Introduction
Since its formation, the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (Turkic Council) has become a major platform in developing political, sociocultural, trade and economic cooperation among the Turkic speaking countries. The council currently consists of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey as well as the observer member Hungary.[1]
Leaving aside historical and cultural ties, Turkic Council also has a great geopolitical opportunity that can limit the growth of Iran-affiliated influence and Russian-Iran pressure in the region. Furthermore, the potential for Russia to form a “NATO zone” around Turkey, which includes territories of Turkey, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, made this organization curious for both European countries and the United States. Iran and Russia are wary of Turkey’s economic penetration into Azerbaijan and Georgia and its policy of using this region to integrate into Turkic-speaking Central Asian countries.
Iran has been very realistic from the beginning in terms of its capabilities in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Due to the impossibility of applying the Iranian model to Central Asian countries, Iran has not been concerned about the application of the “Turkish model” in the region. Iran and Russia have found common reasons to prevent Turkey’s influence in the region. The two countries have acted as strategic allies to minimize the influence of the United States and Turkey in the region and to prevent Central Asian countries from working effectively on a common platform with Azerbaijan and Turkey. In this context, both countries have spoken out in favour of an alliance with Armenia. As a result, the Moscow-Yerevan-Tehran axis was formed against the Turkic countries.[2]
For over ten years, before the Second Karabakh War political contact, unified stance toward international developments and especially economic cooperation among member states were vulnerable, as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict played a destructive role destabilizing peace in the region and undermining economic enlargement from Central Asia via the South Caucasus corridor. However, after the stabilization process after the agreement signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on 10 November 2020,[3] keenness from Central Asian countries to cooperate with Azerbaijan and Turkey across miscellaneous fields, into the bargain utilize this opportunity to diversify its energy security, and promote further collaboration, for this time more seriously, over political and economic sphere have increased.
What is more, Turkic-speaking countries supported Azerbaijani stance during and after the Second Karabakh war, denounced Armenian aggressive and destructive movements in the region, which were increasing the tension between the two countries. One should point out that some countries such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan kept a neutral stance towards this conflict by refraining from showing a direct attitude regarding ongoing clashes. After the peace statement, these countries’ attitudes towards the South Caucasus became warmer. Following a stoppage of clashes, they considered starting a discussion on possible economic developments among the Turkic Council countries.
In this paper, I will endeavor to explain how the above-mentioned countries’ opinion altered before, as well as during the war on regional issues and how the Second Karabakh war influenced their range of vision in micro-level about Azerbaijan and Turkey and in macro-level regarding the framework of Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States. In preparation for analyzing the big picture, firstly we should inspect the history and timeline of this Council.
Historical background
With the disintegration process among Central Asian and Southern Caucasian countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic and political alteration across both regions was inevitable. Up until Turkic countries gained independence from the former USSR, Turkey couldn’t consistently cooperate and get integrated with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Turkey, which had to cut off direct contact with the Caucasus and Central Asia because of the Soviet Union, after the collapse of the USSR recognized the independence of the above-mentioned countries which had deep historical and cultural ties one after another. To fill the political and economic vacuum evoked in 1991, Turkey took an action to attract Central Asian Turkic states and Azerbaijan to collaborate with Ankara and endeavoured to utilize ideological obscurity by persuading long-lasting Turanist ideas. This idea had been the most powerful movement in the region. As a result of a joint effort to coordinate economic and political perspectives of those countries, the Turkic Council was established on 3 October 2009 with the overarching aim of promoting comprehensive cooperation.[4] With the accession of Uzbekistan to the Turkic Council in 2019, this organization brought all independent Turkic countries around the world together, except Turkmenistan which did not exert interest due to its isolation policy. As Halil Akinji assessed this organization, Turkic Council has become the first voluntary alliance of Turkic states in history.
Apart from the historical, linguistic and cultural heritage, all Turkic Council member states joined the alliance for complex reasons. The paramount aspect is to promote the members’ position as subjects rather than objects of the geopolitical relations in Eurasia. Kazakhstan has become a major strategic partner of the Kyrgyz Republic. Especially, Central Asian countries try to balance Russian leverage on their foreign policy and look for alternative routes to diversify their energy security. This policy can reduce the feasible jeopardy of the Kremlin regime that pushes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan not to refrain from Russian “near abroad” future. Turkic unity in the context of the Russia-led Eurasian project is a clear illustration of multi-vector diplomacy in action. For instance, Nazarbayev in his speech during an official visit to Turkey in October 2012, maintained that “Kazakhs live in the motherland of all Turkic peoples” and that “after the regicide of the last Kazakh khan, Kazakhstan became a colony of the Russian Empire and subsequently the Soviet Union”. Furthermore, Kazakhstan at the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in October 2013 proposed to admit Turkey to the Customs Union with a view to co-oppose Russia’s plan to revive the Soviet Union.[5]
By the time, in late 2018 Turkic Council drew Hungary’s attention which expressed its keenness to join the organization as an observer member. Moreover, after the 44-day Karabakh War, the First Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Amina Japarov highlighting historical ties between the Turkish Council and Ukraine announced Ukraine’s application to get an observer place in the organization.
Leaving aside the background of this organization and the history of relations among Turkic nations, the paramount goals and structure of this paper must be defined. The first purpose is to present thriving media interest in member states of the Turkic Council after the Second Karabakh War and discussion over cultural, political, and particularly economic collaboration, as well as future perspectives of bilateral or multilateral contact. Secondly, I will endeavour to reveal the distinction in a number of published news articles by Turkic Council members’ national news agencies prior to and after the 44-day Karabakh War by collecting news schemes from March 2020 until February 2021. The third research domain is to categorize published news by differing political, cultural and economic spheres of relations, approximately over one year, that detect which sphere of interest cooperation is promoting from. Data will provide us with the tendency of how Turkic Council member states’ keenness to cooperate with each other increases. Especially, the data will help us to show Central Asian countries’ efforts over promoting energy security that gives the rise to possible talks regarding common natural reserves of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and at a later stage of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, thereafter taking a strong stance in the European market via Trans-Caspian Corridor.
During the last decades, we have been witnessing strong interconnectivity between media and policy-making. It has become increasingly common to characterize modern politics as mediated or mediatized and quite the reverse contemporary media as politicized. Even according to Mazzoleni and Schulz, politics has increasingly ‘‘lost its autonomy, has become dependent in its central functions on mass media, and is continuously shaped by interactions with mass media’’.[6] Given close interaction between media and foreign policy, media’s pressure on policymaking process, exploitation of power of news agencies to justify political or military interference to other countries’ domestic issues, into the bargain utilizing it as a tool to measure impulses of region’s major countries toward possible developments, feasible future cooperation among Turkic Council member states and Turkmenistan also can be considered via analysing news tendency of media agencies. I will try to explain and justify growing interest in economic and political rapprochement among Turkic states by laying out media trends in each country.
In the next stage, the theoretical framework of the research will be contoured; afterwards, the methodology and data will be presented. Data and the methodology will be followed by an interpretation of collected data, which will analyse the situation and media trends before, during and after the Karabakh War timeline.
Theoretical framework
Politicized media as a government tool
News agencies are the most lucrative tool for a government to introduce, advertise and justify its future movements, and measure public opinion concerning possible developments to boot. Moreover, it could be exploited by autocratic governments to campaign its political interests, suppress domestic anxiety and utilize the media as a propaganda tool. If we browse interactive contact between media and politics, firstly, we should scrutinize Lippmann’s stand-point toward mediated and mediatized politics. It is only during the last few decades that the terms mediated and mediatized politics have become more prominent. Lippmann in his book called “Public Opinion”[7] emphasized that what matters for people’s opinions and attitudes most is not reality per se, but rather the ‘‘pictures in our heads’’, which are mainly formed by media. At the same time, taking into account that politics is mainly communicated and experienced through different means of media, politics can be described as a mediator.[8] [9] Several researchers argue that mediatization is about how political institutions and, within them , behaviour of political actors are shaped by media’s increasing influence.[10] [11] [12] As an additional line to these perceptions, the government could also utilize the media, form new perceptions within external dimensions and shape public opinion towards certain issues within the domestic dimension. When a government has the keenness to reshape its regional or global attitude towards political and economic manners, it prefers indirect ways, such as proliferating media news, to direct statements which can aggravate regional powers and spark off tension among rival players.
