Mediation as foreign policy, the case of Turkey Guest: Spyros Sofos

IE: Hello and, welcome back to the fifth episode of We Can Find A Way in 2024. My name is Idil Elveris. This is the sixth season in this podcast about conflict resolution. We Can find a way pioneers a culture change in handling conflict because conflict is everywhere. We can find a way is also the only bilingual podcast that addresses conflict on an international scale. In this episode, I spoke with Spiros Sofos who authored an article about Turkey as a mediator in foreign policy. We discussed how this practice came about first in the Balkans and then expanded to Africa and beyond; its strengths and outcome; as well as its future. So let me now move to the interview that took place on 17 May. Due to a health scare, it took me this long to edit and process this interview. I apologize from my listeners for not being able to produce this episode in May.

So, what is it about mediation that led Turkey to engage with it in its foreign policy?

SS: I'm not certain I have acomplete answer but some..

IE: According to your paper?

SS: Certainly. Some is the product of conjecture and some has to do with various developments. Turkey had initially engaged in mediation only in the case of Iraq and Iran, when the two countries were at the brink of war. Because it was primarily concerned about its national security. It was in sync with Ataturk's idea that Turkey should not engage with the grand designs globally but focus primarily on consolidating its democracy. There was this kind of limitation. It was imposed at the beginning of the Turkish Republic that, Turkey's ambitions should be modest, and at the same time, however, yield results that were beneficial for the region. That was the first element. So mediation became a reasonable way of Turkey participating in regional affairs, primarily.

I have talked to various Ottomanists, who have argued that there is also something that, lies in the Ottoman past. And this was a tradition of negotiation and mediation that was present in the Ottoman Empire. It was part of statecraft and it was not only in terms of external affairs, but it was also a part of internal affairs within the empire. So, sultans would always have staff that would,mediate between rivals within the state tribes, magnates and so on, in order to convince them to find a modus vivendi. Now, also, I think that there is a third factor that has to do with the fact that Turkey, in especially the 1990s, after the Özal period, actually had started having ambitions. First of all, the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union had become, independent states. There were a number of other, regional states like Armenia, Georgia and so on, that needed attention. And then, of course, the Balkans, which had imploded during the war of Yugoslavia. And, Turkey continued to having modest, but a little bit more ambitious, I would say, goals with regards to its foreign policy. Some sort of mediation, some sort of activity that also involved a mediating element became important.

So Turkey tried to do this in a variety of contexts. For example, in Bosnia Herzegovina, Turkey had stationed military forces as part of multilateral efforts like IFOR, SFOR and so on. And we have information from some of the officers of the military forces there of engaging in local mediation. So, I am not looking at mediation only in the broadest sense of the term but also the local instances. So there was some, I would say, experience from this kind of engagement in countries like Bosnia in attempts to support the independence of Kosovo later on.

IE: I can totally sense what you're saying in the sense that although I was working for UNMIK or OSCE, you can feel the role attributed by the communities there to you, as a representative of a non-Western power, kind of. It doesn't seem too odd with what you're saying. It's not really like a mediation role as an institution as we know it, but it's almost like bottom up. So…

SS: Exactly. I think that this is very important, and it has to do with the notion the kin-state. So Turkey saw itself as a kin-state both towards the Turkic Republics of Central Asia and Azerbaijan, of course, a kin-state in the Balkans. And there were these kinds of cultural affinities, I would say that it tried to mobilize that gave it the possibility of being an honest broker, as someone that could engage without having the colonial or imperial baggage of Western powers. Although we don't have the grand kind of outcomes that we can see, for example in the Oslo agreements, which failed in any case with regards to Palestine, at least, Turkey managed to have tangible effects in local communities, and also in providing a model for the Turkic republics of Central Asia through its attempts to mediate, also provide know-how and so on in a variety of civil service, diplomatic contexts and so on.

