The Best Historical Analogy for Crimea.. look to Cyprus instead of Poland

[question everything]

The Best Historical Analogy for Crimea Doesn't Involve Nazis For precedent, look to Cyprus instead of Poland

Hillary Clinton is only the highest profile figure to compare Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine to Hitler's expansionist policies prior to World War II. This week, as The Washington Post helpfully lists, we’ve heard other versions of the Hitler analogy from John McCain, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Garry Kasparov, and many others.

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In practice, however, Nazi comparisons are unhelpful. Beyond being inflammatory, these comparisons follow the lazy habit of treating World War II as the only thing that has ever happened. Hitler is not the only leader to use irredentism as a justification for invasion, nor is his policy in the Sudetenland the sole or most useful way to understand what Putin is doing in Crimea. For an alternative example, we might look 1,000 kilometers south of Crimea to the island nation of Cyprus. In 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus and drew international outrage. Forty years later, Turkish forces still occupy Northern Cyprus, which Turkey (and only Turkey) recognizes as an independent country. Cyprus (which in practice means the southern areas not under Turkish control), meanwhile, became a member of the European Union in 2004.

There are a lot of similarities between what Turkey did and what Russia is trying to do. Cyprus was once part of the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire, much as Crimea and the rest of Ukraine were once ruled by Russia. During the Ottoman period, large numbers of ethnic Turks settled on the mainly Greek island. After a period of British rule, Cyprus won independence in 1960, but was politically divided from the start between its Greek and Turkish citizens.

Turkey’s pretext for invading Cyprus was a coup, which is the term Putin uses to describe the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt but democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. In this case, the coup was sponsored by Greece’s military junta with the aim of uniting Cyprus with Greece. This aim was unpopular among ethnic Turks, many of whom welcomed the Turkish invasion. Turkey faced near-universal condemnation for its actions, and has weathered regular UN resolutions criticizing the occupation ever since. While Cyprus never ended up joining Greece, both countries eventually found a home in the EU, where membership has continually eluded Turkey.

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But going forward, Northern Cyprus may prove the right precedent for thinking about Crimea. So far it is clear that Putin effectively controls the peninsula, that Russian forces have faced little resistance from the predominantly Russian population there, that Ukraine has taken no military steps to expel them, and that Crimea’s parliament is set to vote on annexing the region to Russia. The near-unanimous condemnation of Russia makes any alteration of Ukraine’s borders unlikely as a matter of international law, while at the same time a Russian withdrawal from Crimea appears unlikely in practice. In other words, we may be seeing a new status quo in which Ukraine as a whole moves away from Russia and toward eventual EU membership while tolerating de facto Russian rule of a breakaway province. It seems like an improbable scenario, but we’ve seen it before in Cyprus.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116931/putin-invades-crimea-nazi-analogy-isnt-best-europe

[bemildred]

1. +1. nt

[Igel]

2. He and his use others.

They use Kosovo as justification, with Iraq as a politically useful alternatives for some interlocutors. That's the ur-example of ignoring territorial sovereignty for short-term political purposes, seen as a direct affront to Russia and its allies. (With the Ukraine issue being billed as a direct affront to the West.)


They also use Abkhazia and S. Ossetia as perfectly good examples, as well, with the extension that those weren't "their own" Russians but of distinct, non-Slavic ethnicities.

The Cyprus example is also invoked in other contexts. The I/P conflict, for instance, but only partially correctly. Yes, there was invasion and occupation, coupled with population movements and uncompensated confiscation of property. But there was also more ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, and it was chauvinistic Turks occupying chauvinistic Turks with the construction of a vassal state. Leave out ethnicity, and you have the examples of Abkhazia and S. Ossetia, more apt because of the shared history of the territories and the fact that Russia is involved in both.


The Cyprus example will only come in handy for confronting Turkey over its promised interference in protecting the rights of co-ethnic Tatars in Crimea. I mean, if Aksenov has already promised that Ukrainian-speakers will have no linguistic rights in Crimea, what hope is there for the Tatars to have any? (In Aksenov's world, Russians have rights, and all others have special dispensations conferred on an ad hoc, temporary basis, by Russians.)