Cooperation between Turkic states and geopolitics of Eurasia
Afterword by Serhey Bohdan

ANALYTICS  13 November 2022 - 16:50

On November 11, Samarkand hosted a summit of the Organization of Turkic States. Long-term efforts of the members of the Organization, including Azerbaijan, on the creation of infrastructure provided the basis for the planned close cooperation of the Turkic states, to which the tense international situation is also pushing them. It is not surprising that within the framework of the organization founded last year on the basis of the Turkic Council, its participants staked on the transition to closer economic cooperation.

New geo-economic situation

The meeting of the leaders of the Organization of Turkic States (OTG) was attended by the presidents of Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Türkiye and Uzbekistan, as well as representatives of observer countries: the former president of Turkmenistan, the current chairman of the Turkmen parliament and the prime minister of Hungary. They discussed integration issues, including by connecting the region to world markets - both by land and by sea - which will fundamentally change the position of the landlocked countries of Central Asia.

To do this, it is necessary to create a single transport space and transport corridors must be further developed. According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan Vladimir Norov, "the new geo-economic situation emerging in Eurasia opens up very favorable conditions for us to turn our region, connecting the strategic corridors of Eurasia, into a powerful transport and logistics link in the global value chain". Indeed, against the background of the aggravation in Eastern Europe, transport communications between Europe and East Asia are shifting south to the region of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

In Samarkand, documents were also signed on the establishment of the Turkic Investment Fund with an authorized capital of $500 million, which will be contributed in equal shares by the member states, as well as the Development Bank of the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS). The task was set to build regional cooperation through cooperative ties between leading industrial enterprises, investment companies, financial institutions and entrepreneurs of the OTS countries, and for this a trade facilitation strategy was approved.

The decisions of the current summit meeting continue the line outlined earlier. Already at the previous summit (still of the Turkic Council) in November 2021 in Istanbul, the strategic program "Vision of the Turkic World until 2040" was adopted, which outlined the priorities in cooperation between the OTS countries, which include achieving the free movement of goods, capital, services, technologies and labor forces within OTS. Now we can talk about the completion of the transformation of the unification of the Turkic countries into a structure whose priority is economic cooperation.

It was expected that Turkmenistan would join the organization at the Samarkand meeting. For a long time, this country, adhering to strict neutrality, refrained from membership even in the Turkic Council, and only last year, after its transformation into the OTS, Ashgabat agreed to observer status. In the spring, it became known about the plans for Turkmenistan to join the OTS, but this did not happen, although significant efforts were made to strengthen cooperation between the OTS and Turkmenistan: both the organization's Secretary General Baghdad Amreyev and Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay visited Ashgabat.

The rapprochement of the OTS and Turkmenistan is of strategic importance, in particular, as Oktay said during his July visit at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Turkmen-Turkish Commission on Economic Cooperation, "with the cooperation of Türkiye, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, we can pump Turkmen gas to Anatolia, transporting it through TANAP. Such a project within the framework of the OTS would have a truly global significance amidst problems with Russian gas supplies to the West triggered by the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Turkmenistan plays an important role in the "link" of European and Asian Turkic countries in the implementation of projects related to transit between Europe and Asia and access to world markets. It is possible to implement them without Turkmenistan, but it is through this country that the most optimal routes to Central Asia run. In particular, one can note the Baku-Turkmenbashi line, where a new port has already been built, and which is the shortest of all existing routes to the whole of Central Asia (including Afghanistan).

Turkic world: from Kyrgyzstan to Hungary

The integration of the Turkic countries was initially a complex process. After the collapse of the USSR, a lot of efforts were made to develop cooperation between Türkiye and the former Soviet republics, primarily Azerbaijan and the countries of Central Asia. The current OTS has its origins in the "Summits of Turkic Speaking States", the first of which was held on the initiative of former Turkish President Suleyman Demirel in Ankara on October 30-31, 1992.

But a more stable multilateral format was achieved only after serious changes in Türkiye itself and the coming to power of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party. On October 3, 2009, the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (CCTS) was established in Nakhchivan, which included Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Türkiye and Azerbaijan. The CCTS was created at the initiative of the then President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, mainly to promote the development of relations between the Turkic states in the field of culture.

However, the CCTS faced difficulties in its work. In the mid-2010s, due to a conflict between the then leadership of Kyrgyzstan and the leaders of the other countries participating in the Council, it was not possible to hold a meeting of the Council at the highest level for three whole years. The disagreements were of a fundamental nature - for example, in 2017 Bishkek refused to support the political points of the Islamabad Declaration of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which, among other things, concerned Karabakh.

Consequently, a new Council summit could only be convened in 2018. But as a result, a series of documents were signed that put the organization's activities in a new direction, especially in the economic sphere, for example, the draft Concept on the integration of Turkic-speaking states. It was then that President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed to give new impetus to cooperation by revising the tariff policy between the participating countries, as well as simplifying administrative rules, and his Kyrgyz counterpart Sooronbai Jeenbekov called for expanding transport corridors, creating conditions for business and investment cooperation. In other words, it was possible to expand the focus of the organization’s activities, and if before that it was aimed mainly at strengthening cultural and humanitarian cooperation, then in 2018 it took a course towards creating an economic and political association through the discussion of political issues (at the same time, the Karabakh topic) and the establishment of trade, economic, investment, transport and logistics cooperation.

