Nov. 25, 2009 - Issue #736: Poster Boys
Dyer Straight
reuniting Cyprus
It's over; Reuniting Cyprus not going to happen
The window of opportunity actually slammed shut in 2004, when
Greek-Cypriot voters overwhelmingly rejected a United Nations plan to reunite
the divided island of Cyprus. A week later the Greek-Cypriot government was
allowed to join the European Union anyway, while the Turkish-Cypriots, who
had voted in favour of the reunification plan, were frozen out. But some
people just won't give up.
A year ago, with new leadership on both sides, the Greek- and
Turkish-Cypriots embarked on another round of talks aimed at reunifying the
island. As late as this September, Alexander Downer, the UN
secretary-general's special adviser on Cyprus, said that "what you have here
are two leaders who are very committed to a successful outcome." But good
intentions are not enough.
Dimitris Christofias, the Greek-Cypriot president, and Mehmet Ali Talat, his
Turkish-Cypriot counterpart, are old friends, and they both genuinely want to
put the country back together, but they have made little progress and after
fifty meetings time is running out. There will be elections in the "Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus" (TRNC) in April, and the new president there is
likely to be hostile to reunification.
Last time, in 2004, it was the Greek-Cypriot president who persuaded the
voters on his side of dividing line to reject the UN proposal. There are
bound to be times when one side or the other is led by somebody who wants to
die in the last ditch. But there are also bound to be intervals, like the
present one, when the leaders on both sides are in favour of
unification.
So why talk of windows of opportunity shutting? Even if it doesn’t
happen now, surely it will happen sooner or later. Alas, not
necessarily.
Geopolitical realities normally change as slowly as the continents drift, but
the tectonic plates are now moving fast in the eastern Mediterranean. The
chance of Turkey ever joining the European Community is now shrinking rapidly
towards zero—and without the incentive of that goal, why would Ankara
ever force the Turkish population of North Cyprus back into a union with the
Greek-dominated "Republic of Cyprus"?
The current obstacle to EU membership for Turkey, which first applied to join
22 years ago and has been an official candidate for the past decade, is
the opposition of the German, Austrian and French governments. They are all
conservative governments that believe a Muslim-majority country has no place
in what they still see as a "Christian" Europe.
That is ugly nonsense, but not necessarily a deal-breaker: those governments
will probably be replaced one day by others that take a more relaxed view of
religious differences. After all, a clear majority of EU citizens are not
interested in religion at all. Greece and the Republic of Cyprus would also
veto Turkish membership today, but a deal between the two Cypriot communities
would obviously remove that roadblock.
If anti-Muslim prejudice were the only obstacle to Turkey's entry, then it
could still become a EU member one of these days, but the tectonic shift is
not driven by whoever is in power today in Paris, Berlin or Vienna. It is
driven by a growing concern in the EU that global warming is going to
generate huge numbers of desperate refugees in Africa and the Middle
East—"climate refugees" who will end up trying to get into
Europe.
Never mind if this is just, or even if it is an accurate vision of the
future. If this view comes to prevail in the EU, the main question becomes:
where do we hold the line against waves of climate refugees? Should we try to
control the current frontier along the eastern borders of Greece and Bulgaria
(about 300 km, 175 miles), or bring Turkey into the EU and try to control
1,100 km (750 miles) of borders with Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Georgia?
Not rocket science, is it?
Unless it is overwhelmed by climate change, Turkey will be all right outside
the EU. It will overtake Germany in population within a decade, and it
already has a higher per capita income than several Eastern European members
of the EU. Turkey was a second-rank great power until the end of the 19th
century, and it is likely to be back in that role by the mid-21st.
But if that is the role Turkey will be playing in another generation, why
would it want to withdraw its troops from North Cyprus and push the
Turkish-Cypriots into a single state with the Greek-Cypriots now? Why would
the Turkish-Cypriots themselves want to resume their place as an unloved
minority in a Greek-run state, rather than retain their own state in close
association with the rising regional great power?
The reply to that question ten years ago would have been: because
Turkish-Cypriots are so poor. But the past decade has seen very rapid
economic growth in North Cyprus. The gulf in living standards between the two
parts of the island has dramatically narrowed, so reunification no longer
seems the only escape from poverty to Turkish-Cypriots.
This is not the last chance for the reunification of Cyprus; 2004 was.
Greek-speaking Cyprus is prosperous and secure, Turkish-speaking Cyprus is
approaching the same state and Turkey itself no longer has an incentive to
support the creation of a reunified, federal state in Cyprus. Partition is
permanent. It's over. V
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