Turkey has formally become a “dialogue partner” of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a step with unclear practical consequences but substantial symbolic import. Turkey is the first NATO member with any sort of formal relationship with the SCO, which is often represented as an Eastern “anti-NATO.” All the cliches about Turkey being “caught between East and West” — here they are, codified in agreements with political-military blocs.
Turkey Makes It Official With SCO
by Joshua Kucera
EURASIANET.org
The Open Society Institute
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66896
Turkey has formally become a “dialogue partner” of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a step with unclear practical consequences but substantial symbolic import. Turkey is the first NATO member with any sort of formal relationship with the SCO, which is often represented as an Eastern “anti-NATO.” All the cliches about Turkey being “caught between East and West” — here they are, codified in agreements with political-military blocs.
During the signing ceremony in Almaty on Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu used some lofty rhetoric about his country’s new partners, saying that Turkey “shares the same fate” as SCO member states: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. From Hurriyet Daily News:
Davutoglu didn’t address the relationship between Turkey’s NATO membership and SCO partnership, but Itar-Tass asked SCO Secretary General Dmitry Mezentsev to comment on it and he basically said, we don’t know:
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made waves a couple of months ago by saying that the SCO is “better” and “more powerful” than the European Union, and that Turkey aspired to full membership in the SCO. The consensus was that Erdogan said that mainly to tweak the EU, which Turkey has been trying to join for decades. But it’s a bit of an empty threat, given that the SCO is still an organization very much in search of a mission. Russia seems to have lost interest in the group as a security bloc, instead focusing on its Collective Security Treaty Organization, and China has been using the group primarily as a means of implementing bilateral development projects in Central Asia with a multilateral shell. Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen, two analysts of China’s presence in Central Asia, wrote in The Diplomat:
Even Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs doesn’t seem to quite know what to make of its policy toward the SCO, as Al-Monitor points out in a piece detailing the confusing official statements vis-a-vis the organization.
My guess, and this is purely speculation, is that these overtures to the SCO are not directed toward the EU, whose officials surely are aware (as are Turkey’s, no doubt) that the SCO is a somewhat empty shell. But this could be more about courting the non-Western world, where there is increasing unhappiness with the U.S./Europe-dominated world order and which sees in the SCO at least an attempt at countering that.