The View from Next Door: Greek-Turkish Relations after the Coup Attempt in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Turkey’s recent slide into authoritarianism will have implications for its close neighbours in the West. Especially Greece cannot avoid negative spill-over effects. A coalition government comprising Syriza and Independent Greeks does not have an unconstrained set of policy choices in responding to this. Maintaining effective working relations is a paramount interest but achieving this is easier in principle than in practice especially considering the issues of asylum seekers and Turkish revisionism on the Lausanne Treaty. Unlike the two parties that dominated the Greek political scene after 1974, PASOK and New Democracy, the current government has little experience navigating choppy diplomatic seas with Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Greece
• Turkey
• authoritarianism
• Syriza
• AKP
• New Democracy

Acknowledgements

Dr. Christofis would like to thank the University of Macedonia’s Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies Department for hosting him as a post-doctoral researcher for 2018-2019. Dr. Baser and Dr. Öztürk would like to thank University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies for hosting them as visiting researchers during the completion of this article. Dr. Öztürk would like to thank the Swedish Institute for funding his research in 2018/2019 academic term. The authors would like to thank Dr. Leonidas Karakatsanis and Dr. Zenonas Tziaras for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback.

Notes

¹ This data is based on statistics released by the Bank of Greece (BOG), cited in Grekodom.com 2017.

² Born a couple of months before the 2012 election, Anel managed to garner an impressive 10.6 percent of the votes. Despite a decline to 7.51 percent in the follow-up June election, the wound Anel inflicted on ND’s right flank is still draining the lifeblood out of the former bastion of the centre-right (Aslanidis and Lefkofridi 2013).

³ In October 2018, the ‘Macedonian question’ led once again to friction, this time between Foreign Minister Kotzias (Syriza) and Defence Minister Panos Kammenos (Anel), and resulted in the former’s resignation. Tsipras’ support for Kammenos shows, at least to these authors, that political cost and pragmatism come before ideological agendas, as the resignation of Kammenos would have led to early elections and, probably, to Syriza losing the elections (Strickland 2018).

⁴ Interview with Yiannis Bournous by Nikos Christofis and Amaryllis Logotheti, Athens, Greece, 23 November 2016.

⁵ A full account is not possible, however it should be noted that Turkey’s foreign policy agenda has prioritised issues related to Syria, Israel-Palestine and Iraq during the AKP period. For more information, see Tezcur and Grigorescu 2014.

⁶ Interestingly, Avlonitou’s statement is nowhere to be found in the news website of the Syriza newspaper, Avgi.

⁷ We thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out these domestic nuances.

⁸ Hulusi Akar is the current Turkish Minister of Defence and a former four-star Turkish Armed Forces general who served as the 29th Chief of the General Staff.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nikos Christofis

Nikos Christofis is Assistant Professor at the Center for Turkish Studies and School of History and Civilization, Shaanxi Normal University, People’s Republic of China and researcher at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Bahar Baser

Bahar Baser is an Associate Professor at Coventry University, UK, and an associate research fellow at SIGLA, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Email: [email protected] bahar_baser

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is a Swedish Institute Research Fellow at REMESO, Linköping University, Sweden and EUREL's (Social and Legal Data on Religions in Europe and Beyond) Turkey Correspondent. Email: [email protected] ahmeterdiozturk