European security and the accession of Turkey: Identity and foreign policy in the European Commission

Introduction

Turkey was officially declared a candidate country destined to join the European Union at the December 1999 European Council Summit in Helsinki. The country took considerable steps to consolidate its democracy, which led to the opening of accession negotiations with the EU in October 2005 (European Commission, 2004). Nevertheless, as the accession process has progressed, debates on the desirability of Turkish accession have intensified in the EU. Opposition has begun to be based increasingly on the grounds that the country poses a profound challenge to the European project because of the perceived ambiguities over its Europeanness (Diez, 2004).

This study aims to take up the challenge of looking into the way in which ‘Europe’ is constructed, through current EU representations of Turkey in a specific institutional setting of the EU, namely the European Commission. ‘Europe’ itself is a contested notion, the meaning of which is not fixed (Schlesinger, 1994). Nevertheless, from a poststructuralist perspective which theorises identity as relational and discursively constructed through difference, European identity is conceptualised as discursively constructed within representations where its construction is dependent on the definition of the European self with respect to various others (Connolly, 1991; Neumann, 1999). ¹ ‘Europe’ is thus treated as a discursive construct that lacks fixed contours, whereby discursive struggles take place to ascribe meanings to it.

The goal here is twofold. The first concern of the article is the popular argument in both academia (Caporaso, 1996; Ruggie, 1993; Smith, 2003) and policy circles (Cooper, 2003; Krastev, 2007) that Europe is moving beyond the modern state to resemble a postmodern order. This argument implies that the EU is becomingly increasingly associated with more porous borders where strict territorial differentiations and imposition of uniform identities over a designated territory are diminishing (Ruggie, 1993). In other words, it entails ‘moving beyond the hard boundaries and centralised sovereignty characteristics of the Westphalian, or “modern” state towards permeable boundaries and layered sovereignty’ (Buzan and Diez, 1999: 56).

Much of that claim, however, rests on an analysis of the relationship between the members of the EU, rather than on the EU’s relations with the outside (Rumelili, 2004: 27–28). Moreover, such claims are often made on the basis of general impressions of the dominant representations across the EU, rather than relying on separate analyses in various institutional settings of the Union. This article argues that the EU’s discourses on security, through its debates on Turkey, can provide insights regarding the extent to which the ‘modern, Westphalian “mode of differentiation”’ figures in the EU’s external relations and the discursive means through which this is realised (Rumelili, 2004: 28). This argument rests on the conceptualisation of ‘security’ as an ‘ontological necessity for the state’ whose very own (constructed) identity depends on the articulation of the concept (Hansen, 2006: 34).

The Commission is hereby considered as a key actor in tracing representations of identity through enlargement. While its direct decision-making powers in enlargement are limited with the member states holding the upper hand (Miles and Redmond, 1996), it enjoys a twofold power in enlargement policy. Firstly, it employs a large amount of discursive power by being the only EU institution that engages with the applicant countries’ official institutions and civil society on a regular basis, and thus shapes the terms of enlargement debates via the regular evaluations it provides on the applicant countries (Robert, 2004). Secondly, through its official role as negotiator and initiator of policy through recommendations to the Council, it also exercises power by governing where the discursive power becomes institutionalised in a way in which it officially and forcefully conditions, in the words of Foucault, the ‘possibilities of action’ for both the member states and the applicant countries (Foucault, 1982). In fact, it has been argued that, as the EU enlarged, making intergovernmental bargaining more difficult in the EU, the enlargement policy began to depend more on the work of the Commission and its expertise, which resulted in the strengthening of its autonomous role in this policy area over time (Smids, 2007).

The selection of the Commission does not rest solely on its particular roles in enlargement policy. It also stems from the fact that, out of all EU institutions, supranationalism is argued to be most pronounced in the European Commission, the task of which is to represent the common interests of the whole EU (Suvarierol, 2007; Wodak, 2004). Therefore, compared with other EU institutions, one can expect to observe a relatively more intense attempt at defining ‘Europe’(s) in the Commission, as a marker of identity with which the Commission officials identify themselves. The focus on the Commission, however, should not be taken to denote that it is the only institution where the discussions on Turkey lead to the discursive construction of European identity. In fact, one can observe that, across all of the EU institutions, debates on Turkish accession in turn lead to the construction of various European identities in discourse, which can suggest strong intertextualities with the discourse of the Commission (see Aydın-Düzgit, 2012). ²

A second concern of this article has to do more specifically with the Commission’s policies towards Turkey. It is, for example, argued that the Commission constitutes a ‘cosmopolitan agent’ in EU–Turkey relations, which assesses Turkish accession on mainly ‘acquired (accