In 2004, Greece exuded an air of progress and self-confidence. In August, billions of people watched a glittering opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics (CNN 2004). The Greek evening news relayed world media coverage of the newly constructed Rio-Antirio suspension bridge, one of the world’s longest bridges of its kind (ERT 2004; Agence France Presse 2004a). An unprecedented range of new transport options linked the Athens Olympics, including ring roads, a tramway, a suburban light rail system, and extensions to the existing metro system (McDonald 2004). Greece, a small country historically prone not only to foreign policy crises but also to serious infrastructure and corruption problems, had managed to make timely preparations for the Olympics (Smith 2004b: 2). Greeks listened to foreign commentators admiring the wonders of ancient and modern Greece, talking about a new “golden era” (ibid.). A Daily Telegraph reporter asserted: “Greece has broken free of the past (the colonels’ seizure of power in 1967, the anti-Americanism of Andreas Papandreou, the confrontation with Turkey over Cyprus) to become a modern, efficient nation” (2004: 21; emphasis added).
The optimism affected others beyond the borders of Greece. Only weeks before the Olympics, Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis had been a special guest of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the wedding of his daughter in Istanbul; then, sending a message of peace to the entire Greek nation, Erdoğan himself attended the opening of the Athens Olympics (Agence France Presse 2004b). Admittedly, the latter move came as no surprise, given the steady improvement in Greek-Turkish relations over the previous five years. Following the successful initiatives of foreign ministers George Papandreou and İsmail Cem—not to mention numerous grassroots initiatives—Greek and Turkish leaders had made decisive steps toward reconciliation, first as members of the European People’s Party and later as prime ministers of their respective countries (Matthews and Kohen 2004; Smith 2004b). In brief, after three decades of tension, in the summer of 2004 ties between Greece and Turkey were warm.
However, the burgeoning friendship between the two countries and their leaders was not the whole story. The charismatic Turkish leader seemed at the time determined to introduce serious reforms. In two years he reversed the course of Turkish foreign policy: first in northern Iraq, where Turkey did not intervene as previously threatened and gradually managed to establish a stable relationship with the federalizing Iraqi Kurdistan (Kardaş 2010; Romano and Gurses 2014). In Cyprus, the new AKP (Justice and Development Party) government opened up the borders for unrestricted movement in 2003 and later embraced the Annan Plan, leading to a Turkish Cypriot “yes” vote in the April 24, 2004, referendum (Çarkoğlu and Sözen 2014; Öniş and Yilmaz 2009).1 Then, in an implicit recognition of the Kurdish reality at home, Erdoğan’s administration legalized Kurdish-language broadcasting and freed Leyla Zana, as well as three other former Kurdish parliamentarians (Ayata 2011; Smith 2004a). In his early years in power, the pro-Islamist Erdoğan arguably brought more positives to Turkey’s majority-minority relations than any of his Kemalist predecessors during the earlier decade.
But others were slow to accept the winds of change, proving themselves unwilling to follow Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) “end of history” in Greek-Turkish relations. For example, during the Olympics, when Turkish F-4 fighter planes violated the Greek airspace over the Greek islands, Greece protested and allegedly warned Turkey through NATO of its determination to shoot down “planes threatening the games” (Simerini 2004). In fact, in the years to come, the Greek-Turkish neighborhood would refuse to reject its crisis-prone past. Greece and Turkey entered bilateral negotiations on their Aegean disputes but failed to reach a settlement, or even to ask for mediation from the International Court in The Hague, as implicitly stipulated in the Helsinki conclusions of 1999 (Tsakonas 2010: 43; Karakatsanis 2014). Despite propeace mobilizations for Greek-Turkish friendship, both sides have kept postponing a comprehensive settlement. More importantly, other major ethnopolitical issues in the region—such as the Kurdish question, the Cyprus peace process, and the Greek-Macedonia naming controversy—have not moved in the direction of a conclusive peace settlement but seem locked into prolonged and irresolvable stalemates.
