Turkey's new foreign policy style will solve the problem with Armenia

One name for the rapid change taking place in Turkey's foreign policy, in parallel with the one at home, could be "a road rapidly traveled from apolitical-ness to political-ness." It would be fair to say that the foreign policy vision Turkey adopted after emerging from the First World War remained within the limits of the traumatic effects of that war. The syndrome of "a country surrounded by enemies on all four sides" is far from the mental health needed to establish a political relationship with anyone.

That is why it is quite clear that someone who sees no one but himself as a friend will have no chance of being at peace even with himself. Turkey is only now getting over the effects of this trauma, opening up as it gets over it, and as it builds healthy relations it realizes, and shows, that it can have far more friends than enemies.

It is not impossible to resolve even enmities on a ground of healthier relations. Looking at the matter this way, it becomes clear that there is no enmity that cannot be resolved, and that always waiting for the other side(s) in order to establish peace only feeds the problem. The only way to end an enmity is not to wait for those regarded as the other side to end their enmity. The only way to open a blocked relationship is not a gesture to be expected from the other side either. It may be that the other side's situation, personality or environment is not suited to making that gesture.

Is likening relations between countries to relations between people too much of a simplification? I do not think so at all. After all, in relations between countries too, it is people who conduct the contacts, and the qualities of the people taking part in those contacts matter a great deal. There is a valid and influential paradigm to the effect that the human element is of no importance in foreign or domestic politics, that countries have their own policies, but in my view the diplomatic performance of Prime Minister Erdoğan himself and of Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoğlu razes this paradigm to the ground, especially in foreign policy. Healthy, warm human relations affect a country's politics, and show that walls thought to be completely insurmountable between countries can be overcome too. In this way Turkey can show examples of re-establishing from scratch its centuries-old, fossilized international relations.

We know that the process recently begun with Armenia has also benefited from this level of human relations. The opening of a new page, through a match diplomacy, in relations frozen for centuries, and the opening of room for new human relations in the contacts that followed, showed very clearly that the solution of this problem too lies not in apolitical-ness, in relationlessness, in rupture, but in human contact, relationship and communication.

However, putting into practice the protocols signed in October and crossing the borders ran up against the internal psychological walls of both countries. These walls are of course not insurmountable, but they make the politicians of both countries think in the face of certain internal calculations. The Armenian Constitutional Court's placing a reservation on the protocols, and the failure to receive any sign that would reassure the Azeris, and thereby Turkey, regarding the Armenian occupation in Nagorno-Karabakh, have made it increasingly difficult to make progress in the process.

Even so, the distance covered now indicates that there is no turning back from this process. A few days ago the Prime Minister's special representative Feridun Sinirlioğlu went to Armenia and then to Azerbaijan and clearly gave the message that standing behind the protocols process begun in October had not been abandoned. Prime Minister Erdoğan is expected to hold a more far-reaching meeting with Armenian President Sargsyan, as a result of these contacts, on his US trip that begins tomorrow.

It is known that Russia has an important role in overcoming, or failing to overcome, the obstacle tied to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem regarding the opening of the borders. It is expected that this issue will again be brought to a certain distance with President Medvedev, who will visit Turkey in the second week of May. Thus a distance will also have been covered toward making a "so-called protocol" process, which could never be activated, an exception to the new style of foreign policy that Turkey has entered in recent years.

The genocide debates or claims perhaps will not end entirely. This issue will always continue to be an issue for someone, but when all these steps have been taken, it will be seen in a short time that the issue concerns the present, not history, and that the problem can be resolved far more comfortably not by going to history but in today's political arenas.