‘If they choose to protect the rights of the Turkish Cypriots in a separate, independent entity, then they should be restricted to what is attributable to the exclusive economic zone of that unlawful entity. Therefore, they have no reason to question the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus.’ (Nicos Anastasiades, 2/1/2018, quoted in:Alphanewslive. (2018) ‘Anastasiades’ statement provokes reactions’ [Αντιδράσεις προκαλεί η δήλωση Αναστασιάδη για την ΑΟΖ] (3/1/2018) Alphanewslive https://www.alphanews.live/politics/antidraseis-prokalei-e-delose-anastasiade-gia-ten-aoz)
This book is based on two decades of close monitoring on the evolution of the Cyprus issue, of writing and political engagement and action against the partition. I am already over 40 years old and I originally wrote this text in Greek, at Kaimakli, a place in Nicosia, in which, on the 3 of the 4 sides of the horizon, a few kilometres in front of me, lies the dividing line of my country with its dead zone. I wish it was otherwise, so that today I would be able to write a book titled Overturning Partition, a feeling I also had during 2003–2004 as a postgraduate student of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science while writing my dissertation on the then ongoing developments with the Annan Plan and the referendum. At that time, I had started with the working title The Peace Process in Cyprus, but in the spring of 2004 the title became Interpreting the Greek Cypriot No.
I refrained from systematically continuing my academic engagement with the Cyprus issue and generally selected other topics for my scientific work over the last 15 years. But my political activism in the reunification movement and my public articles remained largely oriented towards exploring partition and aiming to contribute to its overthrow. This is something that does not stop with the publication of this book. However, since 2017 there was a decisive moment on the Cyprus issue, analogous to that of 2004, and since I think that the various pieces of analysis I wrote in various phases these 15 years have outlined an adequate framework of analysis, I felt it was time to put in place a comprehensive argument as a coherent whole. This book is addressed to a general audience and tries to avoid various academic conventions to keep the text as readable as possible for the average reader without specialised knowledge in the social sciences or in-depth knowledge of the Cyprus issue.
The aim of the book is to record the basic dynamics that have shaped the Cyprus problem since 1974, especially since the 1990s, a crucial time in the building of partition. It does not adopt a historical logic, although it approaches the subject matter historically and builds a more or less chronological narrative of developments. The perspective and logic of the text lies within the field of political sociology and approaches the Cyprus issue in the light of power relations in society, focusing on the interaction between the political elite and society, the political system and civil society. I define normalisation as a societal process whereby people become accustomed to prevailing conditions, accept them and treat them as the normal state of affairs. Whereby they rationalise and naturalise that which is irrational, arbitrary and abnormal and become accustomed to operating within its political bounds. Although this is a historically determined process, and of a structural character, it is neither solid nor inexorable. It is enmeshed in contradictions and it is inherently fluid and potentially unstable. There are numerous cracks in what appears as a totalising system that can and should be opened further. However, in order to identify where the cracks are and how they can be made bigger one needs to examine the whole wall on which they are situated.
The book focuses on the ideological field and analyses the political dynamics, especially the recent ones, in relation to society and their depiction in the public sphere. It also focuses on the Greek Cypriot community without ignoring the parallel international developments, but also on the dynamics within the Turkish Cypriot community insofar as they have influenced or contributed to the process of partition. It was originally published in Greek in 2019 by Psifides and subsequently translated and published in Turkish in early 2020 by Baranga under the title Denktaş in the south: the normalisation of partition in the Greek Cypriot side. This English edition is an updated and expanded one, re-worked at some points and enriched with some additional theoretical and empirical insights. The Covid-19 pandemic, which overshows everything at this moment, has served as an excuse and as a context for political developments in divided Cyprus, rendering the book yet more topical and its argument yet stronger. As of mid-March 2020, all the crossings between the northern and the southern part of Cyprus have been forbidden and not only there has been no cooperation between the two sides in dealing with the threat posed by Covid-19 but the Republic of Cyprus restricted its reporting of incidences and deaths only to those occurring in the south, as if the northern territory is a separate country. More importantly it remains uncertain as to when and how the checkpoints will open again allowing movement across the dividing line after this ‘temporary suspension’.
This book does not aspire to present a comprehensive and extensive analysis of all the factors that have shaped the socio-political development of the Greek Cypriot community in recent decades in relation to the Cyprus issue. Nor can it account in detail for all the aspects of the development of complex issues such as nationalism, peace talks, inter-communal relations and the international environment. It has a much more limited analytical agenda and much more specific questions to ask. However, it does have the ambitious aim of articulating a general overview of how partition has been normalised during the last decades. Or, to turn it on its head, how partition was not disputed and not eroded sufficiently at a time when it was geopolitically, politically and economically vulnerable both as a balance and as a framework. This book aims to honestly raise the question and discuss publicly and openly a kind of hidden but common secret. The analysis of the normalisation of partition in the Greek Cypriot side also has a political weight, that of reversing a firmly founded ideological structure—but for this reason it also brings a sense of liberation to the extent that it succeeds in this endeavour.