When there exists elite dissensus with respect to an issue, as predicted by both Hallin and Bennett, news media coverage reflects this debate, and we can expect a variety of critical and supportive news media coverage.[13] [14] [15] This is a scenario in which news media have the potential, at least, to start playing a more active and influential role in policy debate and formulation of policy line, because there is a chance for news media coverage to take sides in the elite debate. When this scenario happens, news media can play a key role in the causing policy change by promoting a particular policy line advocated either by elites outside the particular members of the executive itself.[16]
The Role of State-Run Media in Politics
Media outlets that are controlled by states have become necessary for the permanent balance of governments around the world. The state-run media and public apathy that it promotes help to keep the main ideology ambitions of the regime. The media outlets in question may be owned and run by the state. At some stages, governments utilize mass media (usually only state-run, but also private media in autocratic regimes) to shape the dominant political narrative.
In post-soviet countries such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Russia, established systems of circumscribed news and information for mass audiences. Moreover, several democratically elected governments with authoritarian leaning, such as those in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Turkey, and Ukraine, use similar techniques.[17] According to Christopher Walker and Robert Orttung, in order to achieve effective dominance, state-controlled media in authoritarian regimes seek to influence four distinct groups of the audience: 1) elites from the regime’s own coalition; 2) the populace in general ; 3) the country’s regular Internet users; and 4) the political opposition and independent civil society. Compared to Walker’s and Orttung definition, each authoritarian country could not totally mobilize Internet capacity and misuse, as well as exploit it. However, they can regulate and control mass media by structuring them for their own interest.
By feeding the media, domestic and foreign, public or corporate news agencies have the potential of multiplying content for spreading information and discourses that may respond to national development plans. As distributors of mass information to the media, these companies always had a quantitatively insurmountable power to disseminate information and opinions (including propaganda), all elements of strategic importance to states in an incipient phase of nation building. As Oliver Boyd-Barrett described, national news agencies were seen as “analogous to strategic industries which were also nationalised – such as oil, electricity, banking, airlines – to ensure economic activity in favour of their own national interests and not of imperial ones”.[18] In the vision of the ideologues of autonomous development, news agencies are political tools for construction of the symbolic space through the circulation of information. Thus, agencies were born by performing both the role of information exporters (spreading news abroad about their country), and importers (domestic distribution of foreign news).[19]
In the context of Turkic states, I will argue that after the Second Karabakh War member states of Turkic Council gave a higher priority to work with Azerbaijan and strengthen collaboration within the framework of the Turkic Council. Throughout the war, state-run news agencies of 3 Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) published a myriad of news applauding Azerbaijani military success in liberating its occupied territory. On top of that, national news agencies of these three countries disseminated intensively informative pieces of news concerning occupied territories of Azerbaijan and condemned Armenian aggression by revealing historical facts and shedding light upon international law.
Method and analytical approach
I analyzed 5 national news agencies – Kazinform (Kazakhstan), Kabar (Kyrgyzstan), UzA (Uzbekistan National News Agency), Anadolu Agency (Turkey) and AZERTAC (Azerbaijan State News Agency) – to gather information and published news by Turkic Council member states. What is more, in order to discover major tendencies one must divide published news in different spheres. In the data-collection process of news agencies from 3 Central Asian countries, I diversified news as regarding Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkic Council; thereafter distinguished 5 different spheres in Azerbaijan and Turkey: Turkic Council, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Moreover, news regarding relations and cooperation between Turkey and Azerbaijan (in both countries’ news agencies) are not taken into account, as these two countries already have increasing collaboration and contact in various spheres ranging from energy security, political and military support to cultural interaction and diaspora collaboration . In addition, I could analyse state-run news agency of Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan is not a Turkic Council member, since it is controlled with non-democratic mechanisms and does not comprise any news concerning external issues and international politics.
I used state-run media, as what we refer here as the “state-run” media covers a variety of different phenomena: from media that are under tight government control of their editorial content to those that are funded by money raised from taxes and licence fees, but with a statutory guarantee of their total independence from the government of the day.[20]
Public media, by virtue of their funding base, are a resource for the entire electorate. It is generally accepted that they should not be politically partisan in their editorial coverage. This was the view set out by the UN Special Report on Freedom of Expression[21], in its 1999 report. The report argues that the obligation of the state-owned media to give voice to a variety of opinions and not to be a propaganda organ for one particular political party. Also, they have particular obligations to provide civic education, as well as to provide a platform for the different political parties. However, this classification by the UN does not work in autocratic countries. The reality that state-run media as above-mentioned allow us to speculate what is published in these news agencies is in favour of the government or its present or expected foreign policy. Also, governments are able to use this tremendous resource in order to justify its future steps.[22]
In contrast, obligations of the private media are far fewer. The essence of the free media environment is that broadcasters and journalists are not told what they may or may not say or write. The best guarantee that a variety of political ideas are communicated freely and accurately is often understood to be for the media to be allowed to get on with their job unhampered. But this does not mean that private media have no obligation at all. Professional journalistic standards will demand accurate and balanced reporting, as well as a clear separation of a fact and its comment.[23] [24] [25]
Following the theoretical framework of this paper, we can visit collected data which will give a wide view on the interest given by member states of Turkic Council and their method of exerting that interest . The data is expected to provide us an explainable reason of the growing importance of reviving this platform again.
