Download Geopol: cyprus, turkey GREEK MONOGRAPH Greek geography has

Geopol: cyprus, turkey
GREEK MONOGRAPH
Greek geography has through its history been both a blessing and a curse. Blessing
because it has allowed Greece to dominate the “known Western world” for a good
portion of Europe’s ancient history due to the combination of sea access and rugged
geography. In the ancient era these offered perfect conditions for a maritime city state
culture oriented towards commerce that was difficult to dislodge by more powerful land
based opponents. This geography incubated West's first advanced civilization (Athens)
and produced its first empire (Macedon Greece).
However, Greek geography is also a curse because it is isolated on the very tip of the
rugged and practically impassable Balkan Peninsula, forcing it to rely on the
Mediterranean for trade and communication. None of the Greek cities had much of a
hinterland – these small coastal enclaves were easily defendable, but were neither easily
unified nor could they become large or rich due to dearth of local resources.
This was a key disadvantage because Greece has had to vie with more powerful
civilizations throughout its history, particularly those based on the Sea of Marmara in the
east and the Po, Tiber and Arno Valleys of the Apennine Peninsula to the west.
Physical Geography: The Peninsula at the Edge of Europe
Greece is located in southeastern Europe on the southern-most portion of the Balkan
Peninsula, an extremely mountainous peninsula extending from the fertile Pannonian
plain. The Greek mainland culminates in the Peloponnesian peninsula -- now an island
separated by the man made Corinth Canal -- which is similarly rugged. Greek mountains
are characterized by steep cliffs, deep gorges and jagged peaks. The average terrain
altitude of Greece is double that of Germany and comparable to the Alpine country of
Slovenia. The Greek coastline is also very mountainous with many cliffs rising right out
of the sea.
Greece is easily recognizable on a map by its multitude of islands, around 1500 in total.
Greece is therefore not just the peninsular mainland, but also the Aegean Sea which is
bounded by the Dodecanese islands in the east off the coast of Anatolia -- of which
Rhodes is the largest -- Crete in the south, Ionian islands in the west -- of which Corfu is
the largest -- and thousands of islands in the middle of the Aegean. The combination of
islands and rugged peninsular coastline give Greece the 10th longest coastline in the
world, longer than those of Italy, U.K. and Mexico.
Mountainous barriers in the north and the northeast mean that the Greek peninsula is
largely insulated from mainland Europe. Throughout its history, Greece has parlayed its
natural borders and jagged terrain into a defensive advantage. Invasions that managed to
make a landing on one of the few Greek plains were immediately met by high rising cliffs
hugging the coastline and well entrenched Greek defenders blocking the path forward -with the famous battle of Thermopylae being the best example, with (as the legend will
have it) a force of 300 Spartans and another 1,000 or so Greeks challenging a Persian
force numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The Ottomans fared better than the
Persians in that they actually managed to conquer Greece, but they ruled little of its vast
mountainous interior with roving bands of brigands -- called khlepts -- blocking key
mountain passes and ravines. To this day this rugged geography gives Greece a
regionalized character that makes effective centralized control practically impossible.
Everything from delivering mail to collecting taxes -- latter being a key factor of the
ongoing debt crisis -- becomes a challenge.
With rugged terrain comes good defense, but also two curses.
First, Greece is largely devoid of any land based connections to mainland Europe. The
only two links between Greece and Europe are the Vardar and Struma rivers, both which
drain into the Aegean in Greek Macedonia. The Vardar is key because it connects to the
Morava in Central Serbia and thus forms a Vardar-Morava-Danube transportation
corridor -- no part of which is actually navigable -- but does provide a valley via which
one can snake their way up the Balkans. The Struma takes one from Greek Macedonia to
Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, and from there via Iskar river through the Balkan Mountains to
the Danubian plain of present day Romania. Neither of these valleys is an ideal
transportation route however as each forces the Greeks to depend on their Balkan
neighbors to the north for links to Europe, historically an unenviable proposition.
Second problem for Greece is that the high mountains and jagged coast leaves very little
room for fertile valleys and plains. Greece has many rivers and streams that are formed in
its mountains, but because of the extreme slope of most hills they mostly create narrow
valleys, gorges or ravines in the interior of the peninsula. This terrain is conducive to
sheep and goat herding -- which explains the Greek cuisine -- but not wide scale
agriculture.
