Turkey's Montreux Convention Outlasts Erdoğan's Emergency Politics

An explosive-laden drone washed ashore in Istanbul on the ninetieth anniversary of the treaty designed to keep Black Sea wars at a manageable distance. Police closed Karaburun beach on 20 July, bomb technicians destroyed the charge and authorities began examining a suspected kamikaze aircraft whose origin they had not established. The Montreux Convention still lets Turkey decide which warships enter the sea. It cannot stop the war’s machines from drifting back onto Turkish sand.

The coincidence captured Ankara’s position better than another speech about mediation. Montreux, signed on 20 July 1936, restored Turkish control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles while preserving merchant passage. It limits the tonnage and duration of non-Black Sea navies and gives Ankara special authority in war. Turkey invoked it after Russia’s full-scale invasion to stop belligerent states reinforcing their fleets through the straits. Romania and Bulgaria can expand bases and clear mines with Turkey; outside powers cannot turn the Black Sea into an unrestricted NATO lake. A ninety-year-old legal restraint has given Recep Tayyip Erdoğan more leverage than the summit diplomacy he prefers to advertise.

The Foreign Ministry calls Montreux a balance applied impartially since 1936. That claim has substance because the convention constrains Turkey as well as its rivals. It permits commercial navigation and subjects Ankara’s gatekeeping to published rules. The bargain has survived fascism, the Cold War and four years of a war between two Black Sea states because none of the main powers likes the available alternatives. In 1936 an average of seventeen vessels crossed the Istanbul Strait each day; the ministry now puts the number near 107, with 169.8 million tonnes of hazardous cargo carried by tankers through Istanbul last year. Predictability is not ceremonial in a waterway running through a city of more than fifteen million people.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan spent the preceding days turning that inherited authority into present-day diplomacy. In Kyiv he met Volodymyr Zelensky, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and presidential-office head Kyrylo Budanov, renewed Turkey’s support for Ukrainian sovereignty and offered to host talks with Russia. Ukraine’s parliament ratified the bilateral free-trade agreement, a step toward the two governments’ $10 billion trade ambition. Zelensky awarded Fidan the Order of Merit and Ankara proposed a moratorium on attacks in the Black Sea. The Kremlin replied that there was no immediate prospect of negotiations.

Turkey’s difficulty is that both belligerents value its gatekeeping more than its peace plan. Ukraine wants Turkish companies in reconstruction, sells engines and technology into a defence partnership and relies on Montreux to keep additional Russian warships out. Moscow values the same treaty because it also keeps larger Western fleets out, and it needs Turkish trade routes. Fidan can convene a room, but neither government will enter it merely because Ankara has kept the door. The explosive drone at Karaburun was a small reminder that mediation has not reduced the volume of the war outside.

Turkey marked another anniversary five days earlier, and the institutional lesson ran in the opposite direction. The failed coup of 15 July 2016 killed 253 people by the Turkish government’s count and injured more than 2,200. Citizens confronted tanks, parliament was bombed and divisions inside the armed forces helped defeat the plot. The state of emergency that followed lasted two years. Around 130,000 public employees were dismissed, about 125,000 people had been arrested by the end of 2016 and 4,000 judges and prosecutors eventually lost their posts. The 2017 referendum replaced the parliamentary system with a presidency holding far wider appointment and executive powers.

Hamit Emrah Beriş of the government-aligned SETA foundation describes 15 July as a victory of political leadership, democratic resilience and state capacity. The first half of that judgment is convincing: Erdoğan called people into the streets, political parties opposed the coup and public services continued. Yaşar Aydın of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs carries the story further. He argues that Erdoğan converted the emergency into an opportunity to consolidate power, weakening legal predictability and political competition. This second account better explains the ten years after the tanks were stopped. A democracy can defeat a coup in one night and still lose restraints in the decade that follows.

The opposition’s condition supplies the current evidence. A court annulled the 2023 Republican People’s Party congress in May, removed Özgür Özel from the chairmanship and reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whom Özel had defeated. Özel is now preparing a new party, with a formal step expected by the end of July or early August; reports say at least seventy legislators could join him. Offices have been identified, logos commissioned and applications made around the deliberately generic name New Party. The state did not need to ban the CHP. A judicial ruling returned its former leader and made its displaced leader contemplate splitting the voters who had made the party nationally competitive.

