The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  The first of these Plans was produced punctually a few days before the EU summit in Copenhagen in December 2002, at which the Council was due to consider the upshot of negotiations with Cyprus. The pious fiction of the secretary-general was maintained, but he had little reason to stir from New York. For its author—after Annan had ‘set out the prize to be achieved . . . in terms almost identical to my CNN Turk interview’34—was on the spot, conferring with Blair as the various heads of state gathered in the Danish capital. The Anglo-American campaign to secure Turkish membership had acquired new urgency with the victory of the AKP at the polls in November, bringing to power the first government in Ankara for some time with which Washington and London felt completely at home, and whose leaders Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül arrived in Copenhagen to press their suit. The UN Plan—‘Annan I’—was adjusted at the last minute to give them further satisfaction, and—as ‘Annan II’—presented to Clerides, now president of Cyprus. It was vital, in the eyes of its architects, to get the Plan agreed by both Greek and Turkish Cypriots before the Council took any decision on Cypriot entry into the EU. Clerides indicated, with a nod and a wink, that he was ready to sign. But to Hannay’s consternation, Denktash—controlling the Turkish Cypriot delegation from afar—refused to have anything to do with it. Amid the ensuing disarray, the EU leaders had to make the best of a bad job. Cyprus was accepted into the Union, effective from the spring of 2004, and Turkey—provided it met EU norms for human rights—was promised negotiations on its candidature, effective from the winter of 2004.

  The AKP proclaimed this pledge a historic achievement for Turkey, with some reason. Its success in securing a date for starting negotiations towards accession, in good part due to heavy pressure from the Bush administration, strengthened its hand at home. But it was still new to power, and in failing to bring Denktash to heel in time, had been unable to forestall the prospect of Cypriot membership in the EU without arrangements on the island agreeable to it signed and sealed in advance. Worse still, once Cyprus was inside the EU, it would have a power of veto over Turkey’s own entry.

  Yet Turkey was, after all, suing for acceptance of its candidacy at Copenhagen, after a long period in which it had been rebuffed. Questions of political experience aside, Erdoğan was not in that strong a position there. The more pertinent question is why the European powers, having rallied to the American case for Turkish entry, permitted such a risky inversion of the schedule for Cyprus—giving membership a green light before a settlement was reached that was supposed to be a condition of it. The answer is that the EU leaders believed, correctly, that once a Turkish government applied itself, it would have little difficulty in getting Turkish Cypriots to accept what it had decided upon. Once that was achieved, they assumed that the concurrence of the Greeks—already available at Copenhagen—could be counted on. There were still fifteen months to go before Cyprus entered, and time enough to tie down the settlement that had been missed on that occasion.

  This calculation, however, assumed that they would still have the same interlocutor. Western establishments had become used to the comfortable presence of Clerides, who had been president of Cyprus for a decade, a fixture of the Right with no thought of upsetting any geo-political apple-cart of the Atlantic Alliance. Unfortunately, within two months of his gracious performance at Copenhagen, elections were due in Cyprus. In February 2003, standing for yet another term at the age of eighty-three, he was trounced by Tassos Papadopoulos, Makarios’s youngest minister at independence and closest colleague in his final years, who enjoyed the support of AKEL and the Cypriot Left. His presidency was unlikely to be so pliable.

  Undeterred, Hannay and his collaborators piled on the pressure. After a meeting between Annan, Weston, De Soto, and himself in New York, at which ‘not surprisingly, since we had all been working closely together for over three years, there was effectively a consensus over our analysis of the situation and our prescriptions for action’,35 Annan in person was dispatched to Nicosia, with a third version of the Plan to be put to a referendum in the two parts of the island, and a summons for Papadopoulos and Denktash to agree to it a week later in the Hague. But this was now March 2003. The AKP government was not only embroiled in arguments over the impending war in Iraq—on 1 March the Turkish parliament defied Erdoğan and Gül by rejecting US demands for passage of American troops for the invasion—but in the throes of getting Erdoğan, hitherto technically debarred from becoming a deputy, into Parliament and making him premier. Amid these distractions, Ankara failed a second time to curb Denktash, who blocked the Plan once again. In frustration, Hannay threw up his hands and quit. The UN shut down its office in Cyprus.

