The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Today, environmental degradation, migration, economic development, and other policy areas all demand that exclusionary definitions of the nation and hegemonic visions of the state both be transcended. The problems that the Black Sea region faces require two things that seem inherently at odds: on the one hand, strong and capable states, and on the other, states that are willing to cooperate with their neighbors by surrendering up some of their sovereignty. But as the 1990s confirmed, simultaneously building and unbuilding the state is no easy enterprise.

  Just after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, Arnold Toynbee wrote that the “fundamental and identical interest of all the Near Eastern peoples lies in peace, in aloofness from the intrigues and ambitions of the great powers, and in the moral and economic support of some international organization.”1 That was the recipe that generations of European diplomats had recommended: Internationalize the status of the sea and its outlets—the Danube and the Straits—in order to prevent any regional power from monopolizing them, especially by using the slogan of national liberation to do so.

  In one sense, the Toynbee strategy has proved eminently successful. Despite the many territorial disputes and the mutual distrust inherited from the pre-communist and communist pasts, armed conflict among the states of the Black Sea zone is now virtually unthinkable. In only one instance—the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended in a ceasefire in 1994—did a territorial dispute between two states lead to war. The only other major instance of potential international strife concerned the status of the old Soviet Black Sea fleet, whose ships and personnel were claimed by both independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation. But the stand-off was settled amicably in 1997, when the two governments agreed to divide the naval assets, with the majority of ships going to Russia. Ukraine further agreed to lease port facilities to the Russian navy, and both countries now share dock space in the fleet’s traditional home, Sevastopol. Of course, none of this is much comfort to victims of the Karabakh violence and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons that have yet to return to their homes in Azerbaijan or, indeed, to the many people affected by the several other civil wars in the region. But in a part of the world which, in Toynbee’s day, still appeared the powder keg that it had been for much of the previous century, the near absence of international conflict is remarkable.

  In the early 2000s, it is not the power of states that threatens the peace and stability of this zone, but rather their weakness. In many areas, poverty is endemic, not simply the result of the “transition” from communist central planning but a long-term, structural feature of local economies. Government institutions, where they function at all, sometimes do so only because they represent sources of revenue for office holders, in the form of petty bribes and large-scale kickbacks. The inadequacy of social services makes daily survival a self-help game, and the reliance on old social networks—of family, clan, and ethnic group—in turn discourages individuals from thinking of themselves as equal citizens of a modern state. More ominously, the lack of effective policing means that trans-state criminal networks, trafficking in everything from arms to drugs to humans, can operate with virtual impunity. Environmental degradation and potential ecological disasters, some left over from communism and others the product of ill-conceived industrial and agricultural policy under the successor governments, are hazards to present and future generations. Transit migrants and asylum-seekers increasingly regard Turkey and the postcommunist states as accessible waiting rooms for eventual migration, whether legal or illegal, into the European Union. Refugees from armed conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus have put further burdens on states that have difficulty providing for their own citizens, much less those of neighboring countries. It is no exaggeration to say that the population movements of the 1990s and the early 2000s—the flow of economic migrants, asylum-seekers, transit migrants, and refugees—may yet transform the demographic structure of the region in at least as profound a way as the great unpeopling from the 1860s to the 1920s.

  The particular problems of weak states are most striking in the outcome of the region’s separatist movements and civil wars. In the early 1990s, several small wars and insurgencies raged across the wider southeast Europe, but by the middle of the decade, most had decrescendoed into relative stability. In the Balkan and post-Soviet conflicts, full-scale peace agreements or temporary ceasefires were signed; in some instances, international reconstruction efforts were put in place and foreign peacekeepers deployed. Turkey’s capture of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 largely deflated the rebel movement in the southeastern part of the country. In four important instances, however, the end of all-out war did not produce a real solution to the conflicts. Instead, unrecognized but functional states grew up in the former conflict zones, de facto countries that have done an exceptional job of surreptitiously acquiring the accoutrements of sovereignty.

  South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Transnistria are little known to the wider world, but they have spent more than a decade as really-existing entities in the Black Sea zone. The internationally recognized governments that play host to them—Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova—have continually called for outside help in settling the disputes, and representatives of the United Nations and other international mediators have been on the ground to do just that. Negotiations, in one form or another, have dragged on for years without a final settlement. Yet, in this limbo between war and peace, Eurasia’s unrecognized states have created real institutions that function, in some cases, about as well as those of the countries of which they are still supposedly constituents. All have the basic structures of governance and the symbols of sovereignty. All have military forces and poor but working economies. All have held elections, however undemocratic, for political offices. All have set up currency structures, border regimes, and educational systems separate from those of the recognized states. These four entities even cooperate with each other, sending representatives to regular summits and ministerial meetings. Most maps show only six states around the Black Sea, but if a baseline test of a “state” is simply the ability to exercise control over a defined piece of territory, then there are in fact rather more—depending on who is doing the counting.

