Turkey uses economic clout to gain Balkan foothold

AP

The minarets and Turkish coffeehouses in this southern Serbian town are reminders of the Muslim empire that once shook Europe’s foundations by pushing armies all the way to the gates of Vienna.

Now Turkey — the modern state that replaced the Ottoman Empire — is staging a comeback. Turkey’s fast-growing economic clout is allowing it into Europe through the back door, even as its dream of joining the continent through the path of EU membership founders.

Turkey’s trade with the Balkan countries increased to $17.7 billion in 2008 from about $3 billion in 2000. Turkey’s companies have built the largest university campus in the Balkans, in a suburb of Sarajevo. And its banks provided 85 percent of loans for building a highway through Serbia for Turkish transit of goods to the EU.

On a 2009 trip to Bosnia, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu explicitly linked his nation’s Balkan strategy to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region between the 14th and early 20th centuries. “The Ottoman centuries of the Balkans were success stories. Now we have to reinvent this.” “Turkey,” he declared triumphantly, “is back.”

The Balkans: While you were watching Egypt...

T. J. Skopje     The Economist

SHARP-EYED observers have noted that some of the protestors that brought down Egypt's president used the clenched-fist logo of  Otpor, the well-organised, foreign-financed civic resistance movement that helped topple Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Parts of the Serbian press, notes Florian Bieber, an academic who works on Balkan affairs, have claimed that former Otpor activists helped train some of the opposition groups.
 

With the world's attention on the Arab world, the political instability gripping much of the western Balkans has largely been ignored. Yet so serious is the unrest here—including mass demonstrations in Belgrade, Tirana and Skopje—that one diplomat told me his country’s foreign ministry had asked him if he thought that Egypt-style revolution might sweep northwards into the Balkans. (His answer was an emphatic “no”.) Here is a round-up of recent developments: