Making a Case over Greco-Turkish Rivalry: Major Power Linkages and Rivalry Strength/Turk-Yunan Rekabeti Uzerine Vaka Analizi: Buyuk Gucler Baglantisi ve Rekabet Direnci.

• Author: Sert, Deniz S.
• Position: Report

Introduction

Greek-Turkish relations have been a popular topic of interest, attracting academic attention from a variety of disciplines within humanities and social sciences. Every decade, the affairs between the two countries generate fresh areas for discussion besides the already existing ones. Among the themes are Turkey's ongoing accession process into the European Union, NATO, the Cyprus issue, the Aegean Islands dispute, and as of 2015, the refugee crisis. Recently, repeated disputes in the Aegean Sea, caused alarm among commentators about a possible Greek-Turkish war. (1) In general, Greek-Turkish relations have been a prevalent focus of concentration and there are numerous studies concerning the Greco-Turkish rivalry. (2)

Rivalry is employed here as a condition of enmity between two states characterized by the frequent use of either military force or images of enmity. As argued elsewhere, social scientific studies indicate that Greece and Turkey can be regarded in this condition of enmity, which has had a pervasive impact on the way public opinion in both countries perceive everything and anything, including for example, the current refugee crisis in the region. (3)

While some scholars focus on opportunities to break the cycle of rivalry and others focus on the directionality of activity, (4) there is also a tendency to bypass the antagonistic bilateral relationship between Greece and Turkey by concentrating on their multilateral interactions at the regional level or the rapprochement process. (5) When it comes to factors driving a rivalry, a robust debate on the interrelationship between Greek and Turkish military expenditures in the post-World War II era has not been able to settle on whether there is an arms race between the two states. Some scholars have found indicators supporting the arguments on the presence of an arms race. (6) Others argue that statistical data does not support such a view. (7) However, the scholarship on rivalries has shown that even in the absence of arms races, there may be other strategic, political, and economic factors that sustain the rivalry. (8)

One such explanation considers the non-resolution of the Greek-Turkish conflict not as a matter of the incompatibility of tangible interests, but rather as a result of their chosen national identities cum historical narratives, which are built on slighting and demonizing the "other". (9) Comparing Greek-Turkish interstate crises to different cases, others claim that nuclear weapons and regional organizations have been important elements of possible escalation or mitigation of the conflict. (10) There are also studies that run a simulation between Greece and Turkey within a system dynamic model in order to understand why countries go to war, why internal violence occurs, and how internal and external conflicts might be interconnected or give rise to common dynamics or dilemmas. (11)

Within this extensive and rather complementary ground of argumentation, the goal of our paper is to explore how the intensity of the Greco-Turkish rivalry (in the 19th and 20th centuries) was affected by variation in the intensity of rivalries between major powers that have political and military connections to Greece and Turkey. In both centuries, the Greek-Turkish rivalries are exemplar cases of rivalries that are neither fully enmeshed into direct rivalry linkages through alliances nor nested in hierarchical superior rivalries. Yet, they are also not completely isolated from such links. By comparing the effect of relevant major power rivalries with a battery of alternative domestic, dyadic, military, and political variables, the article serves as a deductive evaluation to see how important, if at all, variation in the volatility of intensity of the relevant major power rivalries is on the Greek-Turkish rivalry intensity volatility. While doing so, the article also contributes to the theoretical discussion on rivalry linkages as outlined below.

Theoretical Discussion and Contribution

Rivalries were born out of, or end from, a political shock, which could take place at a domestic (from events in the internal politics of rivals), dyadic (in the relationships between rivals), or international (structural) level. (12) On the domestic level, such events include abrupt government changes due to revolutions or coups, rapid democratization, or the onset of civil war in one of the two rivals. These constitute the most likely events to shock a rivalry into termination. Economic events that lead to massive economic changes, either with a collapse of, or with an abrupt increase in, state finances can also cause such a shock.

