Last week the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held its leaders’ summit in Astana, Kazhakstan. The big story from an organizational standpoint was another round of expansion, with Belarus becoming a full member. The big story from a news perspective, I suppose, was UN Secretary General António Guterres’ attendance. The big story that isn’t a real story was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announcing that he’d like to see Turkiye join as as full member.*
This isn’t exactly new news. Erdoğan has talked about this before. In one of the very first things I ever published, for The Monkey Cage (RIP) back in 2017, I wrote about the possibility of SCO expansion into the Middle East, with Iran and Turkey as prospective members. Re-reading it now, I see a quote in one of the links that has him talking about joining way back in 2013, although really, it reads more like using the SCO as a bargaining chip with the Europeans - a common theme it seems:
The issue of SCO membership had come to the political agenda of Turkey earlier this year after Erdoğan said Turkey might opt to join the SCO. Erdoğan raised the issue in January at a time when hopes regarding the EU process were diminishing due to the adamant opposition of a number of members states toward Turkey’s membership.
“I said to Russian President Vladimir Putin, ‘You tease us, saying, ‘What [is Turkey] doing in the EU?’ Now I tease you: Include us in the Shanghai Five, and we will forget about the EU,’” Erdoğan said at the time.
There has been a lot more water under the bridge between Turkiye and, well, almost everyone, since 2017, and politically the idea of Erdoğan leaning towards the SCO isn’t really surprising. Operationally, I don’t see how it would work, and I can’t imagine it would benefit Ankara enough to justify the problems it would likely cause in its far more important status as a NATO member.
First, this isn’t to overstate what the SCO is or does. On the face of it, it has decent momentum and narrative power since bringing in India and Pakistan in 2017 and Iran in 2023. Its big numbers feature in a lot of the commentary about SCO: its members make up 42 percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of the world’s landmass. Together, they combine for nearly 21 percent of the global gross domestic product. But those numbers mask the fact that the SCO doesn’t actually do much. A decade before the recent rounds of expansion, when it was still a somewhat effective regional organization, Bobo Lo described it as “a modest organization of modest achievements.” Those real achievements were a result of a consensus-based decision making process. With more members the need to build consensus results in the frequent criticism that the SCO has become a talking shop. I haven’t read an article on this yet, but I think India’s membership essentially diminished China and Russia’s capacity to drive the SCO’s agenda. Despite the perception of an organization growing in stature and influence, I think the reality is that it has become even more modest.
That said, it does have a security mechanism that’s worth thinking about when we consider Turkiye as a member. SCO has only 2 permanent bodies: its secretariat, and the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, or RATS. The purpose of RATS is to address the ‘three evils’ - terrorism, separatism, and extremism - issues that each member faces, and certainly concerns Turkiye. To this end, national intelligence officials have meetings twice a year, and RATS coordinates bilateral and multilateral joint military exercises for its members. It also manages a database on the three evils that shares information on organizations and individuals; the SCO credits it for preventing hundreds of attacks and crimes and thousands of arrests. It’s really the intelligence and military spheres where the SCO has the most tangible results. Moves to deepen economic integration are consistently stalled by members worried about the asymmetry of their economies and China’s. The range of regime types and lack of political trust between members limit what it can do politically. So it seems to function primarily as a security organization.
Which is where Erdoğan’s SCO ambitions get problematic - can a country have memberships in NATO and the SCO? Forget the editorializing about SCO as a challenge or alternative to NATO - it’s not. It’s nothing like NATO, and I think the comparison is either lazy or silly (If you read the Monkey Cage piece I linked to above, you’ll see NATO in the title - not my fault. Authors almost never get to write their titles). But operationally, can a country be in NATO while also having regularly scheduled intelligence sharing meetings and regular joint military drills with Russia and China? I’m asking sincerely, because I don’t know, but I assume the answer isn’t ambiguous. And when you look at the balance sheet, NATO offers significant membership benefits against quite modest ones from SCO. If I had to choose one membership there is absolutely no question - NATO every single time.
I suspect this means Erdoğan is using SCO in an attempt to navigate political issues that Ankara is having with Europe in general and some NATO members in particular. Whether it’s the purchase of the S400 defense systems from Russia, the blocked F35 deal with the US, the drama over Sweden and Finland joining NATO…things aren’t very good politically. The perception of an alternative option - especially when it’s a Chinese and Russian-led org - might look like leverage, but again, SCO is not a credible alternative to NATO and/or the EU and serious people know this. It doesn’t look realistic as a threat. So perhaps it represents Erdoğan’s preference but not what Turkiye’s defense establishment wants. Maybe Erdoğan is a better politician than strategist. I’m certainly no expert on Turkish domestic or foreign policy so I don’t know, but I’m deeply skeptical of the possibility of Turkiye joining SCO as a full member any time soon simply because it wouldn’t solve any of Ankara’s existing problems and it would likely create significant new ones in its far more consequential relationship with NATO.
This is to say nothing of a question from the other side: why would SCO benefit from having Turkiye as a full member? It’s proven to be a difficult ally and a prickly political partner. Would turning a NATO member alone be worth it?
*Turkiye has been a dialogue partner with SCO since 2013. A dialogue partner identifies certain issues on the SCO’s agenda that it would like to participate in discussions. It applies to be a dialogue partner for those issues only, and does not have the priviledge to attend meetings beyond that scope. Dialogue partners don’t have agenda-setting or voting rights in SCO. There are 15 dialogue partners as of mid-2024 and Belarus is the only member that began at that level to become a full member.