  But once the AKP regime had consolidated its hold in Ankara, and come to an understanding with the army—in October it secured a vote for Turkish troops to help out the American occupation in Iraq—it was in a position to enforce its will in northern Cyprus, where Denktash’s autocratic rule had by now anyway made many restless. Signals of Ankara’s displeasure were enough to swing local elections against him in December 2003, letting the main opposition party into government. The AKP had made Turkish entry into the EU its top priority, and having sorted this out, wasted no time. In January, a common position on Cyprus was hammered out with the Turkish military on the National Security Council, and the next day Erdoğan travelled to Davos to brief Annan, then flew on to meet Bush in Washington. The effect of their conversation was immediate. Annan was summoned to the White House, and twenty-four hours later had issued an invitation to the two sides in Cyprus plus the Guarantor Powers to join him for talks in New York.

  There, he explained that to cut through previous difficulties, if there were once again no agreement, the UN Plan should be put directly to the voters of each community, regardless of the views of the authorities on either side. This time, the secretarygeneral’s script had been written in America, and US diplomats brought full pressure to bear on Papadopoulos and Denktash, to force them to accept the prospect of such a diktat. The following month, talks entered their final phase at another Swiss resort, Bürgenstock in Interlaken, where the Greek delegation was headed by the younger Karamanlis—nephew of the statesman of Zurich—who had just become premier in Athens. Once again, American emissaries hovered discreetly in the background, this time as members of the British delegation (the US was not a Guarantor Power), while the foreground was dominated by the Turkish premier. A fourth edition of the UN Plan was adjusted to meet Turkish demands, and a final, non-negotiable version—‘Annan V’—was announced on the last day of March. A jubilant Erdoğan told his people that it was the greatest victory of Turkish diplomacy since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, sealing Kemal’s military triumph over Greece.

  Time was now short. The fateful day when Cyprus was due to become a member of the EU was just a month away. The referendum extorted in New York was called for 24 April, a week beforehand, and copies of Annan V—a tombstone of more than nine thousand pages—were hastily prepared, final touches coming only in the last forty-eight hours before the vote. The approval of Turkish Cypriots was a foregone conclusion: they were not going to turn down a second Lausanne. But on 7 April, in a sombre address on television, Papadopoulos advised Greek Cypriots against the Plan.36 Since Clerides’s party had declared for it, the critical judgement appeared to be AKEL’s. The combined weight of Washington, London and Brussels was brought to bear on the party, and the Greek electorate at large, to accept the Plan. From the State Department, Powell himself telephoned the leader of AKEL, Dimitris Christofias, to secure a favourable opinion. In New York, two days before the referendum, the US and UK moved a resolution in the Security Council endorsing the Plan, to impress on voters that they should not trifle with the will of the international community. To much astonishment (indeed outrage—Hannay found it ‘disgraceful’), Russia used its veto for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Twenty-four hours later, AKEL came out against the Plan. When votes were counted, the results said everything: 65 p
er cent of Turkish Cypriots accepted it, 73 per cent of Greek Cypriots rejected it. What political scientist, without needing to know anything about the Plan, could for an instant doubt whom it favoured?

  5

  Hannay was not wrong in remarking—he was in a position to do so—that, for all the jungle of technical modifications that developed across its five versions, the essence of the ‘Annan’ Plan remained unaltered throughout. It contained three fundamental elements. The first prescribed the state that would come into being, if it were accepted. The Republic of Cyprus, as internationally recognized for forty years—repeatedly so by the UN itself—would be abolished, along with its flag, anthem, and name. In its stead, a wholly new entity would created, under another name, composed of two constituent states, one Greek and the other Turkish, each vested with all powers in its territory, save those—principally concerned with external affairs and common finance—reserved for a federal level. There a Senate would be divided 50:50 between Greeks and Turks, and a Chamber of Deputies elected on a proportionate basis, with a guaranteed 25 per cent for Turks. There would be no president, but an executive Council, composed of four Greeks and two Turks, elected by a ‘special majority’ requiring two-fifths of each half of the Senate to approve the list. In case of deadlock, a Supreme Court composed of three Greeks, three Turks and three foreigners would assume executive and legislative functions. The Central Bank would likewise have an equal number of Greek and Turkish directors, with a casting vote by a foreigner.