This does not mean that there is no room for crops to grow, rivers meeting the Aegean
and Ionian Sea carve short valleys that open to the coast where the sea breeze creates
excellent conditions for agriculture. The problem is that other than in Thessaly and Greek
Macedonia most of these valleys are limited in area. This to an extent explains why
Greece has throughout history retained a regionalized character, with each river mouth or
estuary providing sufficient food production for literally one city state, while the jagged
peaks in the foreground prevent competent overland communication between these
population centers. The only place where this is not the case is in Greek Macedonia -location of present day Thessaloniki -- where relatively large agricultural area provided
for West's first true Empire led by Alexander the Great.
Lack of large agricultural land combined with poor overland transportation means that
capital formation is paltry from the get go. Each river valley can supply its one regional
center with food and sufficient capital for one trading port, but this entrenches Greece in
a regionalized mentality. From the perspective of each region, there is no reason why it
should supply the little capital it generates to the central government when it requires it to
develop a naval capacity of its own. This creates a situation where the whole suffers from
lack of coordination and capital generation while a lot of resources are spent on
essentially dozens of independent maritime regions, situation best illustrated by Ancient
Greek city states, all of which had independent naval capacity. Considering that
developing a competent navy is one of the costliest undertakings a state can undertake
one can imagine how a regionalized approach to naval development can be a huge
resource suck that saps the already capital poor Greece.
Lack of capital generation is therefore the most serious implication of Greek geography.
Situated as far from global flows of capital as any European country that considers itself
part of the "West", Greece finds itself surrounded with plenty of sheltered ports but most
are characterized by mountains and cliffs that literally meet the sea with very little room
for population growth. Combine that with the regionalized approach to political authority
encouraged by mountainous geography and you have a country that has been
misallocating what little capital it has for millennia.
Countries that have low capital growth and considerable infrastructural costs usually tend
to develop a very uneven distribution of wealth. The reason is simple, those who have
access to capital get to build and control vital infrastructure and from there call shots both
in public and working life. In countries that have to import capital from outside this
becomes even more pronounced, as those who control industries and businesses that
bring foreign cash have even more control (since at least infrastructure can be
nationalized). When such uneven distribution of wealth is entrenched in a society a
serious labor-capital (or in the European context a left-right) split emerges. This is why
Greece is politically similar to the countries of Latin America which face the similar
infrastructural and capital problems, down to a period of military rule and an ongoing
vicious capital-labor split.
Greek Core: The Aegean
Despite the limitations on its capital generation Greece has no alternative to creating an
expensive defensive capability that allows it to control the Aegean. Put simply, the core
of Greece is neither the breadbaskets of Thessaly or Greek Macedonia, nor the AthensPiraeus metropolitan area where around half of the population lives. It is rather the
Aegean Sea itself – the actual water, not the coastland -- which allows these three critical
areas of Greece to be connected for trade, defense and communication. Control of the
Aegean also gives Greece the additional benefit of influencing trade between the Black
Sea and the Mediterranean.
To accomplish control of the Aegean and the Cretan Seas, Greece fundamentally has to
control two key islands in its archipelago, namely Rhodes and Crete, as well as the
Dodecanese archipelago. With those islands under its control, the Aegean and Cretan
Seas truly become Greek lakes. The island of importance to Athens is Corfu -- which
gives Greece an anchor in the Straits of Otranto and thus an insight into threats emerging
from the Adriatic.
Anything beyond these islands is luxury and deals with power projection, not securing
the Aegean core. Cyprus is key control point for the Levant and the Anatolian land
bridge. Cyprus’s importance to Greece depends on whether or not Athens controls
Anatolia and has therefore waned with the loss of the area today controlled by modern
Turkey. Nonetheless, a Greek Cyprus keeps Turkey (at best) hemmed in Anatolia and (at
the least) impedes Turkish links with Egypt and rest of the Middle East. It is today way to
annoy and distract Turkey, but is not critical to the control of Aegean.
Sicily is similarly about power projection and Greece has at the height of its power in
ancient history made a break for it several times. Controlling Sicily gives Greece the key
gateway into the Western Mediterranean and brackets off the entire Eastern half for itself.
The cost of controlling the Aegean and the multitude of islands cannot be overstated.
Aside from the already stated monumental costs of maintaining a navy Greece has the
additional problem of having to compete with neighboring Turkey, which is still today
considered an existential threat for Greece.
In the modern context, this has also meant purchasing and maintaining one of the most
advanced air forces in the world, since without air superiority even the best navy is
vulnerable to attack. Greek air force boasts over 200 advanced fourth generation fighters,
with F-16 C/D including the advanced block 52+ variants and Dessault Mirage 2000.