Stalemates in the Eastern Mediterranean seem to persist as well as to proliferate. For instance, following the Mavi Marmara vessel incident in 2010, when Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists attempting to confront the Israeli blockade of Gaza, Turkey and Israel became increasingly hostile. Relations with Egypt were similarly damaged with Turkey’s support for ousted Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, leading to the expulsion of Turkey’s ambassador by the new Egyptian regime in November 2013 (Today’s Zaman 2013). More worrisomely, since 2011 Turkey has faced the consequences of the Syrian civil war, including an unprecedented refugee crisis with approximately a million refugees crossing its southern border in 2013, a figure expected to grow to 1.6 million people by the end of 2015 (UNHCR 2014). The refugee flows and spectacular rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have caused many to fear the destabilization of Turkey and the concomitant reversal of its achievements since 2002. Following Turkey’s declining image in the Middle East, the Financial Times wrote: “What once seemed a Turkish beacon of moderate and modernizing Islam to an Arab world in upheaval has been eclipsed, and Turkey risks being sucked into the sectarian violence roaring like a whirlwind throughout the region” (Gardner 2014: 4)
The Politics of Majority Nationalism examines how ethnopolitical frames influence crisis behavior in the Middle East and the Balkans. Interestingly, in 2010 a leading foreign policy thinker of Turkey (and later minister of foreign affairs and prime minister), Ahmet Davutoğlu, attempted to reframe his country’s foreign policy by introducing the doctrine of “zero problems with neighbors” (2010), aiming to shape a new era of relations between Turkey and its immediate region. But, as shown above, Turkish ambitions for regional peace clashed with the tough realities of the Eastern Mediterranean. By the end of 2014, Turkey was identified with the Sunni side of the Sunni-Shia-Kurdish conflict raging across the Levant, despite the fact that a fifth of its own population are Alevis (heterodox Shia) and another fifth ethnic Kurds (Gardner 2014). A political opponent of AKP and former Turkish diplomat from the main opposition party said to the author, in a personal interview, that Davutoğlu’s doctrine had led to a much more difficult situation for Turkey, where it instead faces “zero neighbors without problems.”2
On a more positive note, despite these setbacks in foreign policy, Turkey has yet to suffer the fate of other Southern European nations in the global debt crisis. According to some accounts, Turkish GDP tripled in AKP’s decade in power, with the country appearing on the list of the twenty largest economies of the planet (Öniş 2012; Kastoryano 2013).3
As for Greece, heady optimism about the Greek economy following the Olympics and the country’s accession to the Eurozone meant that few foresaw the country’s world-record financial disaster. In fact, Greece has faced one of the greatest nonwar recessions in modern economic history, roughly equivalent to the Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States. With the wisdom of hindsight, a 2013 op-ed in the Telegraph pointed to a different Greece, one that was “starting to look like Weimar Germany” after five years of financial and political meltdown. Written by Daniel Hannan, a British Euroskeptic conservative MEP, the op-ed describes the hubris of easy credit years, when the markets treated Greek and German debt as interchangeable. It adds: “Now they [Greeks] are suffering the nemesis: GDP down by an almost unbelievable 23 percent from its peak; 28 percent unemployment; middle-class Athenians rummaging in bins for food; farmers bringing supplies to urban cousins” (Hannan 2013).
Inevitably, the financial crisis has had major sociopolitical effects: Greece has seen the collapse of its centrist parties, rising polarization at all levels, and the emergence of one of the most extreme manifestations of majority nationalism, the rise of a prototype fascist party, the Golden Dawn, as the country’s third largest political force (Ellinas 2013; Kovras and Loizides 2014; Zahariadis 2014). Faced with a record seven years of continuous recession since 2008, Greece is far from the new “golden era” envisioned during the 2004 Olympics. The country and its neighbors, particularly Turkey, also pose a set of intriguing puzzles of broader interest for comparative politics and international relations.
THE POLITICS OF MAJORITY NATIONALISM
Unsurprisingly, given the tumult, the two countries have received widespread media and policy attention. For scholars in the fields of comparative politics and international relations, the study of the Greek-Turkish neighborhood could provide valuable insights into the limits and failures of majoritarian politics across a wide spectrum of issues, from managing inter-state crises to accommodating national minorities and dealing with severe financial crises. Yet few scholarly debates have integrated Greek-Turkish politics into the broader international relations and comparative politics literature. The study of the two countries and their broader region generally lacks theoretical engagement and innovation particularly with regard to the role of ideational factors in explaining crisis and mediation outcomes.4 Moreover, until now, no study has provided a comparative perspective of the adversarial or cooperative framing in countries with rich cultural repertoires of contention and moderation. To bridge this gap, this book provides an account of the politics of majority nationalism in the Greek-Turkish neighborhood since the 1980s. It investigates the complex interplay between nationalism and the choice of peace, focusing on how political elites, social movements, and ordinary citizens frame, advocate, and resist peace policies.