  The second element of the Plan covered territory, property, and residence. The Greek state would comprise just over 70 per cent, the Turkish state just under 30 per cent, of the land surface of Cyprus; the Greek state just under 50 per cent, the Turkish state just over 50 per cent, of its coast-line. Restitution of property seized would be limited to a maximum of a third of its area or value, whichever was lower, the rest to be compensated by long-term bonds issued by the federal government, at tax-payer cost, and would carry no right of return. Of those expelled from their homes, the maximum number allowed to recover residence, over a period of some twenty years, would be held below a fifth of the population of each zone, while just under 100,000 Turkish settlers and incomers would become permanent residents and citizens in the north.

  The third element of the Plan covered force and international law. The Treaty of Guarantee, giving three outside powers rights of intervention in Cyprus, would continue to operate—‘open-ended and undiluted’, as Hannay records with satisfaction—after the abolition of the state it was supposed to guarantee. The new state would have no armed forces, but Turkey would maintain six thousand troops on the island for another eight years, and after a further interval, the military contingent accorded it at Zurich, permanently. Britain’s bases, somewhat reduced in size, would remain intact, as sovereign possessions of the UK. The future Cypriot state would drop all claims in the European Court of Human Rights,37 and last but not least, bind itself in advance to vote for Turkish entry into the EU.

  The enormity of these arrangements to ‘solve the Cyprus problem, once and for all’, as Annan hailed them, speak for themselves. At their core lies a ratification of ethnic cleansing, of a scale and thoroughness that has been the envy of settler politics in Israel, where Avigdor Lieberman—leader of the far right Yisrael Beiteinu—publicly calls for a ‘Cypriot solution’ on the West Bank, a demand regarded as so extreme that it is disavowed by all his coalition partners. Not only does the Plan absolve Turkey from any reparations for decades of occupation and plunder, imposing their cost instead on those who suffered them. It is further in breach of the Geneva Conventions, which forbid an occupying power to introduce settlers into conquered territory. Far from compelling their withdrawal, the Plan entrenches their presence: ‘no one will be forced to leave’, in Pfirter’s words.38 So little did legal norms matter in the conception of the Plan, that care was taken to remove its provisions from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice in advance.

  No less contemptuous of the principles of any existent democracy, the Plan accorded a minority of some 18 to 25 per cent of the population, for all practical purposes, 50 per cent of decision-making power in the state. To see how grotesque such a proposal was, it is enough to ask how Turkey would react if it were told that its Kurdish minority—also around 18 per cent—must be granted half of all seats in its Grand National Assembly, sweeping rights to block action in its executive, not to speak of exclusve jurisdiction over some 30 per cent of its land area. What UN or EU emissary, or apologist for the Hannay plan among the multitude in the Western media, would dare travel to Ankara with such a scheme in his brief-case? Ethnic minorities need protection—Turkish Kurds, by any measure, considerably more than Turkish Cyriots—but to make of this a flagrant political disproportion is to invite hostility, rather to restrain it.

  Nor were the official ratios of ethnic power to be all. Planted across the tundra of the Plan’s many other inequities, foreigners were imposed at strategic points—Supreme Court, Central Bank, Property Board—in what was supposed to be an independent country. Topping everything off, armed force was to be reserved to external powers: Turkish military remaining on site, British bases trampolines for Iraq. No other member of the European Union bears any resemblance to what would have been this cracked, shrunken husk of an independent state. Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected it, not because they were misinformed by Papadopoulos, or obeyed directives from Christofias—opinion polls showed their massive opposition to the Plan before either spoke against it. They did so because they had so little to gain—a sliver of territory, and crumbs of a doubtful restitution of property—and so much to lose from it: a reasonably well-integrated, wellregarded state, without deep divisions or deadlocks, in which they could take an understandable pride. Why give this up for a constitutional mare’s nest, whose function was essentially to rehouse the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, condemned as illegal by the UN itself, as an equal partner in a structure jerry-built to accommodate it? Cut to foreign specifications, the Constitution of Zurich had proved unworkable enough, leading only to communal strife and breakdown. The Constitution of Bürgenstock, far more complicated and still more inequitable, was a recipe for yet greater rancour and paralysis.

  There was, however, a logic to this. The rationale for the entire scheme, like that of its predecessor in 1960, lay outside Cyprus itself, the interests of whose communities were never more than ancillary in its calculus. The fundamental drive behind the Plan, in all its versions, was the fear that if Cyprus, as constituted, were admitted to the EU without being taken apart and retrofitted beforehand, it could veto the entry of Turkey into the Union until it relinquished its grip—soldiers and settlers—on the island. The bottom line of Hannay’s calculations was thus always what would be acceptable to Ankara, helping it to seek membership of the EU without provoking public opinion or the ‘deep state’ in Turkey. The AKP government, viewed not inaccurately as the ideal partner for the West, could point to domestic resistance, threatening the grand common goal of its entrance into Europe, every time it wanted to secure a concession in the Cypriot sideshow, and its interlocutors would fall over themselves to oblige it.

  As in 1960 and in 1974, it is pointless to blame Turkey for the process that led to 2004, in this case less of a success for it anyway. On each occasion, it acted according to classical precepts of raison d’état, without undue sanctimony, after being invited to do so. The authors of the latest attempt on Cyprus lie elsewhere. Behind the bland official prose, Hannay’s memoir has the involuntary merit of making it plain that Britain was at the end of the story, as it had been at the beginning, the prime mover in efforts to fix a cape of lead over the island. In that sense, Hannay was a lineal successor to Harding, Caradon and Callaghan, in the record of callous disregard for the fate of Cyprus as a society. Britain, of course, did not act alone. Historically, in all three crises when the future of the island was at stake, the US abetted the
UK, without ever quite playing the leading role, until the last moment.

  In the final episode, however, a new actor stepped on stage, the European Union. If the British set the ball rolling towards another Zurich in 1996, and the Americans followed in 1997, it was not until the end of 2002, with the arrival of the AKP in power, that the EU establishment in general rallied to the Anglo-American determination that Turkey must—for economic, ideological and strategic reasons alike—be admitted in short order to the Union. Though scattered misgivings persisted, by 2003 Brussels, in the persons of Romano Prodi as president of the Commission and Günter Verheugen, commissioner for enlargement, was fully behind London and Washington. Hannay, whose knowledge of the workings of the Commission was unrivalled, had taken care to square Verheugen well before this, securing his assurance that the EU’s acquis communautaire—the body of rules with which candidate countries must comply, including freedoms of residence and investment certain to be a sticking-point north of the Attila Line—would not stand in the way of a settlement that annulled them in Cyprus.

  Verheugen made no difficulty. On all subsequent occasions—in Ankara with Erdog˘an on the eve of his flight to Annan and Bush in early 2004; at the end-game in Bürgenstock two months later—he was at pains to explain that the normal acquis would not apply. This despite the fact that, as Hannay notes appreciatively, ‘he was precluded from clearing his lines in advance with member states’: i.e., he ignored his mandate without consulting them.39 Ponderous and self-important, a kind of German Widmerpool—now a figure of fun in his own country, since he was snapped cavorting in the nude with his secretary on a Lithuanian shore—Verheugen attempted to intervene directly in the Cypriot referendum with a lengthy interview on behalf of the Plan. Incensed when no television station would touch it, he was little short of apoplectic when the Plan was rejected. Such was, indeed, the general reaction in Brussels to the refusal by Greek voters to fall in with its will: an incredulous fury also expressed by virtually the entire European public sphere, FT and Economist in the lead, that has scarcely died down since.40 Were another lesson needed in what the Union’s dedication to international law and human rights is worth, its conduct over Cyprus supplies the most graphic to date.