Syrian Refugee Crisis as an Issue of International Security and the Stance of NATO

Zuhal Karakoç Dora
Turkish Grand National Assembly

Abstract

NATO, as the most intense military organization in the world, became the most important agent of the Cold War after it was established; so much that, it brought the end of the socialist-communist axis which could not resist to compete with it. The importance of NATO was not just because it was a military unit but also because it was attaching great importance to liberal democratic values. Though, when it felt any kind of threat, it intervened anti-democratically to the member states and claimed that it was to protect the western democracies against Soviet Union, as was seen in military coup d’état in Turkey in the years 1961 and 1980 and in Greece in 1968. When NATO reverted back to the mission of enlargement and establishing peaceful areas, the time it specified mass population movements as an issue of security; the wind of “Arab Spring” was intensified. It was EU who first reacted to the issue with the concept of security; because the instability and unrest could have brought the risk of mass migration towards Europe -which in the end happened due to Syrian crisis. Thereupon, NATO launched few operations in some areas like Libya, partly under the guidance of the USA and France but soon after it decided to retreat from hot spots. Especially after ISIS’s emergence on the stage, NATO was expected to intervene in the situation like it had previously done in Kosovo and Afghanistan where mass population movements had stopped considerably. However, the option of military intervention never seriously brought to the table in Syrian crisis. Instead, after influx of the immigrants towards Europe, it has undertaken the function of stopping mass movements in Mediterranean and the Aegean Seas in order to protect the Western World as an issue of security since 2016. Now it is needed to be asked: If NATO had intervened in the Syrian crisis in time, would there have been such millions of displaced people within and out of Syria?


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