Since the creation of their respective national states, political rhetoric in Greece and Turkey has accumulated a diverse cultural repertoire of beliefs, norms, and frames for contention and moderation. At times, hardliners have sustained what Brubaker (1998: 289) calls a nationalist “primed frame,” aiming for national emancipation but more frequently leading to violent conflict, partition, and (civil) war. At other times, peacemakers have established strong beliefs in the value of peace and stability. An explanation of this variation and the conditions under which peacemakers succeed or fail is the major goal of this book.
Building on comparative and historical evidence, The Politics of Majority Nationalism situates Greece and Turkey within the broader literature of peace and conflict studies. It seeks to explain why and how societies make certain choices to achieve peace while others do not. Specifically, it compares the causes of nationalist and peace mobilizations in Greece and Turkey to those in other conflict-ridden societies facing equally rich, explosive, and diverse pools of ethnopolitical contention and peacemaking. On the one hand, this book examines crises, stalemates, and peace mediations involving Turkey and Greece either bilaterally or with minorities and immediate neighbors in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. On the other, it compares Greece and Turkey with their postcommunist neighbors testing the generalizability of the book’s main arguments on Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Conflict-prone dyads such as Greece and Turkey offer theoretically insightful stories about the extent to which framing crisis behavior is driven by “conventional” security concerns or, alternatively, elite manipulation (or alternative factors). The close involvement of international institutions in an area rife with both low- and high-intensity conflicts makes the Greek-Turkish neighborhood a critical testing ground for alternative theoretical frameworks. For one thing, Greece and Turkey are simultaneously NATO allies and strategic rivals with a diverse and explosive repertoire of crises. For another, peace or conflict outcomes are arguably not overdetermined; external incentives for moderation are significant, but so are internal domestic challenges and security dilemmas in a region “tormented by history” (Özkırımlı and Sofos 2008).
Few areas in the world combine the rich building material and contrasting features for framing peace and conflict: on the one hand, strategic rivalries and protracted stalemates have led to near-war situations; on the other, arguably open and decisive opportunities for peace have emerged through the conflict-mitigating role of regional and international organizations such as the EU, NATO, and the United Nations. In short, the Greek-Turkish neighborhood offers an ideal locale for juxtaposing competing ideas and theoretical frameworks emphasizing domestic or international determinants of crisis behavior.
The Politics of Majority Nationalism contributes to the broader literature by investigating how societies in conflict choose to respond to their peace dilemmas and ethnopolitical challenges, emphasizing the ideational preconditions of peacemaking. It uncovers the conditions that foster a particular intractable nationalist discourse, juxtaposing it to the discourse of peacemakers attempting to reverse the logic of nationalism. The book initiates a debate on the underemphasized linkages between institutions, symbols, and framing processes in enabling or restricting the choice of peace. It provides a measure of precrisis frames and demonstrates how the latter influence the crisis behavior of majority groups, as well as stalemates and, ultimately, the choice of peace. Finally, it builds on an established scholarly tradition by linking case studies with comparative politics and conflict studies (Lijphart 1968; Lustick 1993; McGarry and O’Leary 1993, 2004). Such studies on the Eastern Mediterranean are rare, despite contributions in other areas of comparative politics, such as civil wars (Kalyvas 2006), the extreme right (Bora 2003; Ellinas 2010), secularism and democratization (Turam 2007; Fokas 2014), ethnic conflict and minority politics (Grigoriadis 2008; Aktar et al. 2010), and EU integration (Rumelili 2005; Diez et al. 2008).
While existing literature tends to focus solely on Greek-Turkish relations as the unit of analysis, this book also adds their Balkan, Caucasus, and Middle Eastern neighbors into the broader regional analysis. By so doing, it situates Greece and Turkey within a wider conflict-ridden neighborhood aiming to develop a set of theoretical innovations of relevance to the burgeoning literature of peace and conflict studies. This literature has often ignored ideational factors in conflict management and has hitherto dealt with Greece and Turkey merely in passing. This is an odd omission, as most quantitative studies on crisis behavior rank the two Aegean neighbors among the most crisis prone states of the twentieth century (Geller 1993: 181; Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1997: 47).
Finally, the book contributes to scholarly and policy debates by examining conflict transformation in protracted stalemates. It asks how peacemakers challenge and transform the language of ethnic nationalism and war in their countries and identifies a set of tools to use when communicating peace messages to local and national constituencies. To date, most studies have focused on the dark side of nationalism and its destructive manifestations, ignoring internal variations across cases and the contest between peacemakers (“doves”) and hardliners (“hawks”).
FRAMING PEACE AND CONFLICT
Erving Goffman introduced the concept of framing to denote “schemata of interpretation” that enable individuals “to locate, perceive, identify, and label” occurrences within their life space and the world at large (1974: 21). Following Goffman, Bert Klandermans defined framing as a process in which social actors, media, and members of a society jointly interpret, define, and redefine states of affairs (1997: 44).
“Framing” is often used interchangeably with other terms, such as discourse, ideology, hegemonic beliefs, or narratives; however, what distinguishes framing from other comparable terms and frameworks including prospect theory (see Chapter 4), is the degree of strategy involved, particularly in appropriating, challenging, or negotiating the shared meaning of a given situation (see also Benford and Snow 2000: 612; Zald 1996: 261; and Payne 2001: 39). Building on this analytical distinction, I suggest that frames reflect the work of social agents, whether political leaders, civil society movements, or media. In other words, frames imply agency, deliberation, or even manipulation in the construction of new “realities” (Benford and Snow 2000). In the making of majority politics, framers aim to dominate or monopolize political communication, thereby shaping patterns of political behavior, whether at state or civil society level.
Frames have two essential components: first, a diagnostic element, or a definition of the problem, its source, grievances, and more generally, the motives involved; second, a prognostic element, the identification of appropriate opportunities and strategies for redressing the problem, as well as the degree of efficacy of these strategies (Snow and Benford 1988; Levin et al. 1998). Whether cooperative or adversarial toward ethnic “others,” ethnopolitical frames are strategically important in a group’s narrative because they legitimize subsequent courses of action by combining past-present-future (Kovras and Loizides 2012). In essence, frames are purposefully driven political accounts that blend past experience with future action often by excluding uncomfortable facts and “others,” in an effort to legitimize and motivate in-group goals.
Moreover, frames build on a pre-existing cultural stock drawn from the symbolic politics of a national community (Ross 1997, 2007; Kaufman 2001). They rely heavily on the use of available information, public memories, and analogies from the past. Like picture frames, they reflect public perceptions while restricting certain “realities,” including noteworthy institutional designs and innovations, from public attention. Frames focus attention “by bracketing what in our sensual field is relevant and what is irrelevant, what is ‘in frame’ and what is ‘out-of-frame’ in relation to the object of orientation” (Snow 2007). But even when frames correlate to, or reflect, other causes of mobilization and conflict, these variables may remain unnoticed unless elites bring them to public attention and eliminate alternative interpretations. For the most part, winning frames combine diagnostic and prognostic elements and, therefore, are dependent on external security conditions and electoral politics, as well as the personal charisma, authority, and credibility of the leader or opinion-maker during a particular debate.
Ethnopolitical frames and conflict resolution or escalation are closely linked. Ross has demonstrated the importance of using the divergence of historical narratives in contemporary ethnopolitical conflicts (2007) as a starting point in discussions of conflict management. For the most part, frames can influence decision-makers and the broader public in three ways. First, adversarial frames can constrain moderate leaders from capitalizing on their potential for peacemaking. When adversarial framing dominates political debates, a society could become trapped in these frames, even during ostensibly promising times for peacemaking. Alternatively, cooperative frames emphasizing the fairness and viability of peace compromises could be catalysts in conflict transformation, despite prohibitive conditions prevailing in a conflict-ridden society. Contrary to conventional wisdom and as demonstrated in Chapter 5, even hardliners frequently participate in contested peace processes once appropriate political and constitutional arrangements become available.5 Cooperative frames offer the political arsenal necessary to enable such actors to initiate, justify, and maintain their positive transformation despite ethnic outbidding challenges.
Finally, as the literature of ethnic relations frequently demonstrates, actors are often ambivalent and noncommittal, making it hard to categorize them as hawks or doves.6 Frequently, ethnopolitical issues are fluid, and ethnic politics can evolve in unexpected directions, both cooperative and conflictual. Such “hybrid” situations are particularly amenable to framing processes and institutional design to nudge them to the right direction. In a nutshell, the book’s treatment of framing goes beyond structural explanations of peace and conflict to assign agency to actors’ decisions and investigating how these are communicated in the public space.
Besides framing processes, the book addresses alternative explanations of the “choice of peace,” including hostile neighbors, socioeconomic conditions, and reluctant allies.7 It emphasizes a society’s responses to its own ethnopolitical challenges and demonstrates the importance of societal choices in determining the direction and intensity of the causality of alternative explanations. Societies respond differently to similar problems, and the “choice of peace” is critically important, not only for endorsing peace arrangements but also for the ultimate well-being of conflict-ridden nations. This book investigates alternative explanations for such choices, focusing on the institutionalization of symbolic politics and how this enables or restricts leaders from framing the “right” analogies and lessons across space and time (Jervis 1968; George 1980; Bermeo 1992).
RESEARCH DESIGN
To investigate the mechanisms behind episodes of nationalist-driven or peace-driven mobilizations, The Politics of Majority Nationalism employs process-tracing, defined as relevant, verifiable causal stories resting in different chains of cause-effect relations (Tilly 1997: 48; George and Bennett 2005: 205–31). It draws on parliamentary debates, party documents (declarations and memoranda), and biographies and autobiographies of politicians to assess reasons for decisions to support or reject peace arrangements. In order to triangulate the data and fill the existing gaps, it relies on extensive interviews with key political and civil society figures. The Politics of Majority Nationalism supports its arguments by contrasting the experience of Greece and Turkey to “most similar” and “most different” cases and by identifying variations within each case study, particularly at the level of crisis escalation, stalemates, and peace processes (see also King et al. 1994; Van Evera 1997; Levi 1997).
Drawing on Tansey (2007: 766), it also uses elite interviews to corroborate what has been established by others and to determine what a set of people think about key issues. My ongoing engagement with public policy particularly in Cyprus and Georgia has allowed personal access to key actors in peace processes, including individuals with privileged access to information. In addition, I gained access to an electronic copy of parliamentary speeches in Turkey since 1872; to substantiate the book’s arguments, I analyzed selected debates using a potentially generalizable tool-kit designed for measuring nationalist vs. peace framing. Even though citizens might not follow parliamentary debates systematically, it is possible to identify and select the most “high impact” sessions, cited for consistency purposes in the international press.
Although not the only place to study framing, the national parliament has several advantages over such sources as local newspapers, FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Information Service), evening news reports, and interviews. Unlike interviews, which usually take place after a crisis, parliamentary debates do not allow framers to reconstruct their positions. Parliamentary speeches are unrefined and unedited—as compared with, say, an editor’s selection of news, whether for a local newspaper or a translated FBIS source. In fact, the selection of radical news is prevalent in the media. Media might systematically under-report moderate statements by politicians, as more radical statements may capture the attention of the public. Moreover, parliamentary debates tend to reveal aspects of reality not presented in the media; in Greece and Turkey, and most other established or emerging democracies, MPs enjoy legal immunity and, therefore, are not restricted as to what they say publicly. Further, during parliamentary debates, there is often a contest between rival frames, usually between the government and the opposition, something absent in partisan media. In rare moments, parliamentarians with legal immunity even admitted facts that have been otherwise taboo in public discourse. Finally, parliamentary debates constitute, by definition, a characteristic sample of what is said publicly, while an arbitrary selection of television channels or newspaper columns might lead to reasonable criticisms of selection bias.
This book’s distinct methodological contribution lies in integrating comparative analysis with interpretive work. By relying on framing analysis, it addresses a major gap in the literature demonstrating through various comparative designs the role of ethnocentric frames in constraining leaders from negotiating mutually beneficial compromises. While others have recently advocated innovative approaches to the study of framing processes (Desrosiers 2011; Kaufman 2011; McDoom 2012), The Politics of Majority Nationalism goes further, utilizing alternative comparative designs to support its main arguments also drawing insights from institutionalist and structuralist approaches.
The analysis in each of the following chapters is puzzle driven and puts forward an alternative comparative approach. Drawing on the observation that nationalist expression is inconsistent across issues, Chapters 3 and 4 examine within case variation and pairs of contrasting cases of mobilization and restraint in Greece and Turkey, respectively. In the early 1990s, Greek society focused its attention on the “least threatening” Macedonian issue instead of the “traditional” rivalries with Turkey or Albania. Likewise, Turkey in 1998–99 followed a tough-resolve approach against Syria, Italy, and Greece with regard to their (perceived) support for the Kurdish separatists but reached an important compromise with the latter at the EU summit in Helsinki months later. Both chapters provide detailed chronologies of preceding crisis-making in each case study based on the Greek-Turkish Negotiations and Crises 1983–2003 database, available through a British Academy grant (Loizides 2009b). Drawing from Lieberman (2005, 2010), the dataset pays attention to emerging standards in the design of historically oriented replication datasets, including standards on quality of sources, transparency of citations, reporting uncertainty in the historical record, and the need for valid comparisons. To meet these standards, it relies on primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, including the Economist Intelligence Unit reports, Lexis-Nexis, and Facts on File.