In my research, I also encountered two other important cases that have to do with the present, actually, and one had to do with Somalia. Turkey's presence in Somalia becomes, again, something that the news is interested in, the news media, because Turkey has managed to deepen its presence in that country. I don't want to say too much about Somalia but I would like to say that Turkey was the first European or Western country that decided to be actively involved in a war torn Somalia as soon as Mogadishu was liberated by the Islamist al Shabab forces in the early 2010s. So President Erdogan, at the time prime minister, went to Somalia and gave a kind of vote of confidence to the society, regardless of the politics and interests of President Erdogan. What I'm interested in is to emphasize the fact that Turkey went there again, as an honest broker, at least that's what it claimed. And also it lacked the colonial baggage that the French, the Italians, the British had, especially Italians and British in Somalia. And therefore, the notion of confidence that you mentioned with regards to Kosovo was also present there.

IE: It's very interesting you again say that. I live in London most of the year and whenever I'm in a Somalian Uber, they adore Turkey, they adore Erdogan. When I was reading your paper, I was like: “okay, now I understand it better” because it's really bottom up again and free from the baggages that you're just describing. So thank you for bringing these up, actually, because it provides me an understanding about my own country.

SS: For me, it was also quite interesting because Somalia was not an area I was going to focus on. I was working on a Foreign Office funded project on “Turkey as a peacemaker in some ways”. And initially I was incredulous to the idea. I thought, Turkey cannot be a peacemaker in the sense that it had just invaded Syria at the time and it was in Libya fighting. But on the other hand, I had to keep my eyes open in some ways to at least some sort of willingness to do something. And in Somalia, so in 2010, for example, the Turkish Republic, you may know this, had raised a substantial amount of funds to send to Somalia to support the recovering government. And this was, interestingly, a civil society endeavor. It was not a government effort. I still have not managed to find out more about why Somalia became such an important element in this humanitarian drive of civil society. I think this gave the opportunity to the then government to also in some ways, piggyback or ride on the back of this effort.

The Ministry of Foreign affairs realized that Somalia was an interesting case. It was a country that was actually, it had been a state failure since the nineties. It was a country also where there was a relative vacuum. And that was, I think, a very good opportunity for Turkey to hedge its bets on as there was not a lot of competition and as there was also a public sympathy for this war torn country and therefore, Turkey within a few years had become one of the major donors of aid, humanitarian and development aid to Somalia. At the same time, it had been involved TIKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency) primarily, the state agency, a humanitarian agency, had engaged in a number of community projects in the country. There is criticism about these projects but for many of these projects managed to take place in a country that was war torn and deeply divided, there were warlords that were fighting about inches of land. It required also for officials of TIKA to have the ability to negotiate, to engage with local communities as military officers did in Bosnia and Kosovo.

That developed what we would call “small scale mediation” and related also to grassroots and to communities on the ground. But Turkey's intervention in terms of mediation in Somalia didn't end there. Somalia was also facing cessation of Somaliland in the north. Therefore, Turkey which was adamant that Somalia's national unity should be preserved, offered its good services to engage with Somaliland. A little parenthesis here; Somaliland during the last years of Siad Barre, the communist dictator of the country, had been bombed heavily and there were casualties of 15 to 20.000 people through these bombings. So, Somaliland's independence had been built in some ways on the basis of this kind of collective memory of atrocity which they called the “Isaac genocide”. So Turkey had a very difficult task. It had not only to bring the statesmen around the table, but it had also to battle the notion of the genocide and the memory of it, in order to make the effort succeed. It did bring the statesmen around the table, and I say men, because there were hardly any women in this process. It brought them around the table. And as some diplomats have told me, Turkish diplomats, Turkey also was thinking of the notion of territorial unity as paramount also because its own experience with Kurdistan. And therefore it insisted that a framework of reintegration of Somaliland in Somalia would be found. I think that was also a negative aspect because Turkey ignored the sensibilities of the people who had suffered in the hands of a Somalian government in the past. This disagreement was short lived, but it was quite a practical agreement. It started with measures that circumnavigated the issue. So it started with, an agreement about control of the air over Somaliland, who was going to control air traffic and so on. There were also small projects that had to do with, re-integration of communities and refugees and so on. And of course, the implicit goal was that Somaliland would rescind it, secession and declaration of independence. I think, therefore, this process had two elements. One was very constructive. It was small, confidence building measures and that was successful. It worked for a period, but the ultimate goal that was attached to it was something that could not be achieved. There was no sensitivity about these issues. This was, a failure eventually. And therefore, Turkey again didn't find itself in the mediation books, you know, successful mediation books. Nevertheless, I think that this persistence on this kind of diplomatic, activity we call mediation has created a huge capital in terms of expertise. Turkey has also offered mediation in many countries in the Horn of Africa, like Sudan and Ethiopia. It offered mediation between north and South Sudan and so on. This had been taken seriously, never took off the ground. But, it shows that Turkey feels that it has the capacity of providing services in a region where it has a presence. And also, as I said, is not a colonial power.

