All-Turkic corridor heralds rise of new Eurasian political bloc
Turkey-led group has potential to disrupt Russia-China power balance
ISTANBUL -- When the leaders of six Turkic states convened in Istanbul last week for a summit of the Turkic Council, they were adamant to seize the golden opportunity in front of them.
Azerbaijan's decisive victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war had created a new reality on the ground. Through a transit corridor awarded to Azerbaijan as part of the ceasefire settlement, regional powerhouse Turkey would potentially regain direct access to its fellow Turkic states in Central Asia.
It hinted at the possibility of elevating an ethnic bloc into a political force, one that could even disrupt the regional power balance between heavyweights Russia and China. The leaders were keen to leverage their advantageous geography to carve out a new role for the Turkic world.
To illustrate the importance Ankara places on the grouping, it allocated a large historical building in Istanbul as the council's new general secretariat office.
The salmon-colored building near Sultanahmet -- the Old City, home to Byzantine and Ottoman palaces -- stands steps away from the tomb of one of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite Ottoman sultans, Abdulhamid II. Turkish pro-government media have compared the two as strong religious leaders, standing up to the great powers of their time.
The opening of the building symbolized Erdogan's commitment to the council, whose members Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and new observer Turkmenistan share historical and linguistic ties.
"From now on, our council will be called the Organization of Turkic States," Erdogan declared at the Nov. 12 summit.
Following Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijan was awarded the right to create transport corridors through Armenia connecting the exclave of Nakhichevan to the rest of the country.
The envisioned road and rail corridor called Zangazur would provide Turkey, which shares a border with Nakhichevan, a direct link to its ally Azerbaijan and, more importantly, access to all of Turkic Central Asia.
Since the 1990s, Ankara's access to the rest of the Turkic world was blocked by Armenia, prompting Turkey and Azerbaijan to use a route through Georgia to bypass Armenia in the South Caucasus. A new corridor via Nakhichevan will be 300 km shorter and run through lowland topography compared with the Georgia route.
Fittingly, the Organization of Turkic States summit was held on the week marking the one-year anniversary of Azerbaijan's victory, which was driven by the armed drones provided by Turkey.
On the sidelines of the summit, economy ministers of energy-rich Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan told Nikkei Asia that the Turkic states will facilitate further movement of goods and lift trade barriers to boost connectivity and trade.
Turkey intends for its "Middle Corridor," the Trans-Caspian East-West corridor that spans from China to Europe, to be the artery that binds the Turkic world.
"If you look at our geography, many member states are landlocked," said Mikayil Cabbarov, Azerbaijan's economy minister. To overcome that disadvantage, the Turkic countries are determined to simplify and harmonize customs procedures and create a seamless corridor.
"Trade and mutual investment between members of Turkish-language states are growing rapidly, 30 years after the independence of Central Asian Turkic states and Azerbaijan," Cabbarov said. "It does not mean we cannot do better. That's exactly what we focused on."
The "Turkic World Vision -- 2040" adopted at the summit calls the Middle Corridor "the shortest and safest transport link between East and West" and says it is important to incorporate the member states into the supply and value chains regionally and globally via this corridor.
Aset Irgaliyev, minister of national economy for Kazakhstan, told Nikkei that "simplifying cross-border trade and unifying transport-transit rules will help and give an impetus to boost trade volumes."
"We will also concentrate our efforts to launch a new special economic zone called Turan next year" in Kazakhstan, Irgaliyev said, a zone exclusively for members and observers of the Organization of Turkic States. The name comes from the Turan steppe, the original home of the Turkic people.
Murat Karatekin, CEO of Turkish logistics company Pasifik Eurasia, the largest railway operator of the Middle Corridor in Turkey, outlined the potential trade benefits of closer ties among the Turkic countries by boosting cooperation on digitalization.
"Integrated, digitized services between the corridor countries can allow customers to track their cargo online and provide communications between railway operators of different countries so that they can complete their respective preparations before train arrivals," Karatekin told Nikkei Asia. "Such moves can significantly shorten lead time."
Michael Tanchum, senior fellow at the Austrian Institute of European and Security Policy and a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the emergence of such a Turkic corridor would be worrisome for Beijing.
"Turkey, ultimately, can pose the greatest systemic threat to China in Central Asia once Ankara has built up its capacity," Tanchum said. "For Beijing, it was, and still is, a matter of consolidating its hold over the commercial architecture of Central Asia before Turkey builds up the requisite capacity. Turkey has come a long way in that regard during the past decade. China, in some sense, has not moved into Central Asia in a sufficiently comprehensive manner to outbox Turkey."
China previously felt at ease over Ankara's ambitions in Central Asia for two reasons, Tanchum said. He cited the threat of a Russian backlash if Turkey intervened heavily in Azerbaijan, as well as Turkey's lack of a direct connection with Azerbaijan and its Caspian Sea access to Central Asia.
"Both of these constraints evaporated with the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war," Tanchum said.
Yet the route still poses many challenges.
"To fully harness the potential of the Middle Corridor, charges taken by states on using roads and railroads should be slashed," said another logistics sector representative.
"Obstacles on visa issuance on truck drivers should be eliminated, Roll-on/Roll-off ferry capacity on ports between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan should be increased and schedules should be fixed and its price should be dropped," the representative said. "Such logistic obstacles are causing a loss of business [on the railway connection from the] North Corridor passing through Russia as well as sea routes."
But once those obstacles are cleared, the Middle Corridor carries the potential to be a powerful alternative to the Russian route.
The Nakhichevan corridor through Armenia also could benefit multiple players.
Azerbaijan already has started construction of a railway and roads along its southern border to prepare to reestablish the link missing since the 1990s, though a final agreement on the issue with Armenia remains to be reached. Occasional exchanges of gunfire along the border are raising fears of a flare-up that could hamper the progress of transport corridors.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has welcomed in principle the plan, saying in March that such a corridor would be profitable for Armenia "because we must have a reliable railway and overland communication with the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This means that the economy of our country can change significantly."
"For Russia the reopening of this link means freight traffic can bypass the Caucasus Mountains and pro-Western Georgia to connect to Armenia and Iran -- all the way to the Persian Gulf -- for the first time in thirty years," senior fellow Thomas de Waal wrote in a Carnegie Europe report published this month.
Tanchum said China might be the big strategic loser in these developments.
So far, the Turkic states including Turkey have been careful not to antagonize China. Despite the Turkic unity hype, neither the summit's final declaration nor the "Turkic World Vision -- 2040" document touched upon China's ethnically Turk Uyghur minority in Xinjiang Province, where human rights violations against this group are alleged.
But as Ankara deepens its economic and security cooperation with the Turkic states of Central Asia, "Turkey could increasingly hold the balance of power between Russia and China in the Eurasian architecture," Tanchum said. "From such a position of greater geopolitical strength, Turkey could conceivably elect to reverse its current acquiescence to China's Xinjiang policy and pressure Beijing as a power player within the emerging Eurasian architecture."