An alliance between Cyprus and Greece: assessing its partners’ relative security contribution

Abstract

The issue that this paper tackles is the assessment of the relative security benefits that Cyprus and Greece derive in the context of their cooperation on defence matters. This form of cooperation, known as the ‘Integrated Defence Space Doctrine’, aims at defending their interests in the Aegean Sea and the broader East Mediterranean theatre. The paper relies heavily on earlier research on this topic, which deals with the Greek–Cypriot alliance facing an arms race against Turkey, and uses a coefficient especially designed to assess the optimal levels of security and the associated defence expenditure of the two allies. A comparison of the relative security coefficient values for the two allies suggests that the security benefit that Greece derives thanks to its alliance with Cyprus exceeds the corresponding Cypriot benefit by far. Given the importance assigned to human resources by this index, in conjunction with the demographic problems of Greece, this conclusion justifies the recent Greek defence policy revision, emphasizing quality, capital equipment and flexibility of forces. This revision aims at satisfying the security requirements of the alliance and the increasing demands of an arms race against Turkey.

Keywords:

• Optimal control
• Defence expenditure
• Arms race
• Relative military security
• JEL codes: C61
• H56

Notes

E‐mail: [email protected]

Corresponding author. E‐mail [email protected]

Corresponding author. E‐mail [email protected]

E‐mail: [email protected]

E‐mail: [email protected]

Professor Keith Hartley’s advice on key issues of the paper is greatly appreciated. Thanks are also due to Mrs Helen Gazopoulou of the Bank of Greece for valuable assistance.

 ‘The landslide victory of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in the 3 November 2002 elections marked the beginning of a new era in Turkish politics, with potentially profound repercussions for domestic and foreign policies. Both its opponents and supporters perceive the JDP as having an Islamist agenda. Although in the short term it is likely to concentrate on consolidating its grip on power rather than trying to erode the secular principles enshrined in the Turkish constitution, there are already signs that the Turkish establishment – led by the military – is mobilising to restrict the JDP’s room for manoeuvre and undermine its authority by targeting the JDP leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’ (IISS, 2002).

 The CFE Treaty imposes a ceiling on the purchases of the participant countries regarding tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, helicopters and fighter planes. The Treaty also provides for a ceiling on the armed forces personnel of the countries involved. It is important to remember that Turkey has never signed this treaty.

 The extent to which the NATO and Euro‐army commitments burden the Greek defence budget can be realized by considering that the cost of just one of about ten programmes required, namely that of the procurement of 10 to 12 transport aircraft (C17 Globemaster or Airbus 400M), amounts to roughly $1.8 billion.

 Introducing the role of geopolitical or strategic criteria in such issues requires the use of Fuzzy Logic, which represents, however, a completely different approach to the problem (see for example Andreou et al., 2003).

 The terms ‘integrated’ and ‘space’ are much more suitable to describing the corresponding Greek terms, compared with ‘joined’ and ‘area’ used by some authors respectively. Indeed, the term ‘joined’ is much weaker compared with ‘integrated’, since the degree to which two sides may join one another may vary from a loose to a very tight extreme. The word ‘integrated’, on the other hand, reflects exactly what the two allies aim at building: a completely unified front against any outside threat in the area. As regards the term ‘space’ it is more suitable to be used as a counterpart of the ‘vital space’ (‘lebensraum’) which represents a major long‐term argument brought forward by Turkey to support its ambitions for expansion in the Aegean (Andreou and Zombanakis, 2000).

 Some figures denoting the applied side of the problem indicate the extent to which the external constraint for a small, open economy can be binding. In the case of Greece, for example, the purchase of 170 Leopards (e1.7 billion), or four Type 214 submarines (e1.5 billion), is disproportionately hard for the country’s e8 billion annual current account deficit to bear.

 It is certainly a fact that these demands have been repeatedly expressed through statements, the diplomatic flavour of which leaves a lot to be desired. Thus, Defence Minister H. Isik declared in his speech on 23 February 1978 that ‘The entire (Turkish) nation depends on Greek pressure which is trying to strangle the country, encircling Turkey from the west and preventing access to the Mediterranean Sea … The Turkish nation must unite to face the problem of the Aegean and of Greek pressure which will encircle western Turkey with the aim of strangling it’. Premier S. Demirel seems to insist in his statement on 24 August 1976 that ‘For six hundred years the Aegean islands were ours and in the hands of the Ottomans’ while Premier S. Irmak pointed out on 18 January 1975 that ‘The Aegean Sea belongs to us. This is something that must be understood by all. We do not intend to innovate in matters of foreign policy. If the honour and interests of the Turkish nation are threatened, we shall knock the enemy’s block off!’ Finally, Foreign Minister Gyunes wrote in Huryett on 20 July 1980 that ‘Cyprus is as valuable as the right hand of a country which is interested in its defence or its expansionary plans’. This is just a small sample of a wide collection of similar statements that describes the Turkish formal view on the subject. Turning to the applied side of things, the persistence of the Turkish authorities on their views regarding their need for vital space is reflected in the large number of Turks being moved to the northern part of Cyprus and the thousands of refugees fleeing from Turkey to Greece every year.

 See, for example, Bruce (1990).

 General surveys of the effects of military expenditure on growth and development are given in Renner (1992), Isard and Anderton (1992), Pivetti (1992), Mintz and Stevenson (1995), and Ward et al. (1995), among others. For comprehensive bibliographies in English see Klein et al. (1995), and Hartley and Hooper (1990).

 For a very useful review on the subject we resorted to Ehrlich and Lui (1997).

 The period between 1960 and 1990 involves a large number of exogenous disturbances mostly of political nature, which have been the cause of structural reforms, not necessarily for the better. Thus, between 1960 and 1967 there was extensive political instability in Greece while in Cyprus there was extensive action of EOKA against the British authorities and the Turkish Cypriots. 1967 marks the beginning of the seven‐year dictatorship in Greece, following which the 1974 Turkish invasion in Cyprus took place. Finally, 1987 marks still one more Greek–Turkish crisis, followed by prolonged political unrest and three consecutive parliamentary elections between 1989 and 1990. The above do not exhaust the list. They are simply some of the events during this period, which will certainly introduce statistical problems in the analysis, unless, of course, one resorts to artificial neural networks (NN) or genetic algorithms to avoid the complications of the traditional methods. We have already used NN repeatedly in the past (Andreou and Zombanakis, 2000, 2001) with very successful results. The only reason why we have not resorted to NN in this case is that optimal control suggests the use of a constraints structure along the lines of a traditional econometric model.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. S. Andreou †

E‐mail: [email protected] Corresponding author. E‐mail [email protected] E‐mail: [email protected] E‐mail: [email protected] Professor Keith Hartley’s advice on key issues of the paper is greatly appreciated. Thanks are also due to Mrs Helen Gazopoulou of the Bank of Greece for valuable assistance.