The European Council on Foreign Relations

Turkey, Libya and unintended consequences

Date: 24th March 2011  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: Europe and the world, Middle East and North Africa,
Tags: , gaddafi, libya, nato, turkey, eu

A couple of days ago I recorded an audio podcast with Dimitar Bechev (here's the podcast; here's the blog post) looking at Ankara's delicate positioning over international intervention in Libya.

I've just been reading a piece in Today's Zaman by Gülnur Aybet (a friend of ECFR's) that contributes significantly to the debate - the piece (in English) is here and well worth reading. Dr Aybet argues that the Libyan intervention will probably be remembered as ambivalent and reluctant, despite wide international backing, largely because of the recent historical reverberations from Iraq. This ambivalence and reluctance has affected many of the actors, from the Arab League to the US, but is especially keenly felt in Turkey.

Turkey is of course a curious case - a member of NATO, frustrated with (and humiliated by) the tortuous accession process into the EU, yet carving out its own niche as a regional diplomatic and economic power, and also with the aspiration of providing a model for more democratic Middle East. The dilemmas that intervention in Libya poses Ankara are different and often more complicated than those posed elsewhere. Yet, as Dr Aybet concludes in her article, the discomfort caused by this intervention (and a situation that is unlikely to be resolved swiftly) is likely to have ramifications well beyond Turkey:

One thing is for sure: Unfortunately, the discomfort this has created will open cracks in the Atlantic Alliance and leave open doubts over the merits of international intervention in the region no matter what the cause or how unquestionable the legality behind such actions. Gone are the days of the 1990s when confidence in upholding international norms through military enforcement emboldened such actions.

As has frequently been noted over the past few days, beware the law of unintended consequences whenever a complex system is tampered with.

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