IE: It is actually built on a historical and cultural background rather than an institutional structure that is using mediation with all of its theories, etc. That's the image I'm getting from, what you're saying. Nevertheless, it probably doesn't make it as a theorist or a boo writer, but it creates a certain confidence and, experience in working the middle basis. And it is almost like a new found option in foreign policy, so it seems?

SS: I do agree, and I think that it happened at a time when Turkey definitely was not a small country in terms of projection. So what I wanted to say is that after Turgut Ozal's foreign economic policy, Turkey had more ambition. It was not the Turkey that was enclosed in its borders in some ways. It was then that Turkey started trying to see how it can leverage this kind of ambition internationally. So later on, after the Justice and Development Party came to office, it also tried to institutionalize this kind of interest in mediation by aligning with medium sized powers internationally and forming the Friends of Mediation, an United Nations group. It also has to do with this kind of transformation of Turkey into a medium sized power or even a local superpower in some ways. And mediation was seen as an important element in projecting Turkey's presence internationally.

I think that this was also something that Turkey could use because you asked me to compare it with Qatar and Norway. Turkey lacked what we could call checkbook diplomacy capacity. There have been times when the economy worked really well and allowed Turkey to invest or to provide carrots, in that sense, internationally. But overall, it doesn't have the ability that Qatar has which is a close ally to Turkey internationally. it doesn't have the ability to put its money where its heart is in some ways. It cannot achieve the same types of results and therefore, mediation has been seen as a middle of the way kind of solution to this structural problem.

IE: Financial problems, probably?

SS: Yes.

IE: We can find a way, is sponsored by Koç ttorneys at law, the Istanbul and Antalya based boutique law firm. Founding partners of Koç attorneys at law are staunch believers of using dialogue and finding common ground to resolve conflicts they're very happy to be supporting. We can find a way in the hope that it will help advance the much needed discussion on de-escalation and reduction of polarization in conflict situations within the legal practice as well as in the public discourse.

Is it only about financial problems? Because this global ambitions have been shifted, especially with the justice and Development Party to a more political, of course, that was before also political, but I think it has been more ideologically profound to put its heart or money or time into projects rather than carefully selected little or carefully bottom up driven projects?

SS: You are right. And this was a point I wanted to raise as a transition to the current situation. The initial, I would say, unadulterated kind of yearning for making, a difference and supporting people that had affinities with Turkey. But like in the Balkans and so on, soon, I would say, de-generate into a state and actually maybe even a personal project. I'm saying it because it's common knowledge that Turkey's foreign policy has been changing since close to 2010. After the justice and Development party encountered a number of difficulties: the military had threatened it. There was a presidential election that was shunned by the opposition. And, of course, the courts tried to close the party. So at that point, I think that Justice and Development party developed more aggressive policies, and not only internally, but also internationally. And when I say aggressive, I don't mean, war mongering, although that was also the case. But the important point was that the decision was that the government had to project its own, I would say, power and recognition internationally. And therefore, President Erdogan, at the time, Prime Minister Erdogan, supported a number of initiatives that quite often clashed with the previous model of mediation. So, for example, there are TIKA officials whose names I cannot mention, that have found themselves very frustrated with the fact that they had a humanitarian project. And at the same time, the prime ministerial and later presidential palace would, in many ways, counter with its own kinds of policies, with grand designs, big development projects, instead of local community confidence building and so on. That was something that I think affected a lot also, the foreign ministry. The Foreign Ministry didn't have the independence that it had before and could not have a predictable and long term strategy about effective policy. Another interesting element is that, in the Balkans, and also in terms of Syria, then President Erdogan found that his more preferred type of international politics was going to be personalistic. So, for example, Erdogan has felt like a fish in the water when he would go to the Astana meetings to talk about Syria with Putin and Iran's Raisi. These three persons developed very personal bonds. So diplomacy suddenly becomes the diplomacy of the great in quotation marks of men who decide, for example, on how to solve the Syrian problem; how to peacemake in Syria..