This gives Athens an air force comparable to that of the U.K. and qualitatively and
quantitatively superior to the German and Italian air forces (which is incredible when one
considers that Greek population is seven times and economy is ten times smaller than
German). Greek pilots are also considered to be some of the best and most experienced in
the world, with daily exposure to real life – albeit mostly non lethal – dog fights over the
Aegean against the Turkish air force and have even outperformed the U.S. pilots in war
game simulations.
But maintaining, owning and training such a superior military has meant that Greece has
spent proportionally double on defense than any European state, at over 6 percent of
GDP prior to the onset of the current financial crisis – it has since pledged to reduce it
significantly to under 3 percent. With no indigenous capital generation of its own, Greece
has been forced to import capital from abroad to maintain such an advanced military.
This is on top of a generous social welfare state and considerable infrastructural needs
created by its rugged geography.
The end result is the ongoing debt crisis that is threatening to not just collapse Greece,
but also to take the rest of the eurozone with it. Greek budget deficit reached 13.6 percent
of GDP in 2009 and government debt level is approaching 150 percent of GDP.
But Greece was not always a fiscal mess. It has in fact been everything from a global
superpower to a moderately wealthy European state to a backwater in its history. To
understand how an isolated, capital poor country could accomplish either we need to look
beyond just Greek geography and contemplate the political geography of the region in
which Greece has found itself through history.
From Ancient Superpower...
Ancient Greeks gave the Western world its first culture and philosophy. It also gave birth
to the study of geopolitics with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which is
considered to be a seminal work of international relations. It would do injustice to
attempt to give the Ancient Greek period a quick overview, it deserves a geopolitical
monograph of its own. The political geography of the period was vastly different from
that of present era. Greek city states operated in a geography where the Mediterranean
was the center of the world and in which a handful of city states clutching the coast of the
Aegean Sea could launch “colonial” expeditions across the Mediterranean. They were
also afforded by their rugged geography a terrain that favored defense and allowed them
to defeat more powerful opponents.
Nonetheless, the ancient Greek period is the last time that Greece had some semblance of
political independence. It therefore offers gleams into how Greek geography has crafted
Greek strategy.
From this period, therefore, we note that control of the Aegean was of paramount
importance as it still is today. The Greeks -- faced with nearly impassible terrain on the
Peloponnesian peninsula -- were from the beginning forced to become excellent mariners.
Securing the Aegean was also crucial in repelling two major Persian invasions in
antiquity; each major land battle had its contemporary naval battle to sever Persian
supply lines. Once the existential Persian threat was eliminated Athens -- the most
powerful of the city states -- launched an attempt to extend itself into an Empire. This
included establishing control of key Aegean islands. That Imperial extension essentially
ended with a long drawn out campaign to occupy and hold Sicily – which would form
the basis of control of the entire Eastern Mediterranean -- as well as the attempt to
wrestle Cyprus from Persian control.
While Athenians may have understood geopolitics of the Mediterranean well, they did
not have the technology-- namely the advanced bureaucratic and communication
technology – nor population with which to execute their plans. Athenian expeditions to
Cyprus and Egypt were repulsed while Sicily became Athens’ Vietnam, so to speak,
causing dissent in the coalition of city states that eventually brought about the end of
Athenian power. This example only serves to illustrate how difficult it was to maintaining
control of mainland Greece. Athens opted for a loose confederation of city-states, which
ultimately was insufficient level of control upon which to establish an Empire.
Such bitter rivalries of the various Peloponnesian city states created a power vacuum in
the 4th Century B.C. that was quickly filled by the Kingdom of Macedonia. Despite its
reputation as the most “backward” -- in terms of culture, system of government,
philosophy and arts -- of the Greek regions, Macedonia had one thing going for it that the
city states did not: relatively ample -- compared to the Peloponnesian peninsula -agricultural land of the Vardar and Struma river valleys. Whereas Athens and other city
states depended on the sea born trade to access grain from regions beyond the Bosporus
straits and the Black Sea, Macedonia had domestic agriculture. It also had the absolute
authoritarian system of government that allowed it to launch the first truly dominant
Greek foray into global dominance under Alexander the Great.