  It was, in part, to deal with the problems of state weakness and to ensure that internal disputes would not erupt into international war that the littoral states and their neighbors launched a program of regional cooperation in the early 1990s. A new forum, Black Sea Economic Cooperation, or BSEC, was established on the initiative of the Turkish government. The forum was an outgrowth of Turkey’s new-found vocation as a regional leader after the end of the cold war; but it was also a way of enhancing the sovereignty of the region’s many new states, some of which were experiencing real independence for the first time.

  In June 1992, the heads of state of all the Black Sea littoral countries and other regional neighbors met in Istanbul to proclaim the emergence of a broad cooperation program, a set of initiatives that would eventually include policy areas such as the environment, crime and corruption, investment, taxation, and education. Six years later, the eleven member states—Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Greece—signed a charter that upgraded BSEC to the status of an international organization and created a permanent secretariat, now located in an impressive villa just up the Bosphorus from central Istanbul. A Black Sea parliamentary assembly, an investment bank, a multinational naval unit, a summer university, and a policy research center were also established. For the first time ever, the coasts of the Black Sea were to be brought together not by conquest or the informal networks of commerce, but rather by the purposeful effort of political leaders to craft a secure and cooperative region with the sea at its center.

  Clearly the most pressing area of concern was the environmental degradation of the sea itself, and this is the area in which BSEC has concentrated its
attention. Already in April 1992, the six coastal states signed the Bucharest Convention on environmental protection; a year later, at a meeting in Odessa, they agreed to establish conservation zones in the coastal areas of each country, coordinate anti-pollution policies in the river systems that feed into the sea, and share vital scientific information on pollution and biodiversity. In 1996, under the aegis of BSEC, the first multi-country analysis of the causes of Black Sea pollution was completed, with assistance from the United Nations and other international organizations. Now, every five years, scientists in all coastal countries work together to issue a “state-of-the-sea” report, a diagnostic venture that is a truly gargantuan step away from the mutual suspicion that prevented such efforts during the cold war.

  There are already some signs of hope. Nutrient enrichment declined over the course of the 1990s, and that in turn produced a slow-down in the plankton and algae blooms that had depleted oxygen and nurtured the fecund jellies. Industrial pollution also eased somewhat, and overfishing was scaled back. Some of these developments, though, are only serendipitous. The parlous state of agriculture in the former communist states—including a universal fall-off in production and, therefore, a decline in the use of chemical fertilizers—has had the beneficial effect of reducing nutrient run-off into the sea. The sharp decline in the fishing fleets of the littoral states was a result of overfishing after the 1960s and the economic crisis in the communist states from the late 1980s forward; but the scaling back of industrial fishing may now allow fish stocks to recuperate. (Because of the laying up of boats in the former communist countries, some 90 percent of the annual catch is now hauled in by Turkish vessels alone. If one needs convincing, just try to order a fish dinner at a restaurant on the Romanian coast.) Industrial pollution, still acute in some areas, has become less of a problem on the sea as a whole, simply because of the shutdown of large industrialized centers from Bulgaria to Georgia. As the economies of littoral states begin to recover, however, the most serious environmental problems will no doubt return. Without proper care, what may be good in the short term for the people along the coast—a return to the relative economic stability of the past—may well do further longterm harm to the sea.

  In areas other than the environment, BSEC has not lived up to its original grand vision. In fact, on just about any thumbnail indicator, the Black Sea region, as a political or economic entity, is today hard to see. On average, the BSEC member states conduct only about 12 percent of their trade with other members. National airlines are far more likely to connect their capitals with European and North American hubs than they are with nearby states. One of the few places where the region shows up clearly is at the beach: When tourists from Black Sea states go abroad on holiday, they are most likely to visit one of their neighbors—Turkey.2 Heads of state meet at summits, ministers travel to conferences, nongovernmental organizations occasionally work out action plans on an issue of common concern. But the emergence of a genuinely vibrant and cooperative region stretching from Greece to Azerbaijan is still a long way away.

  The reasons for BSEC’s difficulties are not hard to gauge. A regional organization that includes Russia, Turkey, and Greece—three mid-size powers with divergent interests and goals—was bound to run into problems. Each of these anchor states has its own vision of a foreign policy role in the region, but none is sufficiently wealthy to finance the kinds of programs that would make those visions a reality. Moreover, BSEC’s emergence was less the result of any genuine commitment to regional cooperation than the product of a peculiar concatenation of geopolitical interests. In the early 1990s, Turkey sought a new regional role, perhaps to demonstrate to the European Union its potential as a force for stability; the newly independent states of Eurasia were eager to join any international organization that would have them; and Greece and Russia were not about to let Turkey define a new “Black Sea region” without them. Build it and they will come, the Turkish president Turgut Özal, the original cheerleader for BSEC, might have thought in 1992. And come they did—to multiple summits, working group sessions, special conferences, and other forums for discussions about the future of the sea. The far trickier issue, however, has been to figure out what exactly this new club is supposed to do, now that the membership list has been assembled.

