Suchergebnisse

This book explores how Turkey is portrayed in EU discourses and how these conceptions discursively construct European identity and notions of 'Europeanness'. Senem Ayd?n-Düzgit is an Associate Professor and a Jean Monnet Chair in International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She is the author of Constructions of European Identity: Debates and Discourses on Turkey and the EU (Palgrave, 2012).

Foreign policy is a key area through which state officials' role in the discursive construction of a state's identity becomes possible and visible. From this viewpoint, Turkey presents an interesting case worthy of analysis due to the significant transformation of its foreign policies in the recent decades. This article first reviews the current literature, which points out that the shift in Turkish foreign policy and the souring of Turkey–European Union (EU) relations in the second half of the 2000s not only entailed a policy change but also a change in the crafted identity of the state at the elite level as distanced from Europe. This article then aims to undercover whether this crafted identity at the elite level is also visible across the changing perceptions of Europe among the Turkish public. Hence, it seeks to observe the ways in which public discourse does or does not follow elite discourse on representations of Europe, and, in turn, engages with the conceptual question of whether public constructions of state identity simply follow elite constructions. This is done through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of texts produced by focus group interviews.

This article focuses on the discourses of the main centre-right political party group (EPP-ED, EPP) in the European Parliament on Turkey's accession to the European Union. It utilises the analytical framework of the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis to mainly concentrate on the articulations of 'culture' and 'cultural identity' in the discussions over Turkish accession in official parliamentary debates and in-depth personal interviews with the members of this group. It is argued that a relational theorising of identity allows for analysis of the ways in which a cultural 'Europe' is articulated through current discussions on Turkey in the mainstream right-wing European Parliament discourse and thus reveals the cultural borders that are enacted with reference to Turkish membership within this group.

This article discusses the potential of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for the study of EU foreign policy and argues that CDA can provide a systematic way of studying discourses on EU foreign policy through the refined linguistic and argumentative tools that it offers. The article first outlines the main theoretical premises of CDA and its one particular variant, the discourse-historical approach, and then presents a discussion on its analytical and methodological toolkit. After discussing the various ways in which EU foreign policy texts can be subject to CDA, the article concludes with the theoretical challenges posed by CDA, particularly regarding its relationship with poststructuralist approaches to foreign policy.