Both ethnic communities in Cyprus have maintained strong political and cultural ties with Greece and Turkey, respectively, and at some point of their twentieth century history, each has aspired to ...become part of either the former or the latter. Yet the way this relationship has been imagined has differed across time, space, and class. Both communities have adapted their identities to prevailing ideological waves as well as political opportunities, domestic alliances, and interests. The article evaluates different responses to ethnic nationalism, highlighting important intra-ethnic differentiations within each Cypriot community usually expressed in the positions of political parties, intellectuals, and the press. While the current literature identifies two major poles of identity in the island, "motherland nationalism" and "Cypriotism," the article suggests that the major focus of identity of Cypriots is identification with their respective ethnic communities in the form of Greek Cypriotism or Turkish Cypriotism. In fact, contentious politics in Cyprus from the ENOSIS/TAKSIM struggle to the April 2004 referendums demonstrate the interplay of external constraints and collective self-identification processes leading to the formation of these identities. The article concludes by identifying the implications of identity shifts for deeply divided societies and conflict resolution in general.
Why do some societies choose to adopt federal settlements in the face of acute ethnic conflict, while others do not? Neophytos Loizides examines how acrimoniously divided Cyprus could re-unify by ...adopting a federal and consociational arrangement inspiring similar attempts in its region.
Loizides asserts that institutional innovation is key in designing peace processes. Analyzing power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the return of displaced persons in Bosnia, and the preparatory mandate referendum in South Africa, he shows how divided societies have implemented novel solutions despite conditions that initially seemed prohibitive. Turning to Cyprus, he chronicles the breakthrough that led to the exhumations of the missing after 2003, and observes that a society's choice of narratives and institutions can overcome structural constraints. While Loizides points to the relative absence of successful federal and consociational arrangements among societies evolving from the "post-Ottoman space," he argues that neither elites nor broader societies in the region must be held hostages to the past.
To effect lasting and positive change, Loizides encourages stakeholders in divided societies to be prepared to identify, redesign, and implement innovative new institutions. Examining successful peace mediations and identifying the shared experience and commonalities between Cyprus and other divided societies promises not only to inform the tackling of the Cyprus problem but also to provide transferable knowledge with broader implications for the fields of peace studies and conflict resolution.
This article examines the effects of elite framing on conflict transformation. It utilises debates from the Turkish Grand National Assembly as the main source of empirical evidence and demonstrates ...the differences in the way Turkish parliamentarians framed national and foreign policy issues in the 1990s. For the most part, elite framing of Kurdish issues was predominantly monolithic and adversarial towards ‘ethnic others’, demonstrating few challenges to dominant nationalist narratives and discourses, while framing of Greek–Turkish disputes was diverse, with moderates cautiously challenging hardliners on the necessity of cooperating with Greece. The article unravels these elite framing strategies and illustrates how framing becomes embedded in public identities, opportunity structures and definitions of national interest, influencing crisis escalation and conflict management in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
This article evaluates theories of nationalism by examining the formation of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. It deals particularly with the various manifestations of the contemporary Kurdish minority ...question and provides an account of the late development of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. It situates the Kurdish experience within the broader experience of the post-Ottoman world and analyzes the awakening of Kurdish national identity among broader segments of the population. It provides an alternative to Ernest Gellner's functionalist account of nationalism and industrialization by stressing the link between state policies and minority nationalism. It considers the political, social and other implications of state repression as well as the opportunities created in the diaspora or through external intervention. It argues that state policies in Turkey did not prevent and even contributed to the rise of Kurdish minority nationalism. Finally, the article raises two interrelated questions: what types of nationalism have Kurds developed under conditions of limited expression and what options for conflict resolution are present particularly in light of Turkey's democratization and EU accession process.
Negotiating the Right of Return LOIZIDES, NEOPHYTOS G.; ANTONIADES, MARCOS A.
Journal of peace research,
09/2009, Letnik:
46, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Negotiating the right of return is a central issue in post-conflict societies aiming to resolve tensions between human rights issues and security concerns. Peace proposals often fail to carefully ...balance these tensions or to identify incentives and linkages that enable refugee return. To address this gap, the article puts forward an alternative arrangement in negotiating refugee rights currently being considered in the bilateral negotiations in Cyprus. Previous peace plans for the reunification of the island emphasized primarily Turkish Cypriot security and stipulated a maximum number of Greek Cypriot refugees eligible to return under future Turkish Cypriot administration. The authors' alternative suggests a minimum threshold of Greek Cypriots refugees plus self-adjustable incentives for the Turkish Cypriot community to accept the rest. The article reviews different options including linking actual numbers of returnees with naturalizations for Turkish settlers or immigrants, Turkey's EU-accession, and territorial re-adjustments across the federal border. In this proposed formula, the Greek Cypriot side would reserve concessions until refugee return takes place, while the Turkish Cypriot community would be 'demographically secure' under all scenarios by means of re-adjustable naturalization and immigration quotas. Drawing parallels with comparable cases, the article emphasizes the importance of making reciprocity and linkages explicit in post-conflict societies.
The article examines why a comprehensive settlement to resolve the Cyprus problem has yet to be reached despite the existence of a positive incentive structure and the proactive involvement of ...regional and international organizations, including the European Union and the United Nations. To address this question, evidence from critical turning points in foreign policy decision-making in Turkey, Greece and the two communities in Cyprus is drawn on. The role of hegemonic political discourses is emphasized, and it is argued that the latter have prevented an accurate evaluation of incentives that could have set the stage for a constructive settlement. However, despite the political debacle in the Cypriot negotiations, success stories have emerged, such as the reactivation of the Committee for Missing Persons (CMP), a defunct body for almost 25 years, to become the most successful bi-communal project following Cyprus's EU accession. Contradictory evidence in the Cypriot peace process is evaluated and policy lessons to be learned from the CMP 'success story' are identified.
This article compares the processes of foreign policymaking in Greece and Turkey in order to examine why the incentives and pressures of the enlargement process have failed until now to initiate a ...settlement in the Cyprus bicommunal negotiations. While most studies on the Cyprus problem have focused on the two communities of the island, little attention has been paid to the policies of the two 'motherlands', namely Greece and Turkey. Yet their leverage on the two Cypriot communities and their conflicting expectations with regard to an enlarged Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean constitute a complex security puzzle. The Republic of Cyprus stands as a champion candidate member for the next enlargement, amid fears of Turkish reprisals and hopes for a political settlement on the island. With the benefits of settlement overwhelming the benefits of any other alternative, it is paradoxical that the parties seem to be about to fail to reach a last-minute, mutually beneficial compromise. I try to resolve this paradox by supplementing rational choice theory with cognitivist theories of international relations. While rational choice predicts a direct relationship between external environment and foreign policy shifts, the case of Cyprus suggests that this relationship is actually indirect. Without understanding how the external environment is framed in the domestic political discourse of Greece and Turkey, it is impossible to demonstrate how outside pressure and incentives affect foreign policy shifts.
What explains patterns of restraint vs. patterns of confrontation in the crisis behavior of majority groups? My thesis examines two dominant national majorities and their miscellaneous patterns of ...crisis behavior, manifested either in confrontational policies or in policies of restraint. I focus on the external security conditions and constraints that shape confrontational behavior, the domestic political dynamics that drive crisis behavior, and the framing of grievances and opportunities preceding ethnopolitical crises. In the course of the study, I use two types of methods, supplementing the semi-quantitative Boolean method with qualitative analysis. More specifically, I test alternative hypotheses on Greece and Turkey, two neighboring countries that feature a rich, highly explosive, but also diverse pool of ethnopolitical contention. I find that in the Boolean tests, the security dilemma explains fewer cases with more accuracy (i.e. 14 out of 15 cases, thus being an "almost" sufficient cause); the diversionary theory speaks for the majority of cases, albeit with less precision (20 out of 30). In sum, the findings suggest that the diversionary theory needs to be complemented by other variables, if we wish to explain a number of puzzling clusters of cases in Greece and Turkey. In the qualitative part of my thesis, I probe more deeply into these cases. Nationwide protests and confrontational policies over the Macedonian issue in Greece in the turbulent first half of the 1990s were not replicated over arguably equally important issues involving either Turkey or Albania. Likewise, political instability in Turkey and discontent over the Kurdish issue translated into mass mobilizations and confrontational policies towards Syria and Italy in the fall of 1998; however, the same factors did not prevent a significant Greek-Turkish compromise at the 1999 European Council summit in Helsinki. I argue that pre-crisis framing (i.e. framing before the advent of each crisis) can explain these apparently dichotomous cases, and working through parliamentary debates, I demonstrate the causal links between a predominantly adversarial framing of opportunities and grievances, on the one hand, and confrontational action, on the other. Finally, I argue that pre-crisis frames are causal: they become entrenched in the social norms, definitions of national interest, domestic politics, and even international negotiations of the majority-group, preventing adaptation as well as reassessment of policy errors.
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