  No politician around the sea today believes that BSEC should be a substitute for the kinds of regionalism that really matter: membership in NATO and the European Union. Romania and Bulgaria were invited to join the former in 2002, and they are engaged in ongoing negotiations for accession to the latter, perhaps by 2007. Turkey has been a NATO member almost since the organization’s inception, but EU membership has remained elusive; still, European states have declared their willingness to consider Turkish membership in the future. While presidents and prime ministers repeatedly affirm their commitment to building a Black Sea region, in practice there is little incentive to cooperate with countries whose prospects for membership in the truly important organizations are even slimmer than one’s own. For all the energetic summitry that has defined BSEC, it is the policies of NATO and the European Union that are today the driving forces behind the international politics of the Black Sea zone.

  As the century progresses, the politics of energy will also bring together the countries and peoples of BSEC in new ways and will remain a source of rivalry in others. In the early 1990s, the promise of oil and gas from the fields around the Caspian Sea, one of the largest sources of marketable hydrocarbons outside the Middle East, sparked a contest among individual states and multinational corporations. For much of the decade, the various channels that Caspian oil might take were the subject of wide-ranging debate. Some companies and governments advocated traditional routes to ports on the eastern coast of the Black Sea and then via tanker to the Mediterranean. The Turkish government objected that the resulting increase in traffic though the Bosphorus would surely lead to an environmental catastrophe, such as an oil spill along the heavily populated coasts, in the heart of Istanbul. Others argued for a new pipeline that would avoid the Black Sea region altogether and head south through Iran, a proposition rejected as politically unpalatable by the United States.

  The politics of pipelines finally ended with an agreement to construct an underground transit system from the south Caucasus to the eastern Mediterranean. In early 2003 construction began on a new pipeline, built by an international consortium headed by BP (the former British Petroleum), that runs from Baku, via Tbilisi, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. The pipeline bypasses the Black Sea ports and will undercut the need for increased tanker traffic through the Bosphorus to handle Caspian output. By 2009 the line is expected to carry a million barrels of oil per day. In the 1880s the completion of the Transcaucasian railway reshaped the regional economy of the southeastern coast and, indeed, the international commerce of the entire sea; the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan line has been hailed as its equal in the early twenty-first century. However, since the terminus lies far away from the Black Sea, in southern Turkey, it is unclear what impact the much-vaunted pipeline will really have on the sea as a whole. It may well make the port cities even more marginal than they were before.

  Thinking of the Black Sea only in terms of high-level politics is too narrow a view of the region, however. The sea still binds, but sometimes in unexpected ways. Shuttle traders—the successors to the coastal merchants of centuries past, but now with airline tickets instead of permits of passage from a Byzantine or Ottoman official—carry Turkish manufactured goods for resale in Odessa, Kyiv, and Moscow. Manual laborers from the north work on construction projects in the south, while Turkish construction companies design and build houses and commercial buildings across the former Soviet Union. Immigrant sex workers (the “Natashas” of Turkish argot) find customers in Istanbul and Ankara, a movement of women born of the same mix of force, tragic necessity, and misplaced optimism that drove Circassians to the seraglio. These kinds of regional linkages are, of course, hostage to the vicissi
tudes of the macroeconomy. The collapse of the Russian ruble in the late 1990s probably slowed down the active “suitcase trade” with Istanbul, and the movement of sex workers from the former Soviet republics also seems have declined. But the connections are still there. One need only stroll through the Laleli district of Istanbul—the center of the informal trade between the city and the former Soviet north—or walk into a hotel lobby in Trabzon to see evidence of the low-level bonds that reemerged at the end of the twentieth century.

  There is also some evidence of a growing appreciation for the old multicultural identities of the seacoast. Archaeological investigations, often in cooperation with west European and American partners, uncover ancient sites and reveal patterns of mutual influence in antiquity. Regional museums in Constanţa, Varna, and Simferopol embrace the multiple cultures of the coasts, in ways that are often at odds with the images found in “national” museums in the capital cities. In Turkey, one can now purchase books on the Hemşin, Laz, and other peoples of the Pontic coast, something that was unthinkable only a few years ago, when literature on ethnic minorities was practically nonexistent. None of this means that any of the littoral areas is likely to experience a renaissance soon, however. Out-migration from almost every part of the coast remains high. Local economies are stagnant. The reassertion of cultural identities has also sometimes led to conflict. The return of Tatars to Crimea has sparked disputes over land rights and problems of social integration, while the region’s several quasi-states, from Transnistria to Karabakh, exist in an uneasy truce with internationally recognized governments. Holiday-makers can now enjoy spectacular beaches and resorts in Bulgaria, but many other parts of the sea remain decidedly unwelcoming.