory stretching
from Kazakhstan to the Gulf and Suez and finally to the
North African coast, containing the most volatile collection
of states in the world.”1

Like Greece, Turkey has been a NATO member since
1952, but its relationship with the EU is contentious. It has
assumed significant commitments in the war-torn
Caucasus and Central Asian regions since the break-up of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), its relations
with Syria and Iraq are potentially explosive, and it
confronts an open-ended domestic insurrection in
Kurdestan with important international ramifications. 2
Greece and Turkey are highly militarized—Turkey devotes
3.8 percent of its Gross Domestic Product to defense
spending and Greece 4.7 percent (against a NATO average
of 2.2 percent), and both have launched ambitious military
build-ups. There is, however, little doubt that the Turkish
side has the wherewithal to prevail in an armed
confrontation. Turkish Gross Domestic Product is
approximately 1.5 times that of Greece, and in purely
military terms, Turkey enjoys something like a 4-1 ratio of
superiority, with 594,000 men at arms (477,000 in land
armies, 63,000 in the air force, and 54,000 in marine forces)
compared to a Greek force of 168,700 (116,000 on land,
33,000 in the air, and 19,700 at sea).
Despite its physical superiority, the unresolved conflict
impacts negatively upon Turkey’s foreign policy agenda as
well. Ankara’s long-standing goal of accession to the EU has
been sacrificed on the alter of Greek-Turkish rivalry, and in
view of the many and substantial challenges that it
confronts on other fronts, eternal bickering with Greece
might well be portrayed as a luxury, if not an extravagance.
The rivalry is nonetheless alive and well, irrespective of the
constant ministrations of NATO, the good will of
innumerable mediators and profferers of good offices, and
the real best interests of almost all those involved.
There are at least two reasons why this is so. First,
though sometimes concerned as much with symbol as with
substance, Greek-Turkish rivalry is deeply rooted and
complex, with multiple dimensions that have tended over
time to become mutually reinforcing. The underlying issues
are neither trivial nor straightforward, and they will
continue to defy facile solutions. Second, the rivalry is set in
a larger spacial and temporal context, and has been
sensitive to patterns of change in the geostrategic and
historical environment. Greek-Turkish relations are often
discussed on the basis of “ancient hatreds” assumptions
that emphasize their timeless and unchanging
character—what Henry Kissinger has called the “atavistic
bitterness” and “primeval hatred of Greeks and Turks.” 3
But the relationship is also a dynamic one, and at present is
very much conditioned by circumstances specific to the
post-Cold War period.

Historical and Cultural Foundations.

Greek nationalism has three foundations; the legacy of
the great classical civilization of the age of antiquity, the
Byzantine and Orthodox Christian heritage of the Middle
Ages, and the national revival of the modern period. The
classical legacy is timeless and in a sense universal, though
its fundamental importance as a source of specifically Greek
identity is revealed by the furor unleashed by the 19th
century Austrian historian J. P. Fallmerayer’s attempt to
deny an organic link between the modern Greek peoples and
their classical ancestors.4 The conquest of the Orthodox
Christian civilizations of the Balkan peninsula and Aegean
island groups by the expanding Ottoman dynasty in the
14th and 15th centuries, culminating with the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, is almost universally regarded as a
tragedy of epic proportions and the prelude to a dark age of
cultural effacement, the Turkokratia or period of
unadulterated Turkish domination.
Modern Greek national identity is a direct product of the
19th century national revival, waged as a bitter struggle
against Ottoman overlordship beginning with the first
Greek uprising in 1821. The Greek national state, created in
1830 at the behest of the European great powers, included
only about a third of the Greek peoples of the Balkan region.
Thereafter, the Greek state was built up piece by piece, as
the consequence of a long sequence of wars, diplomatic
maneuvers, and uprisings on behalf of the goal of enosis or
union, inspired by the Megali Idea (Great Idea) of uniting all
the Greek peoples of the Aegean and Anatolia within a
single national entity. In Turkish national memory, this
process is conterminous with the long decline of Ottoman
civilization, and therefore linked with the Turkish peoples
loss of great power status and cultural preeminence.
The tragic culmination of the Megali Idea came at the
end of World War I, with the defeat of the Greek
expeditionary force in Asia Minor at the hands of Mustafa
Kemal’s new Turkish national movement, the fall of
Smyrna in September 1922 and the ensuing massacre of the
city’s Greek and Armenian populations, and the treaty of
Lausanne in 1923. The treaty regularized a Greek-Turkish
border at the expense of the nearly one and a half million
Greek and Turkish refugees forced to participate in an
officially sponsored population transfer. For the Turks, this
is remembered as the “war of independence” whose outcome
ensured the survival of a Turkish national state. For the
Greeks it is “the catastrophe,” a cataclysmic defeat which
brought a violent end to the millennial Hellenic civilization
of Asia Minor. Like other peoples whose national idea rests
upon a cult of martyrdom derived from a long and only
partially realized struggle for independence, the Greeks’
national identity has been culturally constructed as a myth
of resistance to a barbaric, alien, and permanently
menacing other. In the case of Turkey, national identity has
been defined against the foil of rivalry with an eternal Greek
enemy, always ready to take advantage of Turkish
weakness, that is simultaneously resented and scorned. 5
Outside the context of this mythic structure, of course,
Greek-Turkish relations have been considerably more
nuanced. The peace of Lausanne was followed by a period of
rapprochement under the direction of Mustafa Kemal
(Ataturk) and Elefterios Venezelos, architects of war in
1919 but by the late 1920s determined to prioritize the goal
of domestic restructuring and reform. The policy survived
its architects, and Greek-Turkish feuding was not a
significant factor in international relations during the
period 1930-55.6 It was only with the rise of anti-British
national agitation in Cyprus that the Greek-Turkish rivalry
made a comeback. In the postwar decades, both Greece and
Turkey were modernizing societies undergoing a process of
traumatic social change, including rapid urbanization,
progress toward universal literacy, and the rise of mass
democratic cultures where the evocation of an “invented”
national tradition against the foil of a despised rival played
well in public forums. On both sides, political elites
manipulated national sentiments to further their quest for
power, in the process conjuring up and exacerbating a
strategic rivalry that would quickly take on a life of its own.



DR. R. CRAIG NATION is the Elihu Root Professor of
Military Studies, U.S. Army War College