Shocks on the dyadic level include military disputes and wars, subsumed in the rivalry definition, as well as conditions such as the advent of joint democracy, the contemporaneity of domestic political upheaval, power transition, shared IGO memberships, or shared alliance membership that can act in inhibiting or fostering ways for variation in rivalry volatility. The international, i.e. structural, level focuses on world wars, during which the dynamics of linked major power rivalries could also affect the dynamics of the minor power rivalries they were linked to. With a larger focus on rivalry onset and termination as opposed to conflict dynamics during a rivalry, among the three levels, international events have less of an impact on rivalry conflict dynamics compared to other factors that rise at the domestic or dyadic level.

In any case, each rivalry onset is met with a shock that leads to initial conflict and locks in a Basic Rivalry Level (BRL hereafter) of intensity, which then remains stable. BRL is based on the use of the Correlates of War (COW hereafter) Severity scores of the individual disputes that constitute the rivalry. (13) The BRL of a rivalry is determined by the severity of the dispute that led to the initiation of the rivalry. Any variation in intensity follows a punctuated equilibrium model in which new disputes could lead to increases or decreases of intensity compared to the BRL. However, if those disputes do not shock the rivalry into termination, the increase or decrease of severity compared to the BRL will only be temporary. (14) There has been very little research on how variation of intensity around the BRL, the volatility of a rivalry's intensity, is affected by the volatility of other rivalries.

BRL could be affected by linkages with other rivalries, in which events or changing dynamics in the intensity of one rivalry could affect the intensity of another; a process different from war diffusion. There are two types of linkages: direct and indirect. The former refers to those rivalries linked due to the existence of common disputes in which members of different rivalries engage. To illustrate, during World War I, the British-German rivalry was linked with the Ottoman-Russian rivalry since all were participants in the (greater) conflict. A direct linkage can also be the result of an alliance or of patron-client relations across the rivalries when members of one rivalry are connected to members of the other. (15)

The latter, indirect linkage, is a result of two different conditions, namely contiguity and the presence of a common enemy. Contiguity refers to situations in which two rivalries are linked because members of the two different rivalries are territorially contiguous to each other. In the case of common enemy linkage, the two rivalries are linked because members of each rivalry share a common enemy outside the two rivalries. The Greek-Turkish and Greek-Bulgarian rivalry can be linked because of Greece's participation in both. This is different from linkage by dispute in which the rivalries share no common members, but all of their members are participants in a conflict. (16)

This may be the case for nested rivalries, where rivalries happen because a rivalry between two hierarchically superior actors produces a shock leading to rivalry between two hierarchically inferior actors, with the classical example of Cold War rivalries that were the result of the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR hereafter) and the United States (USA hereafter) rivalry. There is a hierarchy of rivalry linkages based on international prestige and power, where major power rivalries have more of an impact in linkage than asymmetrical rivalries. The analysis of the impact of rivalry linkages shows that contiguity and participation in the same dispute were more likely to lead to increases in BRL intensity for one rivalry when such an increase similarly took place in the other. (17)

Rivalries can also be seen as a system of war diffusion resulting in band-wagon dynamics as rival dyad members enter the war following rivalries with which they share linkages. (18) Diffusion can be contagious and hierarchical across both a spatial and social network of relationships and linkages. A recent review of the rivalry literature adapted and applied the "steps to war" conceptual framework to the onset of rivalries. (19) Based on this analysis, the Greek-Turkish rivalries lacked alliances as a crucial step to rivalry--although the Ottoman Empire had alliances in 1866, Greece did not.

Literature on rivalry has rarely revisited the question of linkage dynamics. (20) There is focus on complex rivalries, which are non-dyadic rivalries where strong links along issue, concerns, and alignments lead to strong joiner dynamics. The crucial difference between linked rivalries and complex rivalries are the stronger likelihoods of the third rival joining any conflict of the two other rivals in the latter. Rivalry linkages are not always as strong, but in time, linked rivalries can turn into complex rivalries. Complex rivalries are a sub-category of more intense rivalry linkages. (21)

We propose two types of linkage dynamics: "oppositional" and "regulatory". In the former case (see Figure I), each of the rivals in one rivalry is linked with...