Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has an insanely ambitious dream of turning Turkey’s most populous city into an island. Erdoğan wants to cut a 45km canal on the European side of Istanbul. Istanbul hosts one of the busiest international shipping routes in the world. The historic Bosphorus strait welcomes about 40,000 ships every year. However, Turkey has a problem: It’s not allowed to charge any money for passage of foreign ships through its own territory.
While Egypt charges 7 dollars per ton of ship for passage through the Suez Canal and Panama charges about 3 dollars, Turkey leaves billions of dollars on the table. And that is because of the Montreux Convention Turkey signed in 1936. Turkey is only allowed to charge for ancillary maritime services that are minute in value compared to what other countries are able to charge.
The Montreux Convention prevents Turkey from collecting fares for civilian ships in exchange for giving it control over military ships that want to cross the strait. However, President Erdoğan’s megaproject could circumvent the Montreux convention by creating a new strait, where Turkey would be free to collect tolls. However, the project has several very serious issues. It not only promises to be a potential environmental, city planning, social, economic disaster, but Turkey’s political opposition is vehemently against it. Though the construction project has already broken ground, there is really no guarantee that it will actually come into fruition. But the chief roadblock isn’t financial or technical. President Erdoğan is heading into general elections in a few months time, where there is a very real chance he could lose his seat. And doing so would not only spell the end of his 20-year tenure as the de facto ruler of Turkey, but his ambitious dream as well.
