Except from the Special Issue Editors’ Introduction:
In the 1960s, a Carnation Evaporated Milk advert appeared on British screens with the slogan: ‘as versatile as an egg’. The milk, it claimed, could be used for a myriad of cooking purposes, with no recipe changes necessary. At least in this respect, the concept of ‘Europeanization’ is reminiscent of this evaporated milk. It has become one of the most versatile concepts of political science, coming a long way since the beginning of the 1990s. Initially conceived as a top-down process, Europeanization has been reconceptualized as bottom-up, and as covering different aspects of society and politics. The enlargement rounds of 2004/7 have added new challenges, in particular the question of Europeanization during accession negotiations. In addition, we now find an increasing number of critical engagements with Europeanization, which analyse the extent to which Europeanization enables and strengthens particular political positions, transforms political discourses and alters political identities. A case of particular interest in this context is Turkey. Turkey is not a member of the European Union (EU) and is often seen as having been turning its back on the EU during the last few years, but it has been in accession negotiations since 2005, and especially when it comes to legal changes, the Europeanization process seems to have been particularly strong. Turkey is also significant as a country which has waited the longest in the waiting lounge of the EU, murmuring and threatening to go to other lounges, yet not leaving the waiting room. The domestic factors and political constellations which lead to this passionate and unstable relationship between Turkey and the EU, full of ups and downs, deserve to be unpacked, backed by a rich empirical and analytical framework.
The contributions to this special issue critically interrogate the relationship between the EU and Turkey, and the impact of EU accession negotiations on Turkish politics and society. How can one explain the varying degree of impact that the EU has had? Has the EU influenced political debates in Turkey or has it been used to promote particular positions in Turkey? In what sense has the EU context contributed to the pluralization and subsequent re-closure of the Turkish political debate? What can we learn from this case for other cases? These are among the questions that the contributors will try to answer.
What brings together the contributors of this special issue is the common critical approach developed against the taken-for-grantedness of the transformative power of European integration and the belief that ‘the domestic’ should be unfolded in order
to understand the pace and course of European integration. The general claim is that we need to go beyond the top-down vs. bottom-up controversy and dig into different forms of alignment that takes into account domestic factors. In order to do this, the
issue seeks to enhance the understanding of the transformative power of Europe from a different and critical angle by paying attention to the political and social contestations ‘at home’, and by investigating how Europe’s transformative power creates repercussions in Turkish politics. All in all, the contributions aim to overcome the limitations of the Europeanization literature in understanding European integration, such as the overemphasis on the EU’s top-down impact on accession countries at the expense of the domestic level, even in presumed ‘bottom-up’ work. Furthermore, all contributions focus on the post-1999 period when Turkey has been granted candidacy status for EU membership and the European integration has penetrated the ‘domestic’ thoroughly.
[T]he contributions in this issue address different forms and aspects of alignment between ‘Europe’ and the domestic level. The paper by Yılmaz and Soyaltın seeks to explore the impact of EU-related and domestic factors in the improvement of Turkey’s minority rights and anti-corruption regimes in the post-2005 period. The paper considers the important question of why progress in these two areas continued in Turkey in spite of the fact that the EU membership process experienced a serious stalemate from late 2005 onwards and hence draws attention to the importance of domestic factors and notably the strategic calculations on the part of the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Saatciog˘lu also takes EU conditionality in Turkey as a departure point and argues that the AKP’s urge for power consolidation rather than the EU conditionality might answer the question of what caused the variation between pre- and post-2007 European-led reforms at Turkish domestic level. Similarly, Gunay and Renda in their paper seek to understand how the Turkish elites use the concept and process of ‘Europe’ to legitimize Turkey’s foreign policy towards the Middle East. By tracing the tripartite conceptualization of the ‘usage of Europe’ literature (‘strategic usage’, ‘cognitive usage’ and ‘legitimizing usage’) in the elites’ discourses, the authors aim to answer how the Turkish foreign policy elite have used the EU in their discursive strategies regarding Turkey’s foreign policy towards the Muslim-majority Middle East, including the East Mediterranean countries and the Gulf countries. The significance of the discourses is also at the focus of Alpan’s piece, albeit through a different analytical framework. By using a poststructuralist framework and the notion of ‘hegemony’ to understand the Europeanization process in the Turkish domestic landscape, she suggests that a hegemonic approach best captures the shifting discourses on and the discursive struggles over ‘Europe’ in Turkey after 1999. Alpan’s general claim is that while Europe was the central point of reference in the period between 1999 and 2005, it no longer emerged as a discursive hegemonic struggle after 2005. Muhlenhoff also uses the term, ‘hegemonic struggle’, this time to denote different narratives on the EU’s democracy promotion in Turkey. By focusing on Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’ and by criticizing the EU for pursuing an apolitical approach and depoliticizing the NGOs it finances, she argues that the EU indeed aims to bolster a liberal narrative through the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) yet by the means of neo-liberal governmental power. By the same token, Ozdemir’s paper looks at the relationality between the domestic and external factors in triggering ‘legal change’ on violence against women in Turkey. By using a bottom-up Europeanization approach, the paper traces the reform process from the 1980s up until 2005 and investigates the interaction of EU-triggered and broader factors such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) regulations. Last, but not least, Kaliber in his paper presents a fully fledged account of the intersections between the modernization and Europeanization literatures through their reflections not only within the framework of two specific enlargement processes (south and east), but also for the Turkish case. In spite of this similarity between two literatures, Kaliber continues, particularly in terms of elite drivenness, there is a difference in terms of outcome, that is, modernization is monolithic whereas Europeanization leads to a pluralistic society. He concludes by arguing that along with other domestic dynamics, Turkey’s European vocation can function as leverage beneath the democratic transformation of state – society relations in the country.
Introduction
The Devil is in the ‘Domestic’? European Integration Studies and the Limits of Europeanization in Turkey
Başak Alpan & Thomas Diez
pages 1-10
Articles
