Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has completed an economic diplomacy tour to Pakistan and Kazakhstan, signing important trade accords with both countries.
This trip was ostensibly to attend with around 7,500 others visitors the Fifth Astana Economic Forum in the Kazakh capital, gatherings by which President Nursultan Nazarbaev is seeking to increase the country's prestige by creating a sort of Central Asian Davos. Yet it falls into the framework of the reorientation of Turkish foreign policy away from the discredited "zero problems" with neighbors doctrine towards its new "Eurasian direction".
Erdogan's stop in Pakistan, where he spent several days on his way to Kazakhstan, also comes into that geo-economic framework, which builds out (without explicitly invoking) the former Turkish leader Turgut Oezal's vision of his country in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era as a regional power. Oezal was Turkey's prime minister from 1983 to 1989 and president from 1989 to 1993.
It is possible to credit Oezal with sowing the seeds of the country's present economic drive, as he transformed its economy by beginning the process of privatizing a good number of state enterprises. His secular Motherland Party no longer exists and Turkey had to await its present demographic situation to find the human-resource dynamism to make good on that promise.
Oezal sought to project Turkish diplomatic and economic power into the South Caucasus and especially Central Asia after the independence of the former Soviet republics 20 years ago, and he succeeded in establishing some cultural ties. However, the desired economic projection never really succeeded, mainly because the countries concerned soon discovered that Turkey could not furnish the advanced technologies and large international capital investment that they needed at the time.
Nevertheless, Oezal's foreign-policy strategy had important successes, including the creation of the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation and the periodic series of Turkic Language Speaking Countries Summits. In 2009, the latter became the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (Turkic Council), with its general secretariat in Istanbul.
The Turkic Council has co-opted two formerly autonomous organizations to its family, the Turkic Academy founded in 1992 in Kazakhstan and its Parliamentary Assembly founded in 1998 in Azerbaijan. It currently has four members: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. Kyrgyzstan, increasingly falling within a Chinese sphere of diplomatic and economic influence, is the only one of the other countries with which Turkey has not succeeded in establishing significant economic exchanges.
Thus in a speech broadcast live on television in Kazakhstan, Erdogan vowed to more than triple the US$3 billion bilateral trade turnover (sum of imports and exports) in 2011 to $10 billion "in a few years", as quoted by Reuters. Turkey's economy minister, Zafer Caglayan, disclosed that his country's Eximbank would provide long-term loans for Turkish business investments in Kazakhstan, without indicating what the terms or conditions might be.
According to Azerbaijan's independent Trend news agency, a delegation of about 150 Turkish businessmen is visiting South Kazakhstan province to inspect a 100-hectare area where a joint industrial zone is proposed to be established. The province is one of the country's fastest-growing regions in population terms, and is culturally more receptive than some other regions to the Islamic cultural component that has become a regular concomitant of Turkish foreign economic activity in recent years.
A newly constructed pipeline from Kazakhstan's northwest is carrying natural gas to South Kazakhstan province (relieving its dependence upon imports from Uzbekistan), thanks to assistance furnished by China in connection with the implementation of the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline that opened in 2009.
In Pakistan, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani agreed with Erdogan on the need to increase significantly the two countries' trade turnover, vowing to seek to reach $2 billion this year, up from the present level of just below $1 billion. Gilani is reported to have invited Turkish companies to invest particularly in communications and housing.
Those remain crucial sectors for Pakistan, as parts of the country are still recovering from the disastrous 2010 floods. Other economic sectors of interest to Turkey include culture, defense, and energy. The agreements came at the second meeting of the high-level bilateral intergovernmental cooperation council that the two countries established two years ago.
During his trip to Kazakhstan, Erdogan set up a similar bilateral intergovernmental cooperation council with Nazarbaev. Such councils function mainly as joint extended cabinet meetings with participation by relevant government ministers over areas that may cross formal bureaucratic lines of responsibility.
Erdogan wanted Turkish investment in Kazakhstan to diversify into the agriculture, defense, energy, and mining sectors with a strong emphasis on industrial infrastructure including "power plant, dam, highway, bridge and port constructions".
In the event, the two countries signed eight agreements and memoranda of understanding in addition to the final joint declaration, reaching beyond economic cooperation to include such operational security issue areas as drug trafficking and anti-terrorism.
Asia Times Online :: Turkey's Erdogan pushes into Eurasia
This trip was ostensibly to attend with around 7,500 others visitors the Fifth Astana Economic Forum in the Kazakh capital, gatherings by which President Nursultan Nazarbaev is seeking to increase the country's prestige by creating a sort of Central Asian Davos. Yet it falls into the framework of the reorientation of Turkish foreign policy away from the discredited "zero problems" with neighbors doctrine towards its new "Eurasian direction".
Erdogan's stop in Pakistan, where he spent several days on his way to Kazakhstan, also comes into that geo-economic framework, which builds out (without explicitly invoking) the former Turkish leader Turgut Oezal's vision of his country in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era as a regional power. Oezal was Turkey's prime minister from 1983 to 1989 and president from 1989 to 1993.
It is possible to credit Oezal with sowing the seeds of the country's present economic drive, as he transformed its economy by beginning the process of privatizing a good number of state enterprises. His secular Motherland Party no longer exists and Turkey had to await its present demographic situation to find the human-resource dynamism to make good on that promise.
Oezal sought to project Turkish diplomatic and economic power into the South Caucasus and especially Central Asia after the independence of the former Soviet republics 20 years ago, and he succeeded in establishing some cultural ties. However, the desired economic projection never really succeeded, mainly because the countries concerned soon discovered that Turkey could not furnish the advanced technologies and large international capital investment that they needed at the time.
Nevertheless, Oezal's foreign-policy strategy had important successes, including the creation of the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation and the periodic series of Turkic Language Speaking Countries Summits. In 2009, the latter became the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (Turkic Council), with its general secretariat in Istanbul.
The Turkic Council has co-opted two formerly autonomous organizations to its family, the Turkic Academy founded in 1992 in Kazakhstan and its Parliamentary Assembly founded in 1998 in Azerbaijan. It currently has four members: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. Kyrgyzstan, increasingly falling within a Chinese sphere of diplomatic and economic influence, is the only one of the other countries with which Turkey has not succeeded in establishing significant economic exchanges.
Thus in a speech broadcast live on television in Kazakhstan, Erdogan vowed to more than triple the US$3 billion bilateral trade turnover (sum of imports and exports) in 2011 to $10 billion "in a few years", as quoted by Reuters. Turkey's economy minister, Zafer Caglayan, disclosed that his country's Eximbank would provide long-term loans for Turkish business investments in Kazakhstan, without indicating what the terms or conditions might be.
According to Azerbaijan's independent Trend news agency, a delegation of about 150 Turkish businessmen is visiting South Kazakhstan province to inspect a 100-hectare area where a joint industrial zone is proposed to be established. The province is one of the country's fastest-growing regions in population terms, and is culturally more receptive than some other regions to the Islamic cultural component that has become a regular concomitant of Turkish foreign economic activity in recent years.
A newly constructed pipeline from Kazakhstan's northwest is carrying natural gas to South Kazakhstan province (relieving its dependence upon imports from Uzbekistan), thanks to assistance furnished by China in connection with the implementation of the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline that opened in 2009.
In Pakistan, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani agreed with Erdogan on the need to increase significantly the two countries' trade turnover, vowing to seek to reach $2 billion this year, up from the present level of just below $1 billion. Gilani is reported to have invited Turkish companies to invest particularly in communications and housing.
Those remain crucial sectors for Pakistan, as parts of the country are still recovering from the disastrous 2010 floods. Other economic sectors of interest to Turkey include culture, defense, and energy. The agreements came at the second meeting of the high-level bilateral intergovernmental cooperation council that the two countries established two years ago.
During his trip to Kazakhstan, Erdogan set up a similar bilateral intergovernmental cooperation council with Nazarbaev. Such councils function mainly as joint extended cabinet meetings with participation by relevant government ministers over areas that may cross formal bureaucratic lines of responsibility.
Erdogan wanted Turkish investment in Kazakhstan to diversify into the agriculture, defense, energy, and mining sectors with a strong emphasis on industrial infrastructure including "power plant, dam, highway, bridge and port constructions".
In the event, the two countries signed eight agreements and memoranda of understanding in addition to the final joint declaration, reaching beyond economic cooperation to include such operational security issue areas as drug trafficking and anti-terrorism.
Asia Times Online :: Turkey's Erdogan pushes into Eurasia
