SPEAKING
FREELY Istanbul Forum goals look good on
paper By Egemen Bezci and James
Warhola
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please
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contributing.
Turkey has recently
used the Istanbul Forum for Economic Cooperation
Between Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as a
platform for advocating increased regional
integration among itself and these two countries,
primarily in order to promote economic development
but also to help resolve an array of seemingly
intractable political, social, and security
problems.
This forum was established in
October 2007. In advocating increased regional
integration, Turkey has also implicitly presented
itself as a sort of "model" for much of the region
to its
geographical east. Can
these ventures - increased regional integration
and Turkey serving as exemplar - succeed? In
considering this question, it is useful to bear in
mind global experience with such efforts in the
late modern era.
After World War II,
French statesman Robert Schuman aimed to create a
supra-national organization between European
states that would foster re-construction and help
prevent war. The European Coal and Steel Community
emerged from his and others' efforts in the latter
1950s, aiming at technical and commercial
cooperation and assistance among six European
countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands and then-West Germany).
The
ECSC has of course since developed and expanded
into the 27-member European Union. It is debatable
whether Dr Schuman intended for the ECSC to expand
its brief to the extent to which the present EU
has done, but the European unification project did
create a level of welfare, solidarity and
prosperity for its member states, and avoid major
war, in a manner that arguably would not otherwise
have been possible.
Notably, other regions
of the world have since engaged in similar
projects of economic and political regional
unification, such that by the early 21st century
there are almost as many supra-national, regional
economic-political organizations as there are
independent countries.
Further, these
organizations typically expand the domain of their
activity as time goes on, generally from economic
cooperation, to increased political cooperation,
and in some cases into the security domain as well
(for example, the African Union's Peace and
Security Council).
Turkey has recently
pursued varying degrees of regional integration
with the countries within its perceived orbit of
significant influence. Some view this as Turkey
revisiting its implicit "Ottoman fantasies", which
is to say, reasserting itself as the dominant
power among the Moslem peoples of much of Eurasia
and the Middle East.
Regardless of whether
one accepts such an interpretation of Turkey's
foreign policy under the AK Party for the past
decade, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's vision
for Turkey and its religiously-fraternal neighbors
has begun to bear similarities to EU-architect
Schuman's early vision for Europe.
Signs
of Turkey's intent in this regard have been
evident for some time, and are underscored by
recent activities and statements coming from the
Istanbul Forum for Economic Cooperation Between
Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
In
mid-May of this year, while on an official visit
to Pakistan, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan offered at a joint press appearance with
Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani that "Turkey will
never leave Afghanistan on its own and will be in
the country until their 'Afghan brothers' say the
Turkish mission is done."
Likewise, in
June of this year the Turkish government's
European Minister Egemen Bagis offered in Istanbul
at the World Economic Forum: "We have a calling to
make Istanbul one of the world's top financial
centers - we see this as a realistic aim and this
conference is the latest event to illustrate that
... Turkey is an island of stability but also a
source of inspiration to the region. Istanbul is
the most western part of the East and most eastern
part of the West."
The Istanbul Forum
aims, among other goals, to foster increased
private sector cooperation as well as increased
governmental cooperation between Turkey, Pakistan
and Afghanistan. The forum is organized by the
chambers of commerce of the respective countries
and envisions political cooperation stemming from
economic and business cooperation.
In the
short run, their activities encompass targets such
as improving the investment climates in Pakistan
and Afghanistan, and encouraging entrepreneurship
both in and among them as well. The forum seeks to
share Turkish experience of private sector
development with the Afghanistan-Pakistan axis,
thereby drawing them more closely into the Turkish
orbit of influence.
The powerful and
influential Turkish Chamber of Commerce is
directly involved in this, seeking to make its
affiliated think-tank, The Economic Policy
Research Foundation of Turkey largely responsible
for this aspect of the forum's activity.
These are all noble and laudable goals,
and if they materialized, could doubtless help
serve to stabilize the exceptionally volatile,
vulnerable and precarious political economy of the
Afghan-Pakistan region. The question is whether
they are they plausible, and here past experience
may shed helpful light.
In the previous
decade, the Turkish Chamber of Commerce attempted
a similar pattern of triangular economic
cooperation among Israel, Palestine and Turkey in
an endeavor called The Ankara Forum.
However, security concerns among the
erstwhile partners caused most of its proposed
agenda to come to grief. Moreover, the breakdown
in Turkish-Israeli relations after the Mavi
Marmara incident, where nine Turkish citizens
were shot dead by Israeli commandos in May 2010,
led the Ankara Forum's activity to lapse even
further.
Prevailing regional realpolitik
triumphed over well-intended initiatives for
advanced economic cooperation through the Ankara
Forum. Concrete and well-thought-out steps will
need to be taken to enable the Istanbul Forum to
avoid the fate of the Ankara Forum and thus
survive its embryonic stage. Serious obstacles are
present, however.