This effort, however, could not be sustained because ultimately the estuary of Vardar did
not provide the necessary agricultural base to counter the rise of Rome, which was able to
draw not only on the Tiber and Arno, but in time also the large Po river valley. Rome
first extended itself into the Greek domain by capturing the island of Corfu -- illustrating
the island’s importance as a point of invasion from the west-- which had already fallen
out of Greek hands in the 3rd Century B.C. With Corfu secured, Rome had nothing
standing in the way between it and the Greek mainland and ultimately secured control of
entire Greece during the campaigns of one of the most famous Roman generals Sulla in
88 B.C.
The fall of Greece to Rome essentially wiped Greece as an independent entity from
annals of history for the next 2000 years and destined the Peloponnesian Peninsula to its
backwater status that it had for most of history under Byzantine and Ottoman rule. While
it may be tempting to include Byzantium in the discussion of Greek geopolitics -- its
culture and language being essentially Greek -- the Byzantine geography was much more
approximate to that of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey than that of Greece proper.
The core of Byzantium was the Sea of Marmara, which Byzantium held on against the
encroaching Ottoman Turks until the mid 15th Century.
In the story of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, territory of modern Greece is
essentially an afterthought. It was Ottoman advance through the Maritsa river valley that
destroyed Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms in the 14th Centuries, allowing the Ottomans
to then concentrate on mopping up the remaining Byzantine territories and conquering
Constantinople in mid 15th century after a brief interregnum caused by Mongol invasions
of Anatolia. Greece proper wasn’t conquered as much as it one day essentially woke up
severed from the rest of the Balkans -- and therefore Christian Europe -- by the Ottoman
power which thoroughly dominated all land and sea surrounding it.
... To Vassal State
The ascent of the Ottoman Empire created a new political geography around Greece that
made an independent Greece -- let alone one that was a power -- impossible. The
Ottoman Empire was an impressive political entity that plugged up the Balkans by
controlling the southern flanks of the Carpathians in present day Romania and the central
Balkan mountains of present day Serbia. Greece was neither vital for Ottoman defense or
purse. It was an afterthought.
If we had to pinpoint the exact moment and location political geography in southeastern
Europe changed, we could look at September 11, 1683 at around 5pm on the battlefields
of Vienna. It was at that moment that Polish king Jan Sobieski III led -- what was at the
time -- the largest cavalry charge against the Ottoman forces besieging Vienna. The result
was not just a symbolic defeat for Istanbul, but also failure to plug the Vienna gap that
Danube and Morava create between the Alps and the Carpathians.
Holding the Vienna gap would have allowed the Ottomans to focus their military
resources for defense of the Empire at a focused geographical point – Vienna – freeing up
resources to concentrate on developing the Balkan hinterland. The Panonian plain would
have also added further resources because it is capital rich due to the Danube and
extremely fertile.
The Ottoman Empire did not crumble immediately after the failure in Vienna, but its
stranglehold on the Balkans slowly began to erode as two rising powers -- Russian and
Austro-Hungarian Empires -- rose to challenge it.
Without Vienna gap secured, the Ottoman Empire was left without natural boundaries to
the northwest. This exposed portions of the Balkan peninsula to Western (and most
crucially, Russian) influence and interests as well as Western notions of nationalism
which began circulating through the continent with force following the French
Revolution.
First to turn against the Ottomans was Serbia in the early 19th Century. The Greek
struggle followed closely afterwards. While initial Greek gains against the Ottoamns in
the 1820s were impressive, the Ottomans unleashed their Egyptian forces on Greece in
1826. The Europeans were at first resistant to help Christian Greece because precedent of
nationalist rebellion would be unwelcome in either the multi-ethnic Russia and AustroHungary or the U.K. with its colonial possessions. But ultimately the Europeans feared
more the possibility that one of them would move in to profit from the dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire and gain access to the Eastern Mediterranean.
While Austro-Hungary and Russia held designs on the Balkans, established European
powers such as the U.K. and France -- and German later in the 19th Century -- wanted to
limit any territorial gains for Vienna and St. Petersburg. For the U.K. this was vital
because they did not want to allow the Russian Empire access to the Mediterranean.
Since 1828 Greece has therefore been geopolitically vital for the West. First for the
British as a bulwark against Great Power encroachment on the crumbling Ottoman hold
in the Balkans. The U.K. retained presence -- at various periods and capacities -- in
Corfu, Crete and Cyprus. The U.K. still to this day has military installations in Cyprus
which are considered sovereign territory under direct rule by London.
