This problem is expertly analyzed by two leading scholars at the University of Cyprus, the mainly Greek school in the south. Yiannis Papadakis, an anthropologist, has worked extensively on the historiography of Cyprus, and two other of his works are included on this site. Costas Constantinou, has specialized in education. Both have participated in bicommunal activities. This in-depth treatment, which draws in part on the experience of bicommunal groups or others who have or have tried to meet across the de facto partition of Cyprus, demonstrates how difficult such efforts are in the face of official and ideological opposition. The article was published in a 2001 issue of the academic journal, Global Society.

The Cypriot State(s) in situ: Cross-ethnic Contact and the
Discourse of Recognition
Costas M. Constantinou and Yiannis Papadakis¹

The Chair
The memoirs of the ex-UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, recall a recognition
incident when the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, was invited to address the
General Assembly in 1974. Seeking to avoid the thorny issue of Palestinian status
becoming a small crisis, Waldheim disagreed with the President of the General
Assembly, maintaining that Arafat should not be allowed to sit on the special
chair that Heads of State customarily occupy before and after their speeches.
Realising his limited options, Arafat agreed to the demand. Standing instead
next to the chair - - a singular international actor - - he casually leaned over it
adopting a reclining posture.[2]

Let us always remember Yasser Arafat, even after he becomes a fully recognised
Head of State, as the chairman. Let us remember him parodying the sign of
recognition, handling the artefact of sovereignty, teasing out and playing with
the constitution of statehood. Recalling this chairing game is particularly relevant
when writing about sitting or standing Cypriots, who for some time now
have been Arafat’s close political neighbours, in proximity to the recognition
predicament. The issue of recognition affects Cypriots deeply and personally. It
has been a serious obstacle not only to official intercommunal dialogue but also to
the cross-ethnic contact of Cypriots as individuals. On the one hand, intransigent
nationalists and confident technocrats commonly employ the recognition argument
to disseminate ethico-political rationales that tie reconciliation initiatives to unpatriotic, 
treacherous, and destructive activity. On the other hand, many Greek Cypriot 
and Turkish Cypriot citizens have come to endorse the view that
these unofficial meetings irrevocably damage the interests of their respective
communities. To that extent, individuals or groups of people seeking to meet
outside the officially designated channels of communication have been frequently
charged with offering legitimation to the legal and political claims of the other
side. In this respect, and in everyday practice, the recognition discourse has
become less reflective of a legal or political dispute and more illuminating of
strategies of control and governance.

The history of this paper is yet another anecdote indicative of the Cypriot
chair syndrome and its politics of assiduity. We began writing it for a bicommunal
workshop of Cypriot academics that was unable to meet freely in Cyprus, and
had to be hosted at the University of Tel Aviv in July 1999. It was agreed that
academics were to travel there under their personal capacity to avoid problems
from their universities, i.e. that they recognised illegal states, governments or
institutions. Greek Cypriots travelled with Republic of Cyprus passports. Turkish
Cypriots travelled with Turkish passports, the common position being that the
Republic of Cyprus does not represent them and with the Turkish Republic of
Northern Cyprus (TRNC) not recognised by any other state but Turkey. Ironically,
checking in at the hotel we discovered that we were united again through
misrecognition. (The printed registration cards bearing our names branded us
all "U.S. citizen"! Was this the longed-for US plan on how to settle the Cyprus
problem or just a hotel-Fulbright misunderstanding?) Early in the morning, we
received a message that the Greek Cypriot ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus
in Israel wished to drop in and meet us in his "unofficial capacity". In response,
the group suggested the hotel bar during the evening, leaving it upon individuals
to join in or not. During the discussion of different projects that all agreed were
worthwhile, members of the group often felt they could not support them openly
because these could be officially construed as recognising pseudo- or usurping
institutions or states. Distribution of funds from foundations overseas was open
to similar problems. In brief, we spent most of the time discussing directly or
indirectly matters of recognition, paying close and constant attention to how our
actions, individually or collectively, would be officially interpreted. In practice,
we accepted and employed the official codes of recognition, though on the
whole--like Arafat--we realised their arbitrary and exclusionary character.

In this article, we seek to show that the discourse of recognition as has been
officially pursued in Cyprus is highly problematic, contradictory, and dangerous.
First, it oversimplifies and popularises the international principles concerning
state and government recognition. Second, it continues practices of objectivisation

that in the past sought to impose particular cognitions and totalising
understandings of the other. The issue of state recognition is conventionally
examined at the level of state and government, but we suggest that looking at
how this issue works on and affects the individual is highly revealing of how the 
recognition discourse operates in action, particularly in divided societies. In
this respect, we also examine how cross-ethnic contacts in the UN buffer zone,
though not always escaping the official frame of recognition, have the capacity
of taking the steam out of the rhetorical claims of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish
Cypriot regimes. We do not argue that granting or denying recognition is a light
matter, that it has no implications on the settlement of the Cyprus problem, or
for the human rights of ethnic groups or of dislocated and dispossessed individuals.
We argue, rather, that the Cyprus problem and the rights of groups and
individuals are rhetorically enunciated in a way that prompts the danger of
recognition and employed as a pretext to determine how (and often, if ) Cypriots
are to meet and communicate with each other. In conclusion, we suggest that
the predominant discourse of recognition in Cyprus assumes or presents its
axioms and maxims as natural, neutral or scientific, thus covering up the
constructed and ideological character of the so-called realist readings that follow
from it. The dominance of the technical language of recognition is currently
attained, we propose, by marginalising the political relevance of other cultures or 
vocabularies of recognition, such as the face-to-face encounter of the other.

