Turkey's Erdogan pushes into
Eurasia By Robert M Cutler
MONTREAL - Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has completed an economic diplomacy
tour to Pakistan and Kazakhstan, signing important
trade accords with both countries.
This
trip was ostensibly to attend with around 7,500
others visitors the Fifth Astana Economic Forum in
the Kazakh capital, gatherings by which President
Nursultan Nazarbaev is seeking to increase the
country's prestige by creating a sort of Central
Asian Davos. Yet it falls into the framework of
the reorientation of Turkish foreign policy away
from the discredited "zero problems" with
neighbors doctrine towards its new "Eurasian
direction".
Erdogan's stop in Pakistan,
where he spent several days on his way to
Kazakhstan, also comes into that geo-economic
framework, which builds out (without explicitly
invoking) the former
Turkish leader Turgut
Oezal's vision of his country in the late Soviet
and early post-Soviet era as a regional power.
Oezal was Turkey's prime minister from 1983 to
1989 and president from 1989 to 1993.
It
is possible to credit Oezal with sowing the seeds
of the country's present economic drive, as he
transformed its economy by beginning the process
of privatizing a good number of state enterprises.
His secular Motherland Party no longer exists and
Turkey had to await its present demographic
situation to find the human-resource dynamism to
make good on that promise.
Oezal sought to
project Turkish diplomatic and economic power into
the South Caucasus and especially Central Asia
after the independence of the former Soviet
republics 20 years ago, and he succeeded in
establishing some cultural ties. However, the
desired economic projection never really
succeeded, mainly because the countries concerned
soon discovered that Turkey could not furnish the
advanced technologies and large international
capital investment that they needed at the time.
Nevertheless, Oezal's foreign-policy
strategy had important successes, including the
creation of the Organization of Black Sea Economic
Cooperation and the periodic series of Turkic
Language Speaking Countries Summits. In 2009, the
latter became the Cooperation Council of Turkic
Speaking States (Turkic Council), with its general
secretariat in Istanbul.
The Turkic
Council has co-opted two formerly autonomous
organizations to its family, the Turkic Academy
founded in 1992 in Kazakhstan and its
Parliamentary Assembly founded in 1998 in
Azerbaijan. It currently has four members:
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.
Kyrgyzstan, increasingly falling within a Chinese
sphere of diplomatic and economic influence, is
the only one of the other countries with which
Turkey has not succeeded in establishing
significant economic exchanges.
Thus in a
speech broadcast live on television in Kazakhstan,
Erdogan vowed to more than triple the US$3 billion
bilateral trade turnover (sum of imports and
exports) in 2011 to $10 billion "in a few years",
as quoted by Reuters. Turkey's economy minister,
Zafer Caglayan, disclosed that his country's
Eximbank would provide long-term loans for Turkish
business investments in Kazakhstan, without
indicating what the terms or conditions might be.
According to Azerbaijan's independent
Trend news agency, a delegation of about 150
Turkish businessmen is visiting South Kazakhstan
province to inspect a 100-hectare area where a
joint industrial zone is proposed to be
established. The province is one of the country's
fastest-growing regions in population terms, and
is culturally more receptive than some other
regions to the Islamic cultural component that has
become a regular concomitant of Turkish foreign
economic activity in recent years.
A newly
constructed pipeline from Kazakhstan's northwest
is carrying natural gas to South Kazakhstan
province (relieving its dependence upon imports
from Uzbekistan), thanks to assistance furnished
by China in connection with the implementation of
the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline that opened in
2009.
In Pakistan, Prime Minister Yousuf
Raza Gilani agreed with Erdogan on the need to
increase significantly the two countries' trade
turnover, vowing to seek to reach $2 billion this
year, up from the present level of just below $1
billion. Gilani is reported to have invited
Turkish companies to invest particularly in
communications and housing.
Those remain
crucial sectors for Pakistan, as parts of the
country are still recovering from the disastrous
2010 floods. Other economic sectors of interest to
Turkey include culture, defense, and energy. The
agreements came at the second meeting of the
high-level bilateral intergovernmental cooperation
council that the two countries established two
years ago.
During his trip to Kazakhstan,
Erdogan set up a similar bilateral
intergovernmental cooperation council with
Nazarbaev. Such councils function mainly as joint
extended cabinet meetings with participation by
relevant government ministers over areas that may
cross formal bureaucratic lines of responsibility.
Erdogan wanted Turkish investment in
Kazakhstan to diversify into the agriculture,
defense, energy, and mining sectors with a strong
emphasis on industrial infrastructure including
"power plant, dam, highway, bridge and port
constructions".
In the event, the two
countries signed eight agreements and memoranda of
understanding in addition to the final joint
declaration, reaching beyond economic cooperation
to include such operational security issue areas
as drug trafficking and anti-terrorism.
Dr Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org),
educated at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and The University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the
United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and
Russia. Now senior research fellow in the
Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
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