Greece and Turkey: Can old enemies finally make friends?
This could be the “beginning of a new era for Turkish-Greek relations,” said Abdullah Karakus in Milliyet (Turkey). Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to Athens to sign a landmark “declaration of friendship and good neighborly relations” with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. While it’s not a binding treaty, the Athens Declaration does commit the two neighbors to communicate openly about their longstanding disputes—including gas rights, migration, and borders—and to peacefully resolve conflicts when they arise. The deal includes 15 newly minted agreements on matters from agriculture to education, with the aim of doubling annual trade to $10 billion. The two countries’ problems “won’t be solved today or tomorrow,” of course. Mutual antagonism dates back to before Ottoman Turkey’s 400-year reign over Greece, while more recently, the rival nations fought over Cyprus in 1974 and have been at the brink of conflict at least three times since. Yet the show of goodwill is encouraging. Erdogan, not much given to jollity, was all smiles at the meeting, saying he wanted to transform the Aegean into “a sea of peace.”
It’s quite a turnaround, given that Erdogan has been “the one playing with the tension switch,” said Constantinos Filis in Ekathimerini (Greece). The last time he came to Greece—in 2017, when he became the first Turkish leader to visit in 65 years—the authoritarian Erdogan turned what was meant to be a rapprochement into a diplomatic crisis by suggesting that the Aegean Sea border needed an “update.” A few years later, when gas fields were confirmed under the seabed on Greece’s side, he insisted Turkey should have drilling rights. And last year, he lashed out like a sulky child at Mitsotakis for lobbying against the U.S. sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, refusing to share a stage and saying the Greek premier “did not exist” to him. He even implied Greeks should fear an attack, saying Turks “might arrive, suddenly one evening.” This “sudden U-turn” can’t be explained just by the fact that Greece reached out and sent aid after Turkey’s devastating February earthquake, said Dimitra Krustalli in To Vima (Greece). The truth is, tension with Greece was useful when Erdogan wanted to whip up nationalist fervor to win elections, but now it “no longer helps him.” His relations with the U.S. and EU had been growing sour over his overtures to Russia and his refusal to allow Sweden into NATO, and Washington and Brussels were pressuring him to make nice with Athens if he hoped to get those F-16s.
The friendship pact glosses over the thorniest issues, said Moritz Pompl in Tagesschau.de (Germany). The uptick in migrants entering Greece from Turkey over the summer is still a sore point, and any agreement over drilling rights in the Aegean will require many tedious hours of that “constructive dialogue” that the two sides claim to desire. Still, both Erdogan and Mitsotakis were recently re-elected, and therefore have several years ahead in which they “don’t have to bluster against their neighbors in order to get votes.” Will “true friendship” develop? Not likely. But “pragmatic relations that last” would be good enough.