Chapter 5 takes a different direction from the rest of the book by considering positive transformation in deviant or least likely case studies (Lijphart 1968; Eckstein 1975; Gerring 2007). Deviant cases of peace transformation are those that initially demonstrated high levels of entrenched ethnocentric framing, majority nationalist mobilization, and human rights violations, yet actors have nonetheless managed to catalyze a process of conflict transformation. Finally, Chapter 6 engages on a broader cross-country comparison of five cases comparing Greece and Turkey with three of their postcommunist neighbors. The Politics of Majority Nationalism introduces an additional methodological innovation by combining historical comparative analysis with process tracing.8 What is particularly interesting in this comparison is that the five cases of majority nationalism are sequential: Serbia (1987), Greece (1992), Turkey (1998), Georgia (2008), and Ukraine (2014) allowing broader analysis of the effects of cross-learning, elite socialization, and framing of ethnopolitical issues in post–cold war Europe. The research design also follows Petersen (2011) in pointing out that the selection of cases within a particular region and time period often provides the most reliable sample minimizing the effects of selection bias.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
The book is divided into six chapters, each addressing a different piece of the puzzle in the study of majority nationalism and the framing of peace, stalemates, and crises.
Chapter 1, “The Politics of Majority Nationalism: Regional and Global Perspectives,” situates Greek and Turkish nationalism within the broader picture of conflict-ridden national majorities. This chapter provides key definitions and typologies; it integrates theories of nationalism, social movements, and ethnic conflict, aiming to demonstrate major gaps in these literatures. It argues that majority nationalism and the variations in the response of majorities cannot be adequately explained simply by history or long-standing ethnic and religious rivalries. Moreover, theories of ethnic mobilization, which focus on single-factor explanations, such as group status, relative (or actual or unexpected) deprivation, fear, and repression, offer an inadequate explanation of the politics of majority nationalism.
The social movement literature provides valuable insights on mobilization and conflict, yet as this chapter demonstrates these insights are rarely investigated in studies of nationalism.9 Following McAdam et al. (1997: 152), the social movement literature has been integrated across a trinity of issues: political opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing processes/norms. Drawing on this study, I argue for a comprehensive perspective in the study of majority nationalism, noting the conditions and constraints that shape protest, the institutions and mobilizing structures that support it, and the framing processes around which action is perceived and acted out (ibid.). One of the underlying themes of this chapter is the need to supplement structural or rational choice explanations with cognitive perspectives. Framing, in particular, needs to be at the center of analytical discussions on crisis behavior and peace settlements, since most variables discussed in the literature do not trigger outcomes unless mobilizing elites can point out their importance.
Chapter 2, “Doves and Hawks: Frames of Peace, Stalemates, and Crises,” focuses on precrisis framing (that is, framing before the advent of a crisis or mediation). It asks how framing processes contribute to subsequent crises, stalemates, or peace processes. The chapter provides the book’s main argument on why societies succeed or fail in their choice of peace. It identifies the precrisis framing strategies of “doves and hawks” and illustrates how framing becomes embedded in public identities, norms, and institutions to determine a society’s subsequent path toward peace or its alternative. It addresses in more detail the following issues: the conceptualization of frames in general and their precrisis features in particular; the key differences between framing and the broader conceptual category of perception; the debate on the limits of plasticity of frames, or to what extent frames should correspond to pre-existing “perceived realities”; the causal links between framing processes and the choice of peace; the two necessary component frames relating motives and opportunities; and the detailed coding procedures of adversarial and nonadversarial frames.
The chapter also notes the curious absence of successful peacemaking in post-Ottoman societies despite legacies of Ottoman-era tolerance. It addresses these conundrums and offers explanations as to why societies in the Balkans and the Middle East have generally failed in overcoming protracted stalemates. The chapter builds on framing analysis to demonstrate how a selective reading of the past and false analogies drawn from the Ottoman and Western colonialism legacies have made the endorsement of accommodation mechanisms more difficult. Framing analogies with the past shape common (mis)understandings of the fairness and viability of such compromises, leading to a society’s ultimate refusal to consider necessary (even unavoidable) mechanisms of accommodating ethnic diversity.