Data
I collected a total of 1352 pieces of news from national news agencies of 5 Turkic Council member countries, ranging from energy security, infrastructure building, investment in miscellaneous fields to social and medical aid, economic cooperation and military training. Each scheme consists of published news regarding the mentioned country starting from March 2020 to February 2021. I used this timeline to reveal whether there is an unprecedented increase in the amount of published news or not. There are 86 news articles in Kazakhstan national news agency Kazinform, 257 news articles in Turkey national news agency Anadolu Agency, 706 published pieces of news in Azerbaijan state-run news agency AZERTAC, 37 news stories in Kyrgyzstan national news agency Kabar and finally 216 news stories in Uzbekistan state-run news agency UzA about Turkic Council and separately its members, Turkmenistan included.
We can observe from scheme 1 that there is no unprecedented keenness or curiosity by Central Asian countries and Turkey toward cooperation within the Turkic Council. I assume that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan behave more carefully while exerting their interest to cooperate with Azerbaijan and Turkey within the framework of Turkic Council. Kyrgyzstan’s geopolitical situation and its perspective to join economic collaboration in the region is limited, and therefore this country does not show high interest toward possible developments. They prefer a direct contact with Azerbaijan and Turkey to get together on a platform, which Russia is worried about. For instance, in his recent interview Russian Defence Minister with a response to the question “Some politicians in Turkey and some circles of our political elite (Kazakhstan) think of rebuilding great Turan and creating a joint army of Turkic states, the “Turan Army””, answered that “The first thing that I want to tell these people is that I don’t know whether to call them politicians or something else. Well, you dream of this, you’re trying to take some steps towards that. For what and against whom? The same Turkic language speaking peoples live in Russia and their number is quite high”.[26] But Azerbaijan trying to operate as a “hub” in the region has more curiosity to revive Turkic Council and connect economic actions.
While having a look at scheme 2, we can see that during and after the Second Karabakh War, especially Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan expressed noteworthy interest in Azerbaijan. There was also informative news which shed a light upon the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as well. Another point that should draw our attention is the content of such news and its motives. Prior to the beginning of the war in September, the paramount point of content was cultural unity among Azerbaijan, Turkey and other Turkic states. But when the Second Karabakh War commenced, we can see a growing amount of news which counted on giving rise to economic and political contact among member states. For instance, after September in Kazakhstan and after November in Uzbekistan, 75% of subject-related news was about economic perspectives of feasible projects in the region.
It can be observed that the most curious state among Central Asian countries which considers tighter contact on future infrastructure and economic projects with Turkey is Uzbekistan. We can explain Kazakhstan’s pacifism by looking at its geopolitical situation, a direct border with Russia, where every moment can spark off an ethnic confrontation. However, Uzbekistan does not have a direct border with Russia and has a more convenient position compared to Kazakhstan. Furthermore, after August in Kazakhstan, all news’ content were economic and political rather than cultural.
Above-presented 4 schemes provide us data of published news by Azerbaijani and Turkish state-run news agencies regarding Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. As we can see from schemes 4, 5 and 7 Azerbaijan has more motives to expand its hub capacity and become a major transit country by ensuring a secure route for Central Asian resources to be transported to European markets bypassing pivot regional rivals like Iran and Russia. Turkey also considers its benefit from future economic projects in the region, as it will be a lucrative development to meet domestic gas demand.
Following the explanation of collected data presented in 7 schemes, we can predict the future of the Turkic Council, possible influence of reviving this platform, interest and support from international actors for feasible economic and political developments among these states.