The book is divided into nine chapters dealing with various themes focusing on periods, nodal points and fields that shaped the conditions of normalisation of partition. It also includes a postscript after the conclusion that is sort of autonomous from the rest of the book, in the sense that it reverses the analytic frame by approaching the Cyprus conflict from the outside as opposed to from the inside as the rest of the book does. After this introduction, the second chapter sets the historical context and examines the creation of partition, introducing also conceptual issues in relation to the political system, the political balance of forces and the dynamics of identities and ideologies at a societal level. It essentially narrates the basic developments of the 25-year-long period 1950–1975 that led to the separation of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The third chapter discusses sociologically the separation, as it was almost completely imposed between 1975 and 2003, and its consequences at the level of collective consciousness between the two communities. Having outlined the key issues that have historically constituted the Cyprus problem, the next chapters dealing with the latest developments deepen the analysis and discuss the parameters of the failure to be resolved.
The fourth chapter focuses on the opening of the barricades and the big social potential that it created in 2003, but also how that failed to assume a direct political form resulting in its erosion and in the leading back to the margins of those logics and forces that persistently articulated an anti-partitionist political stance. It also discusses the importance of the existence of open checkpoints and crossings from 2003 to 2020 and their impact on inter-communal relations. The referendum on the Annan Plan is the central theme of Chap. 5, serving as a pillar on which the basic argument of the book is laid: that the consolidation of the partition was neither automatic nor de facto, nor did it happen behind the back of the Greek Cypriot community. It was not the resounding ‘No’ to Annan Plan which sealed the partition. More important was the repulsion by many of the consequences of the loud ‘No’ and hence their inability to work out alternative practices and other scenarios in the years to come. But the demystification that came with the referendum process meant the end of the fog and the end of innocence for all.
The sixth chapter discusses the last battle between federation and partition in the 2007–2017 decade at the political level and how, despite the apparent victory of the federalist forces, it was ultimately the forces of partition that really prevailed defining the game. It reviews the internal dynamics in the two communities, the international changes and the developments in the negotiations until the collapse of the last round of talks in 2017, distinguishing between the formal and substantive attitude of the various actors, the form and content of the actions at the political and societal level. Subsequently, the seventh chapter focuses on the role played and not played by education and the media both historically and at crucial moments in the development of the Cyprus issue, thus opening up the discussion on the structures and institutions of the Republic of Cyprus of emergent necessity and their impact on collective memory, social perceptions and public opinion. The central theoretical concept here is the idiosyncratic, deep state that has historically been shaped and reproduced preserving certain dominant, ideological and political frames that impact on present political time.
Finally, the eighth chapter opens up the analytical perspective and discusses in more theoretical terms the argument and, more specifically, the political balances and political stakes as shaped by recent internal and international developments. It deals with the class and political equilibria within the Greek Cypriot society, briefly describes the left-wing approaches and discusses the various lines, positions and plans of the Greek Cypriot bourgeoisie and their association with the popular and worker strata. The goal here is to explain the shifts, the legitimisation of policies and the inability to set up an alternative historical bloc that could overturn the partitionist conditions.
In the Conclusion an attempt is made to place the problematic of the book in historical terms and to make a calm appraisal of the effect that the actors have had on the production and reproduction of the structures of partition. This is, I believe, an obligation to the next generation who has been condemned to live in a precarious environment, in a possibly deteriorating partitionist state of affairs, where peacekeeping will continue to depend entirely and exclusively on international balances. This spirit is carried through to the postscript which analyses the current state of the Cyprus partition in international terms, situating it in the regional dynamics and as viewed
by the EU and the UN.
It is important to say that the state of affairs, as shaped in 1974, the established partitionist status quo, which is based internally on nationalism and fear, does not provide any security in conditions of change of these international balances. That the non-solution consolidates the subsumption of Cyprus in the grid of imperialist relations. That without the reunification of Cyprus and the development of the consciousness and reality of the common interests of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, we are in danger of becoming again the export point of the tension of the Greco-Turkish expansionisms and their competition.
The idea that Denktaş’ vision of a partitioned Cyprus found half a century later many advocates in the Greek Cypriot community is neither new nor my own. The same applies to the insight of its normalisation as a process guiding the political economy and the political culture of the country. These have been said many times in gatherings, written in articles and exposed to the public sphere. But what has not been done so far is an in-depth analysis and a concrete logical and empirical documentation of this claim. This is the intellectual aim of this book. The slogan ‘Denktaş
in the south’, used as the title of the Greek and Turkish editions of this book, was called out by the crowd of pro-Yes Turkish Cypriots in the evening of the announcement of the referendum results, thus reversing the ethno-centrism expressed and served by Rauf Denktaş and his associates. Let him go to southern Cyprus then, where the partitionist status quo has more fans. Over the last two decades, the Greek Cypriot community has been the main field in which the political issue has been played out and decided—whether the partitionist status quo formed in 1974 would be undermined and reversed or consolidated.
Ending this introduction, I reiterate that history does not end and everything can change. The future of the country will ultimately depend upon its people and their action or inaction—people make their own history—as Marx’s famous saying goes. But it will happen in conditions ‘given by the past’. These conditions from the past are what this book records, realistically and without any wishful thinking that may blur the analysis. With the burning desire at the same time, however, to overthrow the consolidation of the partition that is illustrated in the book. Because it is my belief that the ‘any partition’ policy which the dominant section of Greek Cypriot leadership is working upon and which is accepted and/or desired by a strong portion of the Greek Cypriot community will be neither velvet nor advantageous nor will it solve the problem which will continue to haunt us, even if in the coming years some regulation is imposed on its external aspects.
