What Turkey asks to admit Sweden and Finland to NATO – Ronald Suny

After decades of neutrality, the two Northern European states that have so far remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Finland and Sweden, have reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by submitting a request to join in this alliance led by the United States. But there is a major obstacle in their path: Turkey.

The increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has declared that he will oppose the entry of these two countries. And the approval of Turkey, as a NATO country, is necessary for acceptance. Erdoğan is the only NATO leader to publicly express his opposition to the entry of the two countries into the alliance.

The opposition of the Turkish president is based on his idea that Finland and Sweden support “terrorists”. Erdoğan says that both countries have provided protection and residence to members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the main armed group that opposes Turkish policies towards millions of Kurdish citizens, who have long been the subject of confrontation between Ankara and part of the international community.

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Although the PKK is cataloged by the United States and the EU as a terrorist group, Finland and Sweden have hesitated to extradite people of the group to Turkey for human rights concerns. Erdoğan responded by calling Sweden an “incubator” of terrorism and stating that neither country has “a clear and open attitude” towards terrorist organizations, adding: “How can we trust them?”.

Erdoğan’s anger at Helsinki and Stockholm is also exacerbated by the fact that the two countries are home to some supporters of Turkish academician and preacher Fethullah Gülen. These supporters are part of a political and educational movement that Erdoğan was allied with, but with which he broke up as he became more powerful. The Turkish president accuses the Gülenists of organizing a coup d’état, which later failed, against his government in 2016.

In addition, the two neutral northern European countries condemned Turkey’s 2019 incursion into Syria. In that operation, the Turks targeted Rojava, an autonomous Kurdish enclave, socialist and feminist close to the Turkish border. To complicate matters, the Syrians of Rojava were – despite their ties to the PKK – allies of US forces. The Rojava Kurds played a pivotal role in pushing back the Islamic State group in Syria, but were later abandoned by the Trump administration, which withdrew US troops from the Turkish border, allowing its NATO ally to launch a military operation. against the Kurds.

Foreign policy is almost always intimately linked to domestic policy concerns. In the case of the Turkish government, one of the main fears is the threat to their power posed by the Kurds, together with the international pressure due to the repression conducted by the Turkish government against this group. The Kurdish populations of Turkey denounce the lack of free elections in the region of Eastern Anatolia, where they are the majority, and the ban on using the Kurdish language.

Finland and Sweden are neutral countries, not obliged to make strategic compromises that the United States and NATO must make to keep the alliance united. Both countries have so far been free to take a moral stand regarding Turkey’s position on Kurdish rights, and have officially protested the repression of dissidents, academics, journalists and minorities.

Meanwhile, the NATO countries have taken an ambiguous position vis-à-vis their alliance colleague and have agreed to categorize the PKK as a terrorist organization.

So what about the two countries’ request to join NATO? The rules of entry into the strategic alliance require the unanimity of the current states that are part of NATO. This is why Turkey can effectively veto the entry of Finland and Sweden. This stalemate underlines an internal problem within NATO, which should be an alliance of democratic countries. But some of its members – in particular Turkey and Hungary – have decidedly moved away from liberal democracy, moving towards a populist and ethnonationalist authoritarianism.

Finland and Sweden, on the other hand, meet the NATO membership criteria better than many others. While the United States proclaims that the war in Ukraine is a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, Turkey’s opposition to the Nordic countries that have protested against its illiberal drift tests NATO’s unity and ideological coherence.

(Translation by Stefania Mascetti)