Reviving of Trans-Caspian project – reality and perspectives
For three days, despite all efforts, an EverGreen cargo ship has blocked the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important transportation arteries. This crisis will once again raise the issue of diversification of global transport routes and increase the importance of railway lines. This will increase the transport potential of the South Caucasus and the Mehri/Zangezur corridor, which may make these projects even more interesting for investors.
Stabilization of the South Caucasus and commission of the Zangezur corridor created a new reality in the region and gave rise to once-existed economic projects such as Trans-Caspian pipeline from the dusty pages of history.[27] The project to import natural gas from Turkmenistan through a subsea pipeline was suggested in 1996 by the United States.[28] The Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline project is proposed to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to the European Union member countries, circumventing both Russia and Iran. The plan is also considered as a natural eastward extension of the Southern Gas Corridor. This project attracts significant interest since it will connect vast Turkmen gas resources to major consumer geographies, such as Turkey and Europe. However, because of Russian and Iranian opposition to the project, an unresolved legal dispute over territorial boundaries of the Caspian Sea and a gas discovery on Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz field, the submarine pipeline project was shelved in the summer of 2000 and only the South Caucasus Pipeline project continued.[29] For instance, in 2007, Russian Natural Resources Ministry flagged that any gas or oil pipelines across the floor of the Caspian Sea would be environmentally unacceptable.[30] Iran also defied this project by claiming any gas or oil pipelines across the floor of the Caspian Sea would be environmentally unacceptable.[31]
However, these barriers partially faded away, since Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – all bordering the Caspian Sea – have agreed on how to divide it up. Their leaders signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea in the Kazakh city of Aktau which was ratified completely by the signatory states in 2019.[32] [33]
Another positive development ensued when on January 21, Turkmenistan, which has the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world (an estimated 19.5 trillion cubic meters, nearly 10 percent of the world’s total[34]), an Azerbaijan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreeing on the terms for their joint exploration and development of the field.[35] This agreement removed the main obstacle to the construction of the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP) and could pave the way for the transit of Turkmenistan’s massive gas resources to Europe. The results of the Second Karabakh War have eliminated any possible threat by Armenia to the “Ganja Gap” corridor from Azerbaijan to Georgia, through which pipelines and other communications already have been passing. If constructed, a Trans-Caspian gas pipeline would find a ready transit route to Europe in the form of the “Southern Gas Corridor,” the EU-backed transit route which has been supplying Azerbaijani gas to Turkey since mid-2018, and which on December 31 began supplying Azerbaijani gas to Greece, Bulgaria and Italy. Two main pipelines (TANAP pipeline through Turkey and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline across Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea to Italy) currently operate at only half capacity and the gas from Turkmenistan could easily complete its full capacity.[36]
On top of that, the most important motive of reviving Trans-Caspian project is the dependence of Central Asian countries on Chinese and Russian markets. Non-diversification of energy security could lead to serious mismanagement in the region. Firstly, one can observe risks of energy overdependence on one major importer country, for example the Turkmenistan-Russia 2010 economic crisis. Turkmenistan was never compensated by Gazprom after demanding payment under a “take-or-pay” clause in 2010, its relative geopolitical and economic weakness giving it little choice but to give up on the claim. Another motive for Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) to consider alternative routes, in order to diversify their energy security and diminish possible threat from external actors like Russia and China, should be recent developments after COVID-19 outbreak on China’s natural gas supply demand. On February 2020, China’s natural gas demand was estimated[37] to have fallen 17 percent year-on-year, and the impact of this fall could be devastative for economic stability of the Central Asian countries, especially for Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. If the sudden decline continues, it could send shockwaves through the economies of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, which supply Beijing with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually.
Beijing and its Central Asian partners have never publicly opened access to their natural gas contracts, therefore details of these contracts are kept secret. It must be highlighted that almost all of Turkmenistan’s gas exports now go to China, shipping some 30 bcm annually.[38] As Turkmenistan’s economic dependency on China is almost absolute, it threatens the economic stability of Ashgabat. Growing fluctuation of import demands from China creates “force majeure” danger in the region. On March 6, Kazakhstan, whose state pipeline company KazTransGas (KTG) received[39] a force majeure (about abandoning contract) declaration from Beijing. On March 11, Kazakh Energy Minister Nurlan Nogyev said that gas supplies had fallen by 20 to 25 percent “at the request of China”. After this shock from China, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan gained serious awareness that they have to immediately diversify their export routes and find new, miscellaneous partners outside the region. Trans-Caspian pipeline would be a lucrative way to promote both countries’ energy stability; thus, resource-rich Central Asian countries could get access to the European market.
