... Conflict
From the very outset, Brussels supported Greece and condemned Ankara’s aggressive actions. However, the European Union is not entirely homogeneous in its attitude to the dispute. Firstly, some of its members are locked in a confrontation with Turkey, such as Greece and Cyprus, and their stance in unequivocal. There are stakeholder states, such as France and Italy, two European Mediterranean powers that also have an interest in the region’s gas deposits. Their oil and gas companies, France’s
Total
, and Italy’s ...
... half the Aegean Continental Shelf; (2) the “Blue Homeland” consists primarily of Greek territories and Greece's threatened sovereign rights; (3) Turkey had always regarded Greece as far weaker than Turkey and weaker than what Greece really is; (4) Turkey cannot forgive Cyprus and Greece for their EEZs' hydrocarbon deposits in contrast to missing its own; (5) Erdogan cannot “tolerate” that Hellenism has weaved substantial collaboration with neighboring Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon; increasingly with France; and perhaps ...
... are met; and expand Turkey’s geopolitical challenges that violate fundamental international legal and ethical principles and norms, by deploying, sometimes literally, gunboat diplomacy.
Erdogan’s
paradigmatic statements
insulting and threatening Greece and Cyprus include his insistence that Turkey’s “present borders” do not coincide with “
the borders of his heart
,” which include Cyprus and Greek territories; his declaration in Athens last December that the 1923 multilateral Lausanne Treaty — which fixed the two countries’ ...
... more authentic Russophile and far more sensitive to the popular will for even closer bilateral bonds between the Republic of Cyprus and the Russian Federation. Should History unfold in this manner, Moscow’s aforementioned “political/philosophical ... ... evaporate.
1
. This article envisaged “joint action” by the “guarantor powers” of the Cypriot Constitution (Britain, Greece and Turkey) in case of a constitutional breach. Failing agreement to take joint action, each guarantor reserved the right “to take ...
... sovereign bases have turned it into an indispensable partner of the West. The island has large expatriate populations from mainland Greece, Russia and the UK, maintains vital economic interests in the wider Middle East, but remains partially occupied by Turkey which has dispatched thousands of soldiers for the protection of an increasing expatriate population of Turkish nationals on the northern part of the island.
The resolution of the Cyprus conflict poses a major challenge given that it is at core not only of solving regional disputes but most importantly of ...