Second for the U.S. as part of the Soviet containment strategy. As part of its strategy of
maintaining influence in Greece the U.S. specifically intervened in the Greek Civil War
(1946-1949), furnished much of Greek merchant marine with ships after Second World
War, rushed Greece and Turkey into NATO in 1952 and continued to underwrite Greek
defense outlays throughout the 20th Century. Even a brief military junta in Greece -referred to as the Rule of the Colonels from 1967-1974 -- did not affect Greek
membership in NATO, nor near wars with fellow NATO member Turkey in 1964 (over
Cyprus), 1974 (over Cyprus again), 1987 (over Aegean Sea) and 1996 (over an
uninhibited island in the Aegean).
The U.S., and the U.K. before it, were therefore willing to underwrite both Greek defense
expenditures and provide it with the sufficient capital to be a viable independent state and
enjoy near-Western living standards. In exchange, Greece offered the West a key location
from where to plug Russian and later Soviet penetration into the Mediterranean basin.
Geopolitical Imperatives
Before we go into a discussion of the Greek contemporary predicament, we can
summarize the story of Greek geography as told by history in a few simple imperatives:
1. Secure control of the Aegean to maintain defensive and communication lines with
key mainland population centers.
2. Establish control of Corfu, Crete and Rhodes to prevent land invasions via the sea.
3. Hold the Vardar river valley and as far up the valley as you can go for agricultural
land and as your access to mainland Europe.
4. Consolidate hold of inland Greece by eliminating regional power centers and
brigands. Collect taxes to concentrate all capital to the needs of the state.
5. Extend to outer islands such as Cyprus and Sicily to dominate Eastern Mediterranean.
(Obviously one that Greece has not accomplished since Ancient times).
Greece Today
With the collapse of the Soviet threat at the end of the Cold War and subsequent end of
Yugoslav Wars with the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, which removed Belgrade as a
potential challenger for domination of the Balkans, political geography of the region
changed once again. This time unfavorable for Athens. With the West largely
uninterested in the affairs of the region, Greece lost its status as a strategic ally. With that
status lost, Athens also lost the political and economic support that allowed it to
overcome its capital deficiencies.
This was evident to all but the Greeks. Countries rarely accept their geopolitical
irrelevance lightly. Athens absolutely refused to. Instead it did everything it could to
retain its membership in the first world club, borrowing enormous sums of money to
spend on most sophisticated military equipment available to cooking its books to get into
the eurozone. This is often lost amidst the ongoing debt crisis. The debt crisis is
explained -- mainly by the German press -- as result of Greek laziness, profligate
spending habits and irresponsibility. But faced with its geography that engenders a capital
poor environment and existential threat of Turkey challenging its core, the Aegean sea,
Greece has had no alternatives but to indebt itself once its Western patrons lost interest.
Today, Greece has no chances of dreaming of the fifth imperative. Even its fourth
imperative, the consolidation of inland Greece, is in question as illustrated by its inability
to collect taxes. Nearly 25 percent of Greek economy is in the so-called shadow sector,
highest rate among the developed countries by far.
Succeeding in maintaining control of the Aegean, its most important imperative, and in
the face of regional opposition is simply impossible without an outside patron. The
question for Greece going forward is whether it will be able to accept its much reduced
geopolitical role. This too is out of its hands and depends on the strategies that Turkey
adopts. Turkey is a rising geopolitical power with designs on spreading its influence in
the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus. As such, the question is Turkey is
whether it focuses its intentions on the Aegean or whether it is willing to make a deal
with Greece in order to concentrate on other interests.
Ultimately, Greece needs to either find a way to again become useful to great powers in
the future -- unlikely unless great power conflict returns to the Balkans -- or to sue for
lasting peace with Turkey and begin learning how to live within its geopolitical means.
Either way the next three years will be defining ones in Greek history. The IMF/EU
bailout 110 billion euro bailout package comes attached with severe austerity that is
likely to destabilize the country to a very severe level. Grafted on to the regionalized
social geography, a vicious left-right split and history of political and social violence, the
measures will likely further deteriorate the ability of the central government to retain
control. A default is almost assured by the soon-to-be-above 150 percent of GDP
government debt. It is only a question of when the Europeans pull the plug on Athens -most likely at first opportunity when Greece does not present a systemic risk to the rest of
Europe. At that point, devoid of access to international capital or EU bailout the country
could face a total collapse of political control and social violence not seen since the
military junta of the 1970s.
Greece therefore finds itself in very unfamiliar situation. For the first time since the
1820s, it is truly alone.