South China Morning Post


By Gyorgy Busztin
Feb. 7, 2022

[As Russia seeks to re-establish its Soviet-era sphere of influence
and Turkey turns towards Central Asia, their opposing interests might
soon collide

For China, Russo-Turkish tensions would destabilise Central Asia. For
South and Southeast Asia, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman drive has bigger
repercussions]

Current events have provided two instances of history repeating
itself. The first, and indisputably more dangerous, instance is the
drive by President Vladimir Putin to restore Russia to the superpower
status it enjoyed in Soviet times.

What is happening on Ukraine’s border is not about Russia feeling
threatened but about Moscow seeking to re-establish its Soviet-era
sphere of influence. What does Russia have to fear from its neighbours
in Nato, a defensive alliance of countries that are preoccupied with
their own concerns?

To those who have followed Russian history across the centuries, this
pressure campaign is neither new nor surprising. Historically, Russia
has been obsessed with seeking access to warm seas. It succeeded in
reaching the Black Sea at the time of Catherine the Great, clinching
Crimea from its nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan.

But this was not enough. After occupying the entire Eurasian land mass
adjacent to its realm east of the Urals, swallowing up Turkish and
Persian vassal states and reaching the Pacific, Russia still dreamed
of ejecting the British from India, in a push to the Indian Ocean.
(Thus prompting the Great Game, the British Empire’s desperate
19th-century attempt to block Russian progress south in Afghanistan).
To keep Russia at arm’s length from the Mediterranean, England, France
and Turkey fought the bloody Crimean war.

Then came the Russian expansion into the Balkans, which pitted St.
Petersburg against two great powers of the age, the Austro-Hungarian
empire and Ottoman Turkey. The first of the two conflicts was
temporarily defused by the Congress of Berlin, which delineated the
spheres of influence of both empires.

But Russia found it difficult to abide by these arrangements and
stoked pan-Slav nationalism to grab more influence, leading eventually
to the pistol shots in Sarajevo, and the first world war.
Meanwhile, Russia’s conflict with Turkey kept brewing. It had
successfully pushed the Ottomans from their Balkan dependencies by the
last quarter of the 19th century. That the nations freed from Ottoman
rule were soon at each other’s throats (in the first and second Balkan
wars) mattered little.

What mattered was Russia’s drive to end the Turkish presence in the
Balkans altogether, by aiming to take hold of Istanbul, which it
referred to as Constantinople. Thus emerged the antagonism that
eventually pushed Turkey into the arms of Germany and Austria-Hungary
in the first world war, with catastrophic consequences for the Ottoman
Empire.

The second development, related to the first, is Turkey’s loud support
of Ukraine. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan travelled to Kyiv on
February 3 to announce a deal to send its highly-regarded drones to
the beleaguered nation.

For good measure, he used a phrase loaded with symbolism since
Ukraine’s troubles with Russia began in 2014: “Glory to Ukraine!” That
Turkey, a Nato member that has cosied up to Russia in recent years –
despite the anger this has aroused in its other ally, the United
States – has made clear which side it is on might surprise some.

But for those who remember the past, the reasons are clear. Both
Russia and Turkey are embarking on relentless drives to be great again
on the world stage. In the case of Russia, the driving force is what
Lenin condemned as “Great Russian chauvinism”, bolstered by military
might and hydrocarbon resources.

For Turkey, the European Union’s refusal to admit it to what Ankara
sees as a “Christian club” has motivated Erdogan to go it alone and
swap a European identity for one rooted in its glorious past. This has
seen it make a decisive turn towards the Turkic nations of Central
Asia and a claim to kinship.

All would be well if these ambitions have been playing out in opposite
corners of the world. But Russia and Turkey are neighbours, and the
risks of them colliding are increasing. They have opposing interests
in the Caucasus. Their spheres of influence overlap and breed
contradictions in Central Asia.

Their differences are manifest with respect to the GUAM countries
(Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova), independent states
threatened by Russian expansion, but which Turkey resolutely stands
by.

The short but bloody war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in
Nagorno-Karabakh last year brought Russo-Turkish tensions to the
surface, as both backed opposing sides – a situation similar to that
in Syria and Libya, and now Ukraine.

For us in Asia, the Russian push for rejuvenation seems remote.
Turkey’s drive, on the other hand, is taking place in our backyard.
The history that binds them, however, should interest even the casual
observer.

The world is rife with inherited tensions that can easily be
channelled to feed new conflicts. Conflicting nationalisms – Russian
Orthodox neo-imperialism here, Turkish neo-Ottomanism there – fall
into this category, even if the risk of tensions spilling over remain
remote.

For China, protracted Russo-Turkish tensions would destabilise Central
Asia. For those further south, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman drive has bigger
repercussions.

For many South and Southeast Asian countries with Muslim populations –
Malaysia foremost among them – Turkey remains a beacon and a model for
how Islam can fuse with modernity. It is no secret that it is vying
with the other Muslim axes – chiefly those led by Saudi Arabia, and
Iran – for leadership of the Islamic world.

A Muslim nation standing up to a European power will no doubt be
applauded in this region, giving the political Islam which Ankara
champions a fillip, and boosting the neo-Ottoman drive.

The 64,000-dollar question for those watching history repeating itself
is this: have the lessons of their bloody pasts been learned by Moscow
and Ankara?

*

Dr Gyorgy Busztin is a visiting research professor at the Middle East
Institute of the National University of Singapore. A career diplomat,
he served as Hungary’s Ambassador to Indonesia and Iran, among other
postings