A number of specific
challenges obstruct the sort of increased
cooperation among Turkey, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan that might lead to an integration process
even remotely resembling the EU - even in the
distant future.
First, these countries all
suffer from violent insurgencies to one degree or
another, and these directly threaten smooth
economic cooperation and an attractive investment
climate.
Although Turkish economic
development displayed an impressive growth rate in
the last decade by averaging well over 7%
annually, Kurdish guerrilla attacks on
construction projects and on energy pipelines in
southeastern Turkey make the investment climate
there highly problematical.
Circumstances
are even worse in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where
secessionist activities are compounded by
insurgent radical religious parties.
Second, unstable political dynamics in the
region, including Turkey's forlorn
"zero-problem-with-neighbors" foreign policy,
complications arising from the Arab Spring (Syria,
principally), and strained relations with Russia
and also with Israel will preoccupy Turkey's
foreign policy agenda with realpolitik engagements
in a manner that will make regional integration
very difficult.
Third, Turkey's already
rather strained relations with Iran and Iraq have
also preoccupied Turkish policy-makers,
complicating their efforts to focus on resolution
of the regional fallout from the Arab Spring and
its particular consequences for Turkey.
Finally, Afghanistan and Pakistan face
insufficient administrative structures and a yet
high level of centralization of decision-making
which disables local administrative units from
engaging independently in the sort of economic
activities the Istanbul Forum seeks to promote.
To be sure, the Isyanbul Forum's laudable
intent to foster such activity is a step in the
right direction, but it will have to experience
dramatic success before such structures could
begin to serve as a foundation for an increasingly
integrated supra-national union. The inefficient
political sovereignty over large areas of
Afghanistan (to put it politely), and to some
degree even Pakistan, only further compound the
problems of regional, supra-national integration.
Turkey itself is still seeking to solve
crucial domestic problems - particularly the
Kurdish question, the issues of secularism and
democratic consolidation, and a viable new
constitution; nonetheless it has already emerged
as a pivotal country in which the necessary
compromises among democracy and security,
secularism and Islam, and free-market economics
are more functional than in many of its neighbors.
Turkey has arguably arrived at an uneasy
but reasonably stable harmony amid complex and
sometimes seemingly contradictory values, such as
secularism vs Islam, free-market economics vs its
traditionally statist economy, the liberated vs
traditionally subjugated status of women, and
others.
This uneasy harmony, however, does
not constitute solid evidence that the "Turkish
model's" structure of values could be successfully
adopted by other countries in the region.
For instance, expanding women's
entrepreneurship - a key goal of the Istanbul
Forum's sixth meeting in November 2011 - has been
successfully advanced in Turkey for decades, due
to the Kemalist experience under Ataturk where
strict rules regarding women's rights were
implemented, and to the crucial place of women in
Turkish social movements ever since the mid-19th
century.
The likelihood of replicating
these in Pakistan does not appear good, and even
less so in Afghanistan.
The formation of
social values in Turkey followed quite different
paths. Moreover, as noted above, realpolitik in
regional affairs such as exigencies in the
Turkish-Russian relation, the Turkish-US relation,
or the Turkish-North Atlantic Treaty Organization
relation could easily triumph over an economically
liberal internationalist vision of Turkish
decision makers to continue with increased
integration with Eastern neighbors.
Even
before the Arab Spring emerged, Turkey and Syria
endeavored to follow an economic-oriented
political rapprochement, yet power politics
between them and Syria's own internal conflict
have more recently brought the two countries to
the brink of war.
It is questionable at
best whether Turkey's current efforts with
Pakistan and Afghanistan will lead to concrete
achievements that could prevent a similar lapse
into a level of animosity that would scuttle
further integration.
European
integrationists' vision in the post-World War II
era was to create, stepwise, a functionalist
pattern of evolution that would hopefully result,
over time, in an increasingly integrated Europe
that would be correspondingly more prosperous and
more secure.
While this is possible for
Turkey and its would-be integrated neighbors,
doing so is almost certain to require more sincere
and concrete contributions by all parties involved
to first establish workable regimes within those
these countries which can not be overthrown by the
sensitive balance of power in the region.
Turkey is farther along in this prospect
than Pakistan and certainly than Afghanistan, but
movement in the direction of increased stability,
security, and functionality within these two
countries appears to be a prerequisite of
increased integration among all three, and not an
outcome from premature integration.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here
if you are interested in contributing. Articles
submitted for this section allow our readers to
express their opinions and do not necessarily meet
the same editorial standards of Asia Times
Online's regular contributors.
James W Warhola, PhD is
Professor and Chairman Department of Political
Science, The University of Maine, USA. Egemen B
Bezci, MA, is an independent political analyst
based in Istanbul, Turkey.
(Copyright
2012 James W Warhola and Egemen B
Bezci)
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