In addition, in 2018, Hungary became an observer in the Council (and then the OTS), for which the Prime Minister of this country, Viktor Orban, first came to the summit. By the way, he also came to the Samarkand summit and even called his country "Christian Turkic land" there. And this is not Orban's personal position, the Hungarians have long emphasized their closeness as a Finno-Ugric people to the Turks.

The Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States received an additional impetus in 2019 with the entry of Uzbekistan, the largest Central Asian country in terms of population, into its structure. The composition and goals of the association have changed so dramatically in quality that its transformation into the Organization of Turkic States last year was a completely expected move.

Multipolarity and polycentricity does not mean discord

The Russian media like to scare the audience with pan-Turkism, pan-Islamism and other similar things, inflated back in tsarist times - when the secret police cooked up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this regard, the OTS has also become a target for such attacks. In this regard, the Turkic people warn, saying, "for Türkiye, the ideology of the Turkocentric subsystem called the 'Turkic world' is very important, where the Turks are the only correct Turks, and everyone else must follow them".

However, if we take OTS, it is difficult to correlate these words with reality. It does not in any way resemble a purely Turkish organization. The Samarkand summit was a striking example. Apparently, it was precisely because of the position of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that no official decision was made to grant observer status to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Anyone who knows the importance Ankara attaches to the TRNC will understand that there is no need to talk about Türkiye's hegemony in this organization amidst such facts.

Further, the transformation of the Council of Turkic-Speaking States into a union became possible thanks to the long-term policy of the Azerbaijani leadership aimed at building ties and communications in the eastern and western directions. If in physical reality Azerbaijan had not become this central link, everything would have remained at the level of cultural and humanitarian initiatives, at best, a kind of Turkic analogue of the Organization of the Francophonie and similar structures.

By the way, the 1990s perfectly showed that without the appropriate infrastructure, it is possible to establish cooperation between Central Asia and Türkiye only on a limited scale, and it was not in vain that back in 1995, the then President of Türkiye, Suleyman Demirel, spoke about the need for a

"Trans-Caspian international transport corridor" between the "Turkic world" and Europe. It is Baku's political efforts and investments since then that have brought Central Asia and Türkiye together, creating the geo-economic, geopolitical and political economy foundations for the union. The billions of dollars invested by Baku, for example, in the port and SEZ in Alat or the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, allow today not only to increase interaction with the Central Asian states of the OTS and Türkiye, but also to ensure its interface with other inclusive international projects of global importance, such as TRACECA or Chinese "One Belt, One Road". They say that everything has its time, and now, thanks to many years of steps taken by Baku in various fields, a basis has been provided for the OTS, which, which is important, contributes to the development of the OTS in cooperation with serious international initiatives, and not in antagonism with them.

The role of Azerbaijan in no way detracts from the importance of other members of the association - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In particular, even experts who are skeptical of the OTS note the merits and interest of Kazakhstan in the development of the association, pointing out that "Kazakhstan, like Türkiye, stood at the origins of the creation of the organization, Nursultan Nazarbayev personally nurtured the idea." That is why Erdogan once called Nazarbayev "the aksakal [senior/wise] of the Turkic world".

Along with this multi-centricity of the "Turkic world", another positive moment in the OTS should be noted - that it has so far managed to avoid a number of problems that are clearly visible in well-known Western international associations like the EU and which can be described as hidden racism. The European Union, as you know, loudly emphasizing its secularism and pluralism, nevertheless did not accept Türkiye, while accepting a number of much less structurally prepared countries. However, the EU's policy towards the Eastern European nations also raises similar questions.

In contrast, Hungary is actively participating in the OTS, even if it has observer status (with its own interpretation of the Turkic kinship), and there are no questions about the Orthodox Gagauz. The same program "Turkic Global Vision 2040" is religiously neutral. And the Council of Elders of the Union of Turkic States once stated that Russia and China are "natural members" of the Turkic world. And this was a consistent continuation of the line outlined by Nazarbayev immediately after the organization of the Union, when he noted that it would be nice to unite the Union of Turkic States, the EurAsEC, the SCO and some other structures.

Modern politics is always a controversial process and there are always many controversial points in it. The Organization of Turkic States also faces difficult issues, and the Samarkand summit once again testified to this, because some of the expected decisions, as we noted above, were not adopted, although this did not affect the overall positive outcome of the summit. These outcomes were ensured by the fact that the organization has acquired - thanks to the efforts of its member countries - an infrastructure for interaction that allows it to provide a political economy basis for this association and gather its members around common interests and projects. And this, perhaps, is a more reliable guarantee of peace and a better future than some ideological constructions, even based on an undeniable cultural and historical commonality.

This, by the way, was proved before our eyes by the East Slavic peoples - as economic ties and communications between countries were torn, various interested forces managed to increase the militant rhetoric of enmity from all sides, and today the very word "fraternal people" is declared "Putin's ideology". Against the backdrop of fratricidal wars and increasing self-isolation in other regions, the OTS member countries have something to be proud of, because, in the face of a growing number of global and regional conflicts, they go in the opposite direction, preserving their human appearance and creating a bloc of stability and development in the world.

Caliber.Az