Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey
Oct 30 2009
Turkish-Armenian Soccer Diplomacy: A Direct Hit at Azerbaijan’s
Foreign Policy Architecture
Friday, October 30, 2009
Elnur Soltanov
Azerbaijan is not happy with the two protocols signed between Armenia
and Turkey on the 10th of October in Zurich, Switzerland. The most
common explanation has been that despite all the verbal promises by
its strategic ally, Baku is not sure that the opening of the borders
will be tied to the partial withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from
the territories in and (especially) around Nagorno-Karabakh. But the
level of disappointment in Azerbaijan cannot be fully explained away
by an unfavorable behavior of the brotherly government. For
Azerbaijan, the Turkish border initiative amounts to more than that.
Namely, it is poised to destroy the foreign policy architecture
Azerbaijan has been meticulously building since the mid-1990s around
Karabakh issue, leaving behind uncertainty and confusion. This is what
makes the repercussions of the Turkish-Armenian conciliation so
unbearable for Azerbaijan.
After military defeats in and around Nagorno-Karabakh between 1992 and
1994 and the concomitant cease-fire freezing the situation lopsidedly
in Armenia’s favor, in the spring of 1994, Azerbaijan started to
pursue a new foreign policy strategy. It may have begun by default,
yet by the mid-2000s it has evolved into a clearly, if unofficially,
defined foreign policy doctrine. The nature of the strategy was
simple, invoking the memories of the Cold War. It was to be built on
Armenia’s economic isolation and strategic marginalization. The
situation was Armenia’s choice to an extent, but Azerbaijan was intent
on fully capitalizing on the trend.
Armenia was to be left out of the regional energy and transport
projects and deprived of the benefits of the burgeoning Turkish
economy. This also meant closer relations with Russia and Iran,
outsiders in the Western-dominated global politics. Azerbaijan, on the
other hand, revitalizing its economy, becoming a significant link in
the Western energy security, and increasing the power of its military,
was to eventually make Armenia more willing to concede on the
negotiating table its enormous gains obtained in the battlefield. The
vision and the resources (which, essentially, were hydrocarbons)
behind the project were coming from Azerbaijan, which also had a
significant degree of control over it.
Until recently, the strategy was paying off to the apprehension of the
Armenian and the satisfaction of the Azerbaijani side. The enormously
expensive and rewarding Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and
Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline have already been
successfully completed by 2006. The third main transport link,
Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railroad was slated to be finished by 2011/2012.
When Armenians helped to freeze the international investment flow into
the latest project pointing to the intentional isolation of Armenia,
Azerbaijan, in one of the best indications of its willingness to
spearhead and finance the strategic trend, opened up its treasury
generously offering $220 million to Georgia to be paid back in 25
years with a symbolic interest rate of 1 percent. The dynamism that
the pipelines and hydrocarbon revenues have been generating has had an
economic and geopolitical multiplier effect along the
Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey axis, of which Armenia was not a part.
Armenian economy was definitely lagging behind with an associated
demographic downturn. According to CIA Country Report, Azerbaijan’s
economy grew twice as fast as the Armenian economy between 2006 and
2008. Its GDP per capita, almost even with that of Armenia a couple of
years ago, was 30 percent more than Armenia’s $6,300 by 2008.
Azerbaijan’s arms purchases, steadily increasing since the early 2000s
was starting to offset Armenian military arsenal, seasonally flooded
by Russia’s huge military transfers. In fact, the military budget of
Azerbaijan could be effectively catching up with the entire state
budget of the Republic of Armenia for 2009. Partly as a result of
continuing economic difficulties and overall insecurities, Armenia’s
population size has been stuck around 3 million, while Azerbaijan has
grown by a million since 1994 to over 8 million. According to the
International Monetary Fund’s forecasts these trends are to continue
for at least the next five years. The hard economic blows of the
Russian-Georgian war and the global economic downturn of 2008 were the
latest indications of how fragile Armenia’s situation was compared to
that of Azerbaijan.
It is difficult to say how much longer it would have taken for Armenia
(if ever) to be more willing to make concessions. The pace was slow
but the strategy and vision of the Azerbaijani political establishment
was clearly defined and things were, it seemed, moving in the right
direction. It is here that the deep disappointment on the part of the
Azerbaijani government lies. The Turkish move, and there are many
reasons to believe that the initiative came from Turkey, removed the
most fundamental pillar out of the Azerbaijan’s foreign policy
architecture. True, the architecture was being designed by Azerbaijani
vision and built by Azerbaijan’s relatively rich energy resources. But
the fundamental pillar necessary for the success of the isolation
project was Turkey’s willingness to cooperate in keeping Armenia at
bay.
For Azerbaijan the timing of the Turkish initiative makes it
especially worrisome. It began after Azerbaijan’s resource-led
projects and investments have already been made. One does not change
the direction of the multibillion pipelines and railroads overnight.
In the same context, it is only with the completion of the pipelines
in 2006 that a true economic gap started to emerge between Azerbaijan
and Armenia with real security implications. As soon as Azerbaijan’s
foreign policy architecture started to show real signs of success
Turkey defected.
Of course, there could be positive implications to the
Turkish-Armenian conciliation for Azerbaijan, yet it is undefined,
unofficial and is as possible as the opposite result. Despite the
Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government’s verbal promises,
Karabakh is not built into the border initiative which has been
internationalized and already slipping off of Turkey’s control. What
could be gone are not only the clarity of the tools and the purpose of
Azerbaijan’s foreign policy strategy around Karabakh, but also the
relative control Baku had over the overall process targeting the
resolution of the conflict. With the signatures in Zurich, the future
of the occupied lands of Azerbaijan is a function of the overly
internationalized Turkish-Armenian relations. Azerbaijan has lost the
initiative.
>From the Azerbaijani perspective, its clear, controllable, working and
priority strategy has been replaced by an unclear, uncontrollable and
an untested alternative. The status quo around Karabakh, which is
unfavorable to Azerbaijan, is no longer the driving force of the
regional political configurations; it has become an appendix to the
internationalized Turkish-Armenian relations. And Turkey, the
international community and Armenia, in dwindling the order down to
zero, are less concerned about Azerbaijani preferences in the zone of
conflict.
One cannot help but remember that Turkey felt betrayed when the United
States decided to withdraw its Jupiter medium-range nuclear missiles
from Turkish soil to resolve its differences with the Soviet Union
after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The current situation between
Azerbaijan and Turkey is not exactly analogous to the aforementioned.
The latter is only a worse case from the Azerbaijani viewpoint. In the
Jupiter crisis the strategy and resources belonged to a more powerful
ally and Turkey was only trying to beef up its overall strategic
position bandwagoning with the overwhelming global American
initiative. But in the case of Turkey and Azerbaijan, a unilateral
move by a more powerful ally is perceived as wasting Azerbaijan’s
resources, Azerbaijan’s strategy and Azerbaijan’s initiative. It would
not be an exaggeration to say that this strategy was shaping the very
identity of the Azeri foreign policy. One of the biggest and
overlooked challenges of the Turkish-Armenian protocols will be
dealing with the destruction of this foreign policy architecture and
identity, and the uncertainty, confusion and the lack of direction it
leaves behind.
* Mr. Elnur Soltanov is an assistant professor at Azerbaijan
Diplomatic Academy, Baku.
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