Police then detained İzmit mayor Fatma Kaplan Hürriyet, her husband and thirty others in raids across five provinces on allegations of bribery, bid-rigging and participation in a criminal organisation. Six more people were detained in the expanding Beykoz municipality investigation. The government says prosecutors and judges act independently and that municipal corruption must be investigated. CHP officials see a sequence aimed at disabling elected opposition administrations. No court has established guilt in the İzmit case. The political effect arrives before a verdict: staff are removed, municipalities are disrupted and opposition figures spend their time answering prosecutors rather than governing.

The arrest of singer Haluk Levent made the reach of that system visible outside party politics. Levent founded Ahbap, the charity that became a parallel relief network after the 2023 earthquakes. Prosecutors accuse him and associates of aggravated fraud, money laundering and running a criminal organisation; financial investigators allege suspicious transfers, gambling losses and unsecured loans, and ten more suspects were sent to the courthouse on 20 July. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek said charities cannot escape transparency because of social-media pressure. That principle is sound. Its credibility depends on evidence tested in a court whose independence does not vary with the defendant’s popularity or politics.

Abroad, Erdoğan’s Turkey operates with fewer inhibitions and more partners. Ankara reaffirmed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus on the 52nd anniversary of the 1974 intervention, sending Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, Defence Minister Yaşar Güler and the armed-forces leadership to inspect the 28th Mechanized Infantry Division. It rejected the description of Turkish forces as occupiers and cited the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. In Libya, Turkey is expanding training and surveillance cooperation with Khalifa Haftar’s eastern forces even though it once backed the opposing government in Tripoli. Egypt, Haftar’s longstanding patron, has signalled no objection after its own rapprochement with Ankara. Turkey now protects its maritime agreement with western Libya by cultivating the general who could overturn it.

Syria offers a larger version of the same wager. The World Bank puts reconstruction needs at about $216 billion, more than three times Syria’s pre-war GDP. Turkey wants contracts, revived trade routes and influence over a stable neighbour after hosting millions of refugees and losing access to Arab markets. It is promoting the Hejaz Railway and the Iraq Development Road while Turkish builders position for housing, energy and transport work. An analysis by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies warns that Damascus is deliberately diversifying toward Gulf states, Europe, the United States and China. That warning is persuasive. Military proximity gives Ankara early access, not a monopoly over finance that Turkey cannot supply on its own.

The economic figures at home make that limitation plain. The central government produced a 114.2 billion-lira surplus in June, about $2.4 billion, as revenue rose 66 percent and tax collection 72 percent; the primary surplus was $6.7 billion. Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek put the annual deficit near 2.5 percent of GDP, down from 2.9 percent last year. Foreign property investment also rose 28.3 percent over March to May to $590 million as the Middle East war pushed Russian, Gulf, Azerbaijani and Kazakh buyers toward Turkey. These are useful cushions, not the capital pool required to rebuild Syria.

Turkish exporters are therefore asking for a more conventional anchor. Mustafa Gültepe, head of the Exporters Assembly, wants the EU customs union updated, Turkey included in the Made in EU framework and Turkish banks admitted to the Single Euro Payments Area. The European Union and Ankara took a smaller step on 16 July by agreeing to recognise each other’s trusted-trader programmes. Gültepe’s complaint remains: when Brussels signs trade agreements with third countries, those goods can reach Turkey through the customs union without Turkish exporters automatically receiving reciprocal access. His $500 billion export target for 2030 depends on rules Turkey does not write.

That is the contrast between the two anniversaries. Montreux endures because it turns Turkish geography into authority through a rule accepted by others. The post-coup order concentrated authority by loosening the rules that constrain the presidency. One has made Turkey indispensable to countries that distrust it; the other has left the main opposition deciding whether to split after a court chose its leader. Erdoğan can cultivate Kyiv and Moscow, Haftar and Tripoli, Brussels and Damascus because flexibility abroad is power. At home, the same refusal to accept independent centres of power is making the state less predictable.

The tests are immediate. Investigators must identify the drone found at Karaburun and decide whether Black Sea debris now requires a permanent coastal response. Özel must show whether his new vehicle can carry CHP voters without handing Erdoğan an easier majority. The İzmit and Ahbap cases must produce evidence rather than only detention headlines. Fidan can keep offering Istanbul as a negotiating table, but his strongest contribution remains the convention that prevents more warships from reaching the fight. Turkey’s most successful act of sovereignty this week was to keep obeying a ninety-year-old limit.