International Standings
The Republic of Cyprus obtained an international legal standing on 16 August
1960, and took its seat at the United Nations on 20 September 1960. The entry of
Cyprus as a state actor in international relations has been a reluctant one. It is well
known and abundantly registered that this has not been the first choice of the
Cypriot people but a compromise result negotiated by the governments of the
United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey.[3] The majority of Greek Cypriots wished for
the union of Cyprus with Greece (enosis), whereas the majority of Turkish Cypriots,
in lieu of union with Turkey, supported the division of the island between the two
"motherlands" (taksim).[4] This served as a pretext for establishing a state whose
independence was qualified by important treaty and constitutional restraints. The
"guarantor powers", i.e. the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey, were directly
given the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the new state and under
certain circumstances to intervene to restore the status quo. Greece and Turkey
maintained troops on the island. Great Britain managed to maintain sovereignty
and unrestricted military presence over 99 square miles of Cyprus. These novel
provisions could be seen as directly contradicting peremptory norms of international
law, specifically Article 2(4) and (7) of the UN Charter. In this sense some
authors interpreted these provisions as evidence that the Republic of Cyprus came
into being with only limited sovereignty, "the only truly ‘international state’", a
strange mixture of a protectorate, condominium, and independent statehood.[5]

A Short History of the Politics of Recognition in Cyprus
The modern envisioning and organisation of world politics as an interstate system
raises the issue of the recognition of states and of the governments representing
them to a high problematic of international relations. This issue concerns both the
construction of legal subjectivity and the bestowal of international legitimacy. From 
the politics of recognition of the Peoples’ Republic of China, East Germany,
Namibia, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to the competing government claims 
of Cambodia, Haiti, Liberia and Somalia, international practice historically has affected the 
conduct of high politics but also the lives of individuals on the ground.[6]

In the case of Cyprus, both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaderships currently agree 
that the recognition or the possibility of recognition of the other side’s regime as sovereign state 
or legitimate government partly determines what constitutes "the Cyprus problem". Also, they 
seem to agree that whether one or two states are recognised will largely determine the future settlement
of the Cyprus problem (as a federation or confederation, respectively) with disastrous consequences 
in either case for "one’s side".

The issue of both state and government recognition in Cyprus first starkly
emerged after the breakdown of the bicommunal structures of the Republic following
the eruption of interethnic violence in December 1963. Turkish Cypriots withdrew
from the government and were forced to move into self-administered
enclaves and set up their own political structures. Initially they set up what became
known as a General Committee in 1964, followed by a Provisional Turkish Cypriot
Administrationin 1967. In short, during this period, the government of the Republic
of Cyprus came totally under Greek Cypriot control, in principle representing
the Turkish Cypriots but not in practice. By some accounts, the international recognition
of the Cyprus government, despite the withdrawal of Turkish Cypriot
representatives, was only pragmatically and incidentally provided, given that the
consent of a legally constituted government was in essence required for the UN
peacekeeping operation to take place in early 1964.[7] After the coup of 1974 against
the Makarios regime and the subsequent Turkish military intervention leading to
the exchange of populations, the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was
announced in 1975, and in 1983 the TRNC was unilaterally declared. The TRNC
has been branded an ‘invalid’ state by the UN Security Council Resolution 541
(1983), and is currently recognised as an independent state only by Turkey. In other
words, it is only the Republic of Cyprus that is internationally recognised, and so
the Greek Cypriot government has been accepted as the de jure government of the
island as a whole, even though de facto since 1974 it only controls the south part of
the island. At the same time, though presenting itself internationally as a sovereign
and independent state, the TRNC engages in a number of measures undermining
its projected sovereignty. For example, rather than a Turkish Cypriot civilian, it is
the Turkish commander of the military forces in Cyprus who is the head of the
police and the fire brigade. This has recently fuelled a debate among Turkish Cypriot
politicians, precisely on how this reflects on the projected independence of the
TRNC, leading to a public campaign under the suggestive title: ‘This Country is
Ours’.[8] Moreover, in the last few years, the Turkish Cypriot authorities threaten
that any steps that Greek Cypriots make towards accession to the European Union
will be countered by more integration with Turkey. This policy is justified by arguing that 
EU entry for Cyprus is covert union with Greece in line with past attempts during the 1960s 
and 1974. This has been nowadays played down in view of Turkey being given candidate 
status in the EU Helsinki Summit in December 1999.

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Notes

Photo: © Jérôme Brézillon/Métis, from Revue