Hazar Raporu - Issue 02 - Winter 2012

Turkey, Caspian Strategies, and the
Economic Cooperation Organisation
William Hale
On 15-16 October 2012 the media
spotlight was briefly turned on a meeting
in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, of the
Economic Cooperation Organisation
(ECO) – a body which had almost
escaped notice until then. The main
cause of this flurry of interest was an
unexpected encounter after the end of
the plenary sessions between Turkey’s
Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdoğan and the
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The two leaders evidently sought to
overcome serious differences in their
policies towards the civil war in Syria
by trying to forge a regional solution to
the Syrian impasse. 1 If nothing else, the
incident suggested that ECO seemed to
have some value as a platform on which
government leaders who were divided on
important international issues could have
a face to face meeting. It also raised the
question as to whether this organisation
had any other useful functions, granted its
normal obscurity. The question is of some
importance in the context of economic
and political relations between the Caspian
nations, since all the countries in the
1 Simon Tisdall, ‘Iran and Turkey’s Meeting Reveals New Approach
to Syria’, The Guardian (London) 25 October 2012.
Caspian basin except Russia are members
of ECO, together with Turkey, Pakistan,
and four other Central Asian republics. 2
Accordingly, this article seeks to outline
the historical development of ECO and
the political and economic issues which
it currently faces. This is followed by an
assessment of its potential importance
in the years ahead. Does ECO offer any
prospect of becoming a more important
instrument for the development of closer
economic and political links in the Caspian
region, or is it condemned to continue as
just another international talking shop
ECO traces its origins to the alliances
of the cold war, although its scope and
purpose has changed fundamentally since
then. In 1955, Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran
and Pakistan, supported by the USA,
formed the Baghdad Pact, as an attempted
pro-western defence alliance in the middle
east. In 1959, following the overthrow of
the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq in the
previous year, it lost its only Arab member,
and was reconstructed as the ‘northern
tier’ alliance of the remaining members,
known as the Central Treaty Organisation
2 That is, Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
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