Catherine Macmillan (2013) Discourse, Identity and the Question of Turkish Accession to the EU: Through the Looking Glass, Surrey: Ashgate.
Reviewed by Dr. Didem Buhari-Gulmez
As an expert of Turkey-European Union relations, Catherine Macmillan offers a constructivist account of the EU’s diverse attitudes towards Turkey’s membership. Turkey-EU relations seem to have returned to ‘normal’ as the
Turkish government found the latest Turkey progress report of the European Commission as ‘balanced and fair’. Turkey’s membership prospects are still very unclear. In spite of this uncertainty, Turkey’s reform process that is guided by the EU membership criteria continues –albeit on a selective basis. However, the European opposition to Turkey’s membership remains a serious obstacle against Turkey’s accession in the near future.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the European opposition to Turkey’s accession without taking into account the ‘identity factor’. By emphasizing the constructivist turn in European studies and the related focus on identity as a social construction, Macmillan hits the nail on the head in a broader debate about civilizational and religious differences. One of the most important contributions of Macmillan’s study is its successful attempt to problematize and categorize different aspects of the European opposition based on identity claims. First, European scepticism towards Turkey’s membership is not limited to identity conflicts associated with the current era. It also reflects the historical perceptions of the Turk and the East in European past, ranging from enmity, to indifference and from a feeling of inferiority to a complex of superiority. The book provides different sections about historical images, including the ancient Greek images of Persians, the Medial images of the ‘Saracen’, and the images of the Ottoman Turks in order to capture different types of Self-Other relationship.
Second, identity-based arguments are also used in Europe to support Turkey’s EU membership. There is a difference between the view of Europe as a value-based community and the view of Europe as a rights-based post-national union. While some see Europe as an exclusive civilizational community that promotes a strictly European culture and identity, others see Europe as diffusing universal values and norms codified by international law to any country regardless of religious, cultural and civilizational differences. According to Macmillan, this difference of view (an exclusive European cultural club vs. an inclusive Europe of universal norms) is not only influential upon the question of whether one is in favour or against Turkey’s EU membership but it also determines one’s attitude towards the EU’s general policies of deepening and widening.
Macmillan successfully provides a comparative analysis that helps to grasp whether European attitudes towards the enlargement in general and the EU’s enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe in particular, differ from the attitudes towards Turkey’s membership. While analysing attitudes, Macmillan’s book prioritizes elite discourses but it also devotes a chapter to review the available public survey data about how Europeans perceive Turkey’s membership to the EU and the EU in general. She correctly emphasizes the contestations over an emerging European public sphere and the elite’s predominance in shaping public opinion about EU affairs, given the increasingly clear public apathy or indifference towards the EU. A research project led by European scholars from Oxford and Science Po –including, Sophie Duchesne, Elizabeth Frazer, Florence Haegel, and Virginie Van Ingelgom– published its results that confirm Macmillan’s assumptions in the 2013 book entitled Citizens’ Reactions to European Integration Compared: Overlooking Europe. While Macmillan provides two chapters focusing on elite discourse, she devotes Chapter 4 to a European-level discourse analysis whereas Chapter 5 relies upon Foreign Policy Discourse Analysis that considers national differences within Europe. In Chapter 5, Macmillan studies how national identity is understood and defined in France, Britain and Turkey in order to argue that there is a relationship between the conception of national identity and the attitude towards Europe and Turkey’s accession to the EU. This book is strongly recommended to scholars and students of Turkey-EU relations due to its sophisticated analytical framework and its good reviews of the literature about identity, Othering, European integration and public sphere (with a special focus on constructivism) in addition to its empirical findings based on elite discourse analysis. The categorization of EU conceptualizations as a problem-solving entity, a value-based community, and a rights-based post-national union is proved helpful to refine thinking about varying attitudes towards Turkey’s EU accession. The book may benefit from the developing scholarship on Multiple Modernities, post-westernization and world society in order to better conceptualize the model of EU as a post-national rights-based union. Overall, Discourse, Identity and the Question of Turkish Accession to the EU: Through the Looking Glass is an important and timely contribution to the literature on Turkey-EU relations.
