More than 50 years ago, the Turkish writer Cevat Sakir described the entire Mediterranean as “the Sixth Continent” – a single entity stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar in the west to the Levant in the east; from Trieste in the north to the long African coastline on its southern shore, embracing 20 countries and cultures.
Cevat Șakir was cosmopolitan: born in 1890 in Crete (then under Turkish rule), where his father was governor, growing up in Athens and Istanbul and studying history at the University of Oxford.
Living in Istanbul, he was exiled to Bodrum (which became his adopted homeplace) in 1925 for allegedly inciting rebellion in a short story he had written. Ironically, if Sakir were writing today he would most likely have been interned as a subversive by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has suppressed dissent, including judicial removal and imprisonment of the leader of the main opposition party.
Sakir saw the Aegean Sea, with its myriad Greek islands, as one part of a vast living expanse of history and culture. He insisted that we should experience the symbiosis of land and sea – that one lived in the shadow of the other.
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This symbiosis is evident today in the Greek islands such as Lesbos, Chios, Samos or Rhodes, which lie close to the Turkish mainland. Historically, there was a unity between such islands and towns on the Turkish mainland such as Smyrna (today, Izmir) and Ayvalik. Today, the islanders continue to regard the mainland as part of their own life, fuelled by family memories and cultural ties.
Sakir emphasised this in his writings about the culture of Asia Minor, which he saw as continuous and contiguous with Greek communities. The Mediterranean, in his books, embraces rather than divides.
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Sakir is also credited with the modest “Blue Cruise” boat tours of the Turkish Riviera. More recently, Erdogan has declared a “Blue Homeland” over much of the Aegean, completely at variance with Sakir’s concept of a blue community, because it is nationalist rather than cultural in its ambition.
For several years Erdogan has pursued the idea of a neo-Ottoman hegemony, with Islamic links to places once dominated by the Ottomans, such as Kosovo. In power since 2003 as prime minister and 2014 as president, Erdogan is seeking another term, despite the dire economic plight of the country. Like US president Donald Trump, he has shown scant regard for the principles of international law or for national boundaries in his disrespect for neighbouring states.
Turkey is not a party to the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), ratified by 169 countries; Turkey argues, conversely, that an island does not have a maritime economic zone or a continental shelf. Since so many of the Greek islands are close to the Turkish coast – Kastelorizo, for example, is literally a stone’s throw from the mainland – Erdogan is not only claiming that they should be restored to Turkey, but is making provocative legal claims.
In May he drafted legislation (due to be presented to parliament this month) that would give effect to his claims, by unilaterally giving Turkey an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 200 nautical miles. This would thereby (in theory at least) give Turkey control not only over fishing and drilling for oil and gas but over the Aegean Islands themselves, conflicting with Greece’s own EEZ. According to Unclos, a state, or part thereof, can control territorial waters of 12 nautical miles.
[ Will ‘no’ be enough to curb Turkey’s latest claims over Greek territory?Opens in new window ]
Athens has warned of the dangers of exacerbating a “casus belli”, should Erdogan attempt to implement this new law, which is seen as maximalist and concretising the Blue Homeland concept. At an EU meeting of foreign ministers in May, Greece’s George Gerapetritis referred to the “extremely fragile geopolitical environment”.
The situation is exacerbated by the Turkish claim that Greece is not entitled to place army personnel on its islands, ownership of which, Turkey claims, is disputed. The escalation of this potential confrontation was made clear last month when the Turkish defence minister, Yasar Guler, argued, in Trumpish language, that the Turkish army had “the power and determination to neutralise every threat to Turkish security”.
Meanwhile, former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, whose left-wing Syriza government was embroiled in the financial crisis of 2015-2019, has launched a new party, Greek Left Alliance or Elas (a clever pun on the Greek name of the country, Ellas). Tsipras has not only urged a “moral revolution” focusing on low wages, poor housing conditions, and inflation, but has accused the present right-of-centre New Democracy government of corruption, political wire-tapping, judicial interference, and contempt for the rule of law – all of which have also been laid by Turkish opposition parties at the door of Erdogan.
Whether Tsipras’s political comeback succeeds is one question; whether Erdogan succeeds in carrying through his territorial ambitions is a much larger one.