Chapter 3, “Trapped in Nationalism? Symbolic Politics in Greece and the Macedonian Question,” provides the book’s first main case study. It examines how adversarial framing on the Macedonian issue constrained a moderate government in Greece from capitalizing on its peace potential in the early 1990s, when major demonstrations in Thessaloniki and Athens attracted at least a million people each. At the same time, it asks why conflicts related to Turkey or Albania received little attention despite ethnic antagonisms and an alleged “civilizational divide” between Greece and its predominantly Muslim neighbors. Drawing evidence from the Hellenic Parliament, the chapter demonstrates that on Turkish and Albanian issues, a sizable moderate camp championed reconciliation and compromise, maintaining a balance between hardliners and moderates in Greece. Even so, hardliners monopolized the framing of Greece’s Macedonian policies, thus shaping an early nationalist consensus. By adopting this hegemonic frame, mainstream Greek political elites prevented adaptation to new realities in the 1990s, obstructing a feasible peace agreement between the two nations.
Chapter 4, “Europe and (Non-)Accommodation in Turkey: Framing the Kurds, Syria, and Greece,” contains the book’s second main case study, Turkey and the Kurdish question. It highlights the 1998 Öcalan incident, when hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens joined mass nationalist mobilizations to protest against third countries allegedly supporting the Kurdish PKK. It examines how Turkish elites framed foreign governments and the PKK as the parties solely responsible for the Kurdish uprising, making any potential compromise unimaginable for the next two decades. At the same time the chapter examines the progress made by Turkey in reaching better relations with Greece, leading to the Helsinki compromise in 1999.
The chapter goes on to consider why Turkey has failed to develop accommodation mechanisms for its national minorities unlike other industrial or developing countries facing similar ethnopolitical challenges.
Chapter 5 “Transforming Stalemates into Opportunities for Peace: Four ‘Success’ Stories,” takes a different direction, by considering positive transformation. Deviant cases of peace transformation are those that initially demonstrated high levels of entrenched ethnocentric framing, majority nationalist mobilization, and human rights violations, yet actors have nonetheless managed to catalyze a process of conflict transformation. The chapter focuses on four examples of partial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean region—namely, the Macedonian name dispute (that is, the 1995 Interim Agreement), the 1999 earthquake diplomacy between Greece and Turkey; the “democratic opening” followed by the first predominantly Kurdish party entering the Turkish parliament in 2015, and finally a set of successful confidence-building measures in Cyprus.
Chapter 6, “Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine: Postcommunist Transitions and Beyond,” provides a broader comparative analysis of contentious politics and majority mobilization. The chapter makes a number of comparisons between Greece and Turkey and three postcommunist societies—Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. It demonstrates how precrisis framing had comparable effects in the five countries, despite their differences in economic performance, levels of democratization, military capacity, geopolitical alliances, cultural traditions (for example, religion), and approaches to human rights. Finally, for each case the chapter traces the processes through which precrisis framing has influenced subsequent policy decisions.
The concluding chapter, “Why do Majorities Protest? Global Crises and the Pursuit of Peace,” summarizes the book’s findings and notes their broader theoretical and public policy implications for Greece and Turkey and for majority nationalism in general. The chapter also discusses the latest developments in the Eastern Mediterranean, emphasizing both promising and worrisome aspects of contemporary politics. Despite apparent progress in Greek-Turkish relations, all major problems remained unresolved, with predictable and probably catastrophic consequences beyond the region. To this point, there is no real evidence that confrontational behavior belongs to the past, as most analysts recognize a high likelihood of future crises resulting from the spread of genocidal violence in Syria and Iraq, the rise of extreme right-wing nationalism in Greece, and the failure to resolve Greek-Turkish disputes. The unpredictability and fluidity of many variables affecting ethnopolitical crises might alert policy-makers to make better use of opportunities and timeliness for conflict resolution.
A REGION LIKE NEVER BEFORE
The completion of this book in the first half of 2015 coincided with unprecedented developments in the Greek-Turkish neighborhood. Most notably, on 25 January 2015 Syriza, capitalized on the financial crisis to secure a landslide victory, winning 149 out of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament. The phenomenon of the anti-establishment Greek radical Left and its revolutionary forty-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras quickly captured the hearts and minds of intellectuals and policymakers in Europe and globally. But the charismatic Greek PM (as of July 2015) had soon had to compromise his agenda, forging an unholy alliance with a small nationalist party, the Independent Greeks, and signing a third bailout agreement on 13 July 2015 despite a mandate referendum a week earlier to reject older proposals and to renegotiate better terms with international creditors. The meltdown of the Greek economy and society since 2008 has come to threaten not only the country’s position in the EU but also the continuity of Greek democratic institutions.
At the same time, as argued in this book, the post-2008 financial crisis has highlighted the importance of peace and stability in Greece’s immediate neighborhood. Surprisingly, new opportunities have emerged to resolve Greek-Turkish disputes, especially the decades-long Cyprus problem. On 26 April 2015, Mustafa Akıncı, a veteran peacemaker whose earlier contribution to bicommunal cooperation in Nicosia is covered in Chapter 5, won a landslide victory with 60.3 percent in the second round of the Turkish Cypriot elections. For the first time in its long history of stalemates, the Cyprus problem has quietly moved toward resolution, a potentially inspiring example for the entire region at troubled times. For its part, Turkey faced an unprecedented electoral outcome on 7 June 2015 when the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) entered parliament. While predominantly supported by ethnic Kurds, HDP won significant support (and applause) across the Turkish society after a decade of attempted yet unfulfilled reforms by the ruling AKP.
Following public fatigue with the dominance of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, AKP lost majority seats in parliament for the first time since 2002. The post-June electoral situation has created alternative possibilities for either new elections or a coalition government including the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) whose rise in the late 1990s is extensively discussed in the following pages. Similarly, PM Tsipras in Greece could face new elections for a renewed mandate after the July 2015 bailout agreement. Trapped in its populist and anti-austerity rhetoric, Syriza also carries the anti-nationalist tradition of Synaspismos of the 1990s (see Chapter 3), an important reason for optimism for the future of the Balkan, Greek-Turkish and Cyprus peace processes.
Greece and its region have been at crossroads despite painful bailouts, elections, and referendums. New challenges and actors are emerging in the region with competing nationalist and peace agendas. Depending on the outcome of current financial and political developments, the Greek-Turkish neighborhood could still face increasing tensions with catastrophic effects for the economy, global migration, and security. Alternatively, a domestic political consensus could prevail, initiating a new process of ambitious conflict transformation. With unresolved puzzles emerging from concurrent crises, stalemates, and peace mediations, the troubled “post-Ottoman region” will continue to be critically important to the study of international relations and comparative politics for the next few decades.
1. As highlighted later in the book, the Greek Cypriots voted against the Annan Plan, hoping for an improved settlement after informally securing accession to the EU in 2002–3. Following the April 2004 referendum, Cyprus formally joined the EU, but the membership benefits applied primarily to the Greek Cypriot–controlled portion of the island. For discussions on EU conditionality, see Diez et al. (2008); Richmond (2005); Rumelili (2007); and Tocci (2007). For my most updated work on Cyprus, see Loizides (2016).
2. Interview with Osman Faruk Loğoğlu, vice chairperson of CHP (Republican People’s Party) in charge of foreign relations, Ankara, April 2012.
3. GDP per capita has improved dramatically over the AKP period, from $3,492 in 2002 to $10,067 in 2010 (Öniş 2012). Although he recognizes critiques, Öniş argues that economic growth still represents a considerable achievement under AKP. See also critique of AKP’s economic performance in Ozan Gigizoglu, “Demystifying the Turkish Economic Success under AKP Governance,” June 18 2013; accessed 19 January 2015, http://www.santacs.com/Demystifying%20Turkish%20Economic%20Success.pdf
4. For a number of earlier exceptions, see Rumelili (2007); Özkırımlı and Sofos (2008); Diez et al. (2008); Yanik (2011).
5. For comparative examples, see, for instance, Schultz (2005); Mitchell et al. (2009); and Moore et al. (2014).
6. See, for instance, Stedman (1997); Schultz (2005); McGarry and O’Leary (2009).
7. Two already classic studies have adopted comparable approaches in their explanations for why societies collapse or why nations fail; see Diamond (2006); and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). On Greece, see also TED talk by Kalyvas (2011). What is different in this book, however, is the emphasis on the role of political institutions in decision-making and the interplay between frames, contentious politics, and institutional design in fostering peace and political stability.
8. For a discussion of process-tracing, see Van Evera (1997: 65), particularly on comparisons within a historical period (e.g., the cold war, 1947–89).
9. For an earlier application of resource mobilization and other social movement perspectives in the study of the minority nationalisms, see Romano (2006).
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