Regional maritime security in the eastern Mediterranean: expectations and reality

Abstract

Recent developments in the eastern Mediterranean, such as significant gas finds; disagreements over the demarcation of maritime boundaries; large-scale violence and political instability following the Arab Spring; mass migration via sea routes; Great Power dynamics in the region; and environmental hazards, make the political entities along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean part of a regional security complex and create strong incentives for regional coordination on maritime security. Material international relations theories predict that growing security challenges (realism) coupled with expected gains (liberalism) will facilitate regional cooperation. Yet, the political entities in the region rely mainly on unilateral actions, or limited quasi-alliances in response to these challenges. The article shows the puzzling gap between the theoretical expectation and practical outcome in the region and explains why regional cooperation in the maritime domain fails to occur. It argues that cooperation on a regional scale fails to take place due to three complementing reasons: 1) lack of shared ideational features like cultural traits, set of values and regime type; 2) enduring rivalries between political entities in the region (Israel–Palestine; Turkey–Greece–Cyprus) coupled with internal strife within other regional political entities (Libya; Syria); and unequal political standing and lack of sovereignty of some of the political entities in the region (Northern Cyprus; the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip).

Turkey's changing engagement with the global South

“…Regarding the second determinant, Turkey's neighbourhood has been embroiled in cumulative turbulence, including active armed conflicts in Iraq, Syria (where Ankara has deployed a significant number of troops in the north-east) and Nagorno-Karabakh (where Turkey supported Azerbaijan against Armenia), Moscow's annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and the competition for advantage in terms of maritime delimitation and energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean. 14 In this context, Ankara perceived itself as increasingly locked in, with Russia militarily present in every regional conflict and Turkey's claims in the Mediterranean blocked by the East Med Gas Forum nations and traditional disputes on Cyprus-the latter adding an additional layer of tension with the EU, especially with France which usually have a common approach with Greece and Cyprus towards the Eastern Mediterranean.…”

Missing Cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean

“…To explain why collaborative efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean stall, the region itself has to be contextualised: politically, spatially and theoretically. Several scholars have engaged in the conceptualization of the Eastern Mediterranean as a distinct regional subsystem (Tziampiris 2019) or regional security complex (Rubin and Eiran 2019;Stivachtis 2019;Ceylan and Baykara 2020). A regional security complex is defined by strong internal security interdependencies, which the Eastern Mediterranean has been found to provide (Tziarras 2019, 5).…”

“…The conclusions end with the claim that "regional cooperation will remain low as long as the region cannot develop at least a partial shared value system" (Rubin and Eiran 2019, 996). Rubin and Eiran (2019) are right in identifying incentives for cooperation. Nevertheless, the presented argument claims to explain the absence of security cooperation in the region but lacks depth.…”

“…On an empirical note, the argument is not backed up by a case study that would bolster such claims or examine the norm systems mentioned. The literature that has been cited on this matter is equally scarce or absent (Rubin and Eiran 2019). On a theoretical note, acts of securitization are driving inter-unit enmity and impede cooperation between the securitizing actors not differing in cultural inclinations, as suggested by scholars such as Samuel Huntington (1996) (Hobson 2014).…”

“…This trend is marked by an increasing isolation of Turkey (Gür 2020) by other states such as Israel, Greece and Egypt who try to counter Turkey's regional hegemonic aspirations. Although some scholars have tried to explain the absence or the lack of security cooperation, the existing constructivist accounts, such as the one provided by Rubin and Eiran (2019), are not particularly convincing or problematize different questions (Boening 2014;Schoenfeld and Rubin 2011). Furthermore, few scholars (Ceylan and Baykara 2020) have engaged with Securitization Theory and Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) to explain the developments in the Eastern Mediterranean and even fewer (Adamides and Christou 2015) have actually zoomed in on a particular case to analyze how security is spoken at site.…”