IE: As if

SS: …in many ways. But this is the point: these are the limitations of the policy. This policy is not about real peace. It's about the semblance of peace. It's just imposing conflict containment. We saw this also in the Balkans. And nowadays, the careful mediation that individual, either through development officials or military officers would undertake gave its place to diplomacy between heads of state. So, for example, Erdogan has been very close to the current head of the Muslim community in Bosnia, Izetbegovic. At the same time, he has got very good relationships with the president of Serbia. And so you can see these are personalistic relations. So, in many ways, the model is now not developing a genuine, piece, engaging as many stakeholders as possible around the table, but it is to have behind closed doors meeting between heads of state, deciding particular actions which is a very different idea that goes against the grain of mediation as a process that is more inclusive, I would say, slightly more democratic than other attempts. So we can see this now throughout the southeastern Europe that President Erdogan has this kind of understanding of how Turkey will engage in negotiations and mediation, if possible, but without including any stakeholders other than his counterparts in politics.

IE: If I understand you correctly, you're saying this as not an institutional, not an established thing, but a more personalistic thing. If there is change in terms of the personal, then a new modus vivendi will be required if Turkey adopts this as a foreign policy tool, right? Or what is your expectation?

SS: Yes. Although now, officially, we can see that civil society participates in mediation efforts. The fact is that this is a civil society that is very skewed. It's not really a civil society. It's a state supported civil society.

IE: A GONGO?

SS: Yes, I think that Turkey has developed a capacity that now lies within civil society. So the former military officers, the former TIKA officials, the former cultural officials, and so on. These people have developed what I would call and what you called actually grassroots mediation capabilities. But now most of them are either out of the state sector or disillusioned with the state sector. I think that it's quite important for any country to realize that any type of mediation, any type of, I would say, peace building process requires this kind of human capital that exists in civil society and should support it and rcognize it as an important stakeholder in these processes. A president or a prime minister on their own cannot bring peace because they're….

IE: Not on the ground. They can't be on the ground.

SS: Yes, they cannot be on the ground. And as the case of Somaliland indicated, President Erdogan had, at the time, Prime Minister Erdogan had and his foreign minister had no idea of the factors on the ground, of the fears of the Somalian people, of a reunified Somalia. You need the people on the ground and you need to put more people on the ground because of the particular society and understand how to mediate, how to engage. And, also you need to bring the mediation process closer to communities. And, we have now a process of taking mediation away from the communities and taking it into presidential palaces. And this is not a sustainable and effective way of achieving results. If results is the ultimate goal, of course, because it might be a performance at the moment, I'm not certain.

IE: Thank you very much. Anything you would like to add?

SS: No, I said a lot. And, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

IE: Spyros Sofos is an assistant professor at the department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He has studied political science and international studies, sociology, conflict studies, and regional and cross cultural studies at Pantheon University, Greece, the University of Kent, UK, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and held teaching and research positions in the UK and Sweden. His latest book, Turkish Politics and the Mass Mobilization and Populism, explores the emergence of populism in contemporary Turkey from a genealogical perspective. He has also co authored Tormented by History, Nationalism in Greece and Turkey, and Islam in Europe, Public Spaces and Civic Networks, and co-edited nation and identity in contemporary Europe. His research focuses on populism, collective action, polarization and conflict, particularly in Turkey, the MENA region and, southeastern Europe. He is the lead editor of Open Democracy's rethinking Populism project.

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