Making Cyprus a national cause in Turkey’s foreign policy, 1948–1965

Abstract

As the global wave of decolonization that began after 1945 reached the island of Cyprus, the Cyprus question turned into an issue of paramount importance for Turkish nationalists and for the Turkish people in general. Long before, Turkish foreign policy architects – who had previously taken the line that ‘Turkey does not have a Cyprus problem’ – came to portray Cyprus as a ‘national cause’. Three different geopolitical discourses were instrumental in legitimizing Turkey’s claims over Cyprus and in leading Turkish society to believe that it had a crucial stake in the fate of the island. Naturalized geopolitics represented Cyprus as a natural extension of the Turkish heartland, while ideological geopolitics put forth that Greek Cypriots were responsible for the spread of communism. Finally, civilizational geopolitics characterized Turkey and Greece’s rivalry in Cyprus as the latest chapter in the centuries-old conflict between Turkishness and Hellenism.

Keywords:

• geopolitics
• Turkish nationalism
• national homeland
• Cyprus
• Turkish foreign policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The slogan ‘Cyprus is Turkish’ is not encountered until Örnek’s 1949 article in the journal Yeşilada criticizing the ‘Greek Cyprus’ slogan. Starting in 1951, the slogan ‘Cyprus is Turkish’ began to be frequently used in Yeşilada as well as in political rallies in Turkey.

2. The term yavru vatan or ‘baby homeland’ was first used by Gökhan Evliyaoğlu, who published a poem entitled ‘Anavatan’dan Yavruvatan’a’ (From the Motherland to a Baby Homeland) in the October 1949 issue of Yeşilada.

3. Derviş Manizade was one of those chiefly responsible for turning Cyprus into a ‘national cause’ for Turkey. In an interview conducted many years later, Manizade was described as Kıbrıs’ı Türkiye’ye tanıtan adam, ‘the man who introduced/advertised Cyprus to Turkey’ (Kalyoncu 2001).

4. Derviş Manizade’s speech entitled The Cyprus Question was delivered on April 21, 1954, and published in 1965.