Sweden, Turkey are not expected to back down in the tug of war for NATO accession
Sweden said on Sunday that Turkey is asking too much in return for being allowed to join NATO, as Ankara is effectively demanding the impossible – that Stockholm override a ruling by its own supreme court. But analysts say Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is unlikely to withdraw his permit, at least not before the all-important presidential election scheduled for June.
SwedenNew conservative prime minister Ulf Kristersson said that as far as he was concerned, Stockholm had done enough for Ankara.
“Turkey confirms that we have done what we said we would do. But they also say that they want things that we cannot and do not want to give them,” Kristersson told the Swedish Defense Forces’ security conference.
Together with the neighbors Finlandmade Sweden join NATO its main foreign policy goal last year after Russias invasion of Ukraine yanked them from their official neutrality that stretched back through the Cold War. But Erdogan did Turkeygreen light conditional – accuses Sweden of giving sanctuary to people linked to the Kurdish militant group PKK and to the Gulenist movement Turkey holds responsible for the failed coup in 2016.
Sweden – which has a large Kurdish diaspora of around 100,000 people – responded to Erdogan’s demands at a NATO summit in June. Sweden and Finland agreed to “commit to preventing the PKK’s activities” on its territory.
Stockholm then lifted an embargo on arms sales to Turkey and distanced itself from the YPG – a Syrian militia that Western countries championed for its role in the fight against Islamic State, but angered Ankara because of its close ties to the PKK, which has waged intermittent guerrilla campaigns against the Turkish state since 1984 and is classified as a terrorist organization by the EU and the US as well as Turkey.
But Erdogan is demanding the extradition of journalist Bulent Kenes, a former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, for his alleged role in the foiled coup.
“Not a political issue”
The Swedish Supreme Court rejected Turkey’s demand in December, on the grounds that Kenes risked persecution for his politics if sent to Turkey.
This is a legal issue in a country governed according to the separation of powers, and it gives the Swedish government no choice, noted Håkan Gunneriusson, professor of political science at Mittuniversitetet.
– Specific individuals cannot be deported to Turkey from Sweden if there is no legal basis for it. It is a legal procedure, not a political issue, says Gunneriusson.
If anything, Turkey’s intransigence on the issue will only strengthen Swedish resolve, suggested Toni Alaranta, senior researcher at the International Institute of Finland in Helsinki.
“Both Sweden and Finland are applying for NATO to secure ours [political order based on] the rule of law in times of possible external attack – not to throw it in a dustbin,” Alaranta said.
This approach is popular among Swedish voters, according to a poll published by Dagens Nyheter last week, which showed that 79 percent of Swedes prefer to stand by the court decision even if it delays NATO accession.
Turkey’s stance is soon expected to be the only remaining obstacle to Sweden and Finland joining NATO, as 28 of the Western alliance’s 30 members have validated their wishes and the Hungarian parliament will give its approval later this month.
“Happy to wait for things”
Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto regretted that Ankara is unlikely to allow the two countries to join before Turkey’s presidential election in June. Nevertheless, Sweden and Finland may well have to wait longer.
Turkey is no stranger to rowing with other NATO members – as Erdogan’s shows public ghosts with French President Emmanuel Macron and above all Ankara’s decision to buy Russia’s S-400 air defense system in 2017 in the face of US uproar followed by sanctions. Erdogan also has a history of making life difficult for European countries to help advance his priorities in the Middle East – most notably when he threatened 2019 to allow millions of migrants into Europe unless European powers muted their criticism of Turkey’s offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria.
Of course, Russia’s war against Ukraine is the West’s most pressing geopolitical concern, making it a natural priority to bring Sweden and Finland into NATO’s umbrella. But the war in Ukraine also highlights Turkey’s importance to the Western alliance, even though Ankara has been a troublesome NATO member for the past decade. So far, Erdogan has maintained relations with both Russia and Ukraine while not remaining estranged – and it paid off for the rest of the world when Turkey co-brokered with the United Nations an agreement on Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea in July, before the agreement was renewed in November after Russia briefly withdrew.
“Erdogan approaches the NATO alliance with the belief that Turkey’s interests are not taken seriously enough and that NATO needs Turkey,” noted Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey specialist at the St. Lawrence University in New York State and the Middle East Institute in Washington DC. “He doesn’t see bitterness within the alliance as necessarily a bad thing, as long as it underscores that Turkey’s interests need to be addressed.”
The Turkish government’s “core assumptions about how Western governments should persecute Turkey’s enemies run counter to basic principles of the rule of law,” Eissenstat said, adding that he believed, “Ankara knew this from the beginning but believes the process serves its interests.”
“Ankara is perfectly content to wait things out,” he reasoned. “These calculations may well change after Turkish elections when domestic benefits diminish, but until then I doubt Ankara is likely to budge.”
Indeed, Erdogan faces a tricky re-election campaign in June in a dire economic context, as a currency and debt crisis has plagued Turkey since 2018.
“The key issues in Turkey’s election are of course mostly domestic – the abysmal economy and the question of [Syrian] refugees,” Eissenstat pointed out. “But Erdogan clearly benefits from taking a hard stance against Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO.”
Not only does the Turkish public like to “see Turkish leaders play important roles in the world,” Eissenstat said, it’s also “probably true that many share Erdogan’s distrust of the West and belief that Western governments have given sanctuary to Turkey’s enemies.” .
So the Swedish-Turkish tug-of-war will continue. Perhaps the most revealing statement at the Swedish defense conference, however, was not Kristersson’s refusal to overrule the Supreme Court – but rather NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s. suggestions that the alliance has already extended its security umbrella to the two Scandinavian countries. “It is unthinkable that NATO would not act if the security of Sweden and Finland were threatened,” he said.