There is an additional route for Turkmenistan to gain new partners: Iran. However, there are unresolved problems that jeopardize possible ways of utilizing this route. Firstly, Turkmenistan has suspended gas supplies since the first week of January 2017 on the grounds that Iran failed to pay its debt ($1.8 billion) over a decade.[40] [41] Nonetheless, the route passing through Iran has more capacity compared to Azerbaijan, South Caucasus route is out of danger. At the moment, Azerbaijan is a more suitable transit country for Turkmenistan on account of tension between the US and Iran which undermines Iran’s transit route. In addition, if Turkmenistan does not want to be in a complex situation as it was in 2010 with Russia, Ashgabat should choose to cooperate with those countries which can balance Turkmenistan’s power in crisis periods .
For all that, there is the only and most substantial barrier that can suppress the Trans-Caspian Pipeline. The convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea signed in 2018 leaves the construction of pipelines in the sea partly unsettled. Article 14 of the Convention states that “the parties can lay underwater pipelines along the Caspian floor” (Section 2) “according to consent by the parties through whose sector the cable or pipeline should be built” (Section 3). However, the same section of the Convention also stipulates that such activities hinge on “the condition of the accordance of their projects with ecological requirements and standards”.[42] This means that “each of the five Caspian littoral states will be able to weigh in on questions of the environmental impact of transboundary pipeline projects which could become a new instrument some regional players might use to try to delay the construction of the TCP”.[43] Russia and Iran can utilize these arguments and justify its objection to TCP. Before the signing of the Convention in Aktau, ministers of ecology of the Caspian states, in an extraordinary meeting in Moscow, signed an additional Protocol to the 2003 Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea. The 2003 agreement, which is mostly known as the Tehran Convention, is referred to in the CLSCS as a baseline for environment protection while carrying out pipeline constructions (Article 14.2).[44] The recent Protocol to it, titled Assessment of Impact on Environment in the Trans-border Context, provides legal leverage for trans-national assessment of impacts of the possible pipelines.[45] On August 18, 2018, Igor Bratchikov, Moscow’s chief negotiator on the Convention, referring to that protocol noted that “[…] when and if real plans for the construction of Trans-Caspian pipelines appear, any of the Caspian countries, if it deems it necessary, can join in the procedure for assessing the possible consequences of such projects for the Caspian environment, even at their design stage”.[46] There are certain levers in the text of the Convention that could potentially be used against TCP, since Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and other countries which will participate in this project can compromise with Russia and Iran like Azerbaijan did about the Baku – Tbilisi – Jeyhan pipeline.
Conclusion
To sum up, the results of the Second Karabakh war provoked new reality in the region and subsequently gave rise to the idea of creating a more feasible contact among Turkic Council member states. In the near future, Turkmenistan can consider its membership of the Council, which seems inevitable. Marking the 25th anniversary of Turkmenistan’s permanent neutrality, In December 2020, the Turkish president also reiterated his wish for the Central Asian country to be included in the Turkic Council.[47] Accession of Turkmenistan to the Turkic Council will strengthen its power and evoke new opportunities for this country.
This paper aimed to shed light on the thriving importance of collaboration within the framework of Turkic Council and to analyse future development perspectives in political, particularly economic relations among member states. Firstly, I tried to explain how opinion in Turkic Council member states altered prior to, as well as during the war on regional issues, and how the Second Karabakh war influenced member states’ range of vision by analysing the situation and media trends. We observed that Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan showed considerable interest in the opening of the Zangezur corridor. In addition, the willingness of Turkey and Azerbaijan were presented by schemes which allowed us to suppose that both countries also have powerful motives to attract Central Asian countries into political and economic cooperation. Secondly, the future of the Turkic Council was predicted by considering different scenarios of possible developments in the region. Especially, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan were and are being affected by COVID-19 outbreak and its effects came as a result of China’s diminishing gas demand. Economic stability of these countries were jeopardized in the absence of alternative routes and partners to export its energy products. However, Trans-Caspian pipeline could become a lucrative project for all Turkic Council members and bring these countries together to create a stronger platform which would protect those countries from aggressive actions of Russia and Iran in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and even probably in the Middle East.
Note: This paper was completed in March 2021.
References:
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