New Greek FM Kotzias promises to be household name like Tsipras

It has been a week since last Sunday's electoral victory of the leftist Syriza in Greece. Yet the international media, including Turkey, are still trying to assess and analyze the policies and strategies of the new government. Greece's economic problems are naturally at the center of everybody's concern. 

Perhaps it would be helpful to have a look at another aspect of the new Greek government's policies: its foreign policy. It's an area that is highly important as it will determine the basis on which Greece will conduct its relations with its neighbor Turkey. 

The new Greek foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, is not at all new in the field of Greek-Turkish affairs. Some of you might remember him as a frequent visitor to Turkey during the period of the catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Greece in 1999 and the resulting Greek-Turkish diplomatic spring - known since as "earthquake diplomacy." Kotzias was then a special adviser to the then-foreign minister of Greece, George Papandreou, and it was widely accepted that he had played an important role in the planning of that period's Greek-Turkish rapprochement as a new policy doctrine.

A leftist political animal since his school years, he, like the new Greek prime minister, was a member of the leftist youth organizations and had important party posts as a member of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) until he resigned in 1989. His involvement in political affairs took up a different dimension when he became an adviser in the Greek Foreign Ministry and eventually an acclaimed academic with dozens of books and publications. In his latest book, entitled "The Colony of Debt" (2013), he introduced a new theory that EU is developing into an empire based on the markets, the bureaucratic structure in...