Year LXVII, 2025, Single Issue, Page 48
NATIONALISM AND POWER POLITICS:
HAS CYPRUS REACHED A TURNING POINT?
On 19 October 2025, the northern part of Cyprus surprisingly elected Tufan Erhürman as its new president. This election is significant for the wide margin by which Erhürman beat the outgoing president Ersin Tatar, securing 63 per cent to the latter’s 35 per cent of the votes, but above all for the marked difference between the two men’s stances on the question of Cyprus. Indeed, while Erhürman positioned himself as a supporter of reunification with the Republic of Cyprus, his predecessor instead pushed for consolidation of the statehood of the self-declared northern republic, an entity closely aligned with (or subordinated to) Ankara.
The division of the island into two parts—the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus—dates back to the conflict triggered in the twentieth century by a Greek-backed coup aimed at achieving union with Greece. This coup, prompting a military intervention by Turkey in support of the Turkish-Cypriot minority population, ultimately resulted in a full-fledged occupation of the northern part of the island and the creation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, an entity recognised solely by Ankara and still today excluded from the international community.
Over the centuries, various peoples have contested this island. Following an initial thousand-year Greek-style colonisation, which took a succession of forms—city-state, Roman province, Byzantine rule, Venetian domination—it was annexed to the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, it experienced immigration from Anatolia and saw a profound cultural and religious transformation of part of its population. In 1878, the island entered the orbit of the British Empire, remaining under British control until the mid-twentieth century. This change of governance allowed its Greek-Cypriot population (around 80 per cent of the total) to develop a growing desire for unification with Greece, a sentiment known as Enosis. By contrast, the Turkish-Cypriot community’s fear of being reduced to a minority within Greece fuelled the development of the idea of partitioning the island, a concept known as Taksim. The creation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 followed the island’s independence from the United Kingdom and the Greek and Turkish communities’ agreement on a division of powers. But this compromise solution, intended to circumvent the aspirations of both Enosis and Taksim and supported and guaranteed by London, as well as Athens and Ankara, proved insufficient to ease internal ethnic tensions. The 1974 coup d’état orchestrated by the Greek military junta then ruling Athens, which wanted to see Cyprus united with Greece, prompted a military response from Ankara in defence of the Turkish community, and led to the occupation of the northern part of the island that persists to this day.
The division of the island between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is more than merely a question of ethnic and religious partition. Indeed, it carries economic and energy security implications for both Turkey and Cyprus, as well as for the European Union, of which Cyprus is a member state. For Turkey, control of Northern Cyprus is a means to expand its influence in the eastern Mediterranean and access the area’s hydrocarbon resources, in violation of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) entitlements held by Cyprus under the so-called Montego Bay treaty.1 In recent years, Turkey—consistent with its “Blue Homeland” doctrine of maritime power projection, first conceptualised in 20062—has adopted an increasingly assertive stance in the Mediterranean. This choice has brought Ankara into direct contention with Greece and seen it relying heavily on Cyprus as a means to expand its maritime boundaries. It has consequently led Turkey to disregard the EEZ delimitation agreements concluded by the Republic of Cyprus with several Middle Eastern states and to contest the activities of foreign companies operating under Cypriot-issued licences.
Turkey imports around 90 per cent of its energy—largely natural gas, oil and coal—mainly from Russia, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Iran. The country’s energy consumption is increasing constantly, more than doubling since the turn of the century. This, combined with the worsening of tensions linked to the instability in the Middle East and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, explains Turkey’s aforementioned assertive stance in the eastern Mediterranean—adopted to guarantee it access to and control of the region’s natural resources.
Access to hydrocarbons is, moreover, also crucial for Europe, which needs to diversify its energy supply sources, particularly now that it is seeking to end its dependence on Russian gas. Ankara’s blatant disregard for agreements in this field is contributing to the erosion of international law and undermining the European countries’ energy interests, thereby exacerbating instability in the area and, in effect, interfering with the realisation of crucial infrastructure projects between third countries there, such as the EastMed Pipeline and the Great Sea Interconnector for transporting gas and electricity respectively from Israel to Greece and the rest of Europe via Cyprus.
Erhürman’s victory reopens the possibility that negotiations for the island’s unification on the basis of some form of coexistence between the two Cypriot populations might be resumed, leading to an easing of tensions. Political and economic integration of the island would in fact reduce friction in the eastern Mediterranean, creating a more stable setting for the pursuit of energy cooperation and maritime security. Participation of the Turkish-Cypriot community in the institutions of a state organised along federal lines would allow Turkish interests to be safeguarded in a legitimate and institutional manner, while regional integration would create the conditions for developing new joint projects for the transport of gas to Europe.
In this context, the voice of the European Union is practically absent. With the EU lacking true political power, the situation remains largely in the hand of the parties directly involved—the two Cypriot communities, Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom, the latter by virtue of its sovereign military bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia—while the Union is little more than a bystander. This diplomatic weakness undermines not only the EU’s capacity to safeguard one of its member states but also the credibility of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, which remains constrained by national interests.
In short, the question of Cyprus highlights the structural limits of the current European architecture and the need for a federal evolution of the Union. Creating a European federation with a genuinely common CFSP would make it possible to overcome the national divisions that currently leave the Union paralysed and unable to act in scenarios such as the Mediterranean. A federal Europe would have the political legitimacy and decision-making tools necessary to intervene in a coherent manner—speaking with a single voice in complex international settings and more effectively defending its own strategic, energy and security interests. From this perspective, reunification of the island of Cyprus would be not only a regional achievement but also a testing ground of the continent’s capacity to evolve from a mere economic union into a mature political actor, capable of guaranteeing stability and order in its neighbourhood.
Giuseppe Arcidiacono
1 The Montego Bay treaty, officially titled the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and commonly referred to as the “constitution of the oceans”, is an international agreement that was concluded in 1982 and entered into force at the end of 1994. It establishes a legal framework for regulating oceans, seas and internal waters, defining states’ rights and responsibilities regarding the use of their maritime spaces and resources. Among other things, it defines how coastal states may exercise their sovereignty over different maritime zones, depending on how far these zones extend from the coastline: territorial seas (up to 12 nautical miles), contiguous zones (from 12 to 24 nautical miles), Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs, from 24 to 200 nautical miles), continental shelves (not beyond 350 nautical miles).
2 The notion that Turkey should play a pre-eminent role in the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea, and that it was being “suffocated” by Greek sovereignty over the Aegean islands, was already gaining currency within the Turkish armed forces in the 1970s. However, it was not formalised until 2006, when the Turkish Navy’s chief of staff defined the “Blue Homeland”, an area to which Turkey laid claim even though it extended well beyond the maritime limits attributed to the country under the Montego Bay Convention.
Giuseppe Arcidiacono
