By Can Öztaş
This week, Yerevan is not a distant capital at the edge of Europe’s map. Armenia has hosted the European Political Community summit at a moment when its political direction, its European ties and the regional peace process are all under scrutiny at once.
Turkey’s decision to be represented at vice-presidential level is not a minor protocol detail. Protocol, in diplomacy, is rarely incidental. The level of representation signals that Ankara does not wish to treat this as an ordinary gathering and that the recent movement in Turkish-Armenian relations deserves more than polite observation from a distance.
This is welcome. But presence at a summit is not normalization. For more than three decades, Turkey and Armenia have lived beside each other without full diplomatic relations. Geography made them neighbors. Politics kept them apart. The land border remains closed. The habits of separation have outlived most of the explanations once offered for them.
Armenia’s parliamentary elections in June give this question a sharper edge. Peace in Armenia is politically exposed, caught between domestic suspicion, external pressure, maximalist currents of memory, diaspora anxieties and the familiar charge of betrayal. The question is whether the fragile language of peace can survive the pressures of politics. For Turkey, wisdom lies in looking beyond electoral arithmetic and asking what kind of regional order it wishes to help build. The need is not for another grand declaration, but for enough visible movement to show that realism is not merely another word for surrender.
The regional context has changed. The Karabakh status quo has been transformed. Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a peace process, still fragile and still contested. Ankara and Yerevan have taken steps of their own. Direct flights resumed. In 2022, the two sides agreed to open the land border for third-country nationals and diplomatic passport holders.
THE BORDER
The central fact remains unchanged. The border is still closed.
Flights restore movement and a measure of contact. But airports do not replace borders. A land border is where normalization becomes visible to ordinary people, traders, students, tourists, drivers, local businesses, municipalities and families. A closed border is not only a diplomatic position. It is an economic punishment imposed on the periphery.
The recent meeting in Kars on the Gyumri-Kars railway points in a more promising direction. Railways are never only railways in the South Caucasus. They are maps of political possibility. The agreement on the joint restoration of the Ani Bridge carries a similar weight. Some crossings carry more history than traffic. They show whether the region will remain a geography of blockades or become a geography of movement. Connectivity built as peace infrastructure, and grounded in sovereignty, reciprocity and consent, offers the region a different way forward.
Diplomatic relations are no less important. Special representatives are useful, but they are temporary instruments. Embassies create routine contact, institutional memory and crisis management. They reduce the risk that every misunderstanding becomes a political incident. They also help resist disinformation. In this region, silence is rarely neutral. It is quickly filled by rumor, resentment and people with flags in their profile photographs, that proud little contribution of our age to foreign policy.
MOSCOW, BAKU AND DIASPORA
Russia cannot be ignored. Moscow only needs to keep mistrust alive. Mistrust of Turkey, mistrust of the West, mistrust of compromise, mistrust of Armenia’s capacity to stand without external protection. A credible normalization process would not remove Moscow from the region. It would reduce the political value of fear.
Turkey’s relationship with Azerbaijan is one of the defining realities of the South Caucasus. Nothing in a careful normalization with Armenia needs to weaken that bond. Open borders, restored transport links and regular diplomacy would serve a region that has spent too much of its modern history mistaking isolation for security. Due regard for the regional balance need not become another name for immobility.
The diaspora question requires care. It contains many histories, wounds and political languages. Memory has its dignity. But a state also answers to the living, to security, livelihoods, conscription, emigration and the fragile work of keeping a society intact.
Peace, if it is to survive, has to become visible at the border gate, on the railway line, in embassies, in ordinary movement. Good relations do not require historical amnesia. They require enough political maturity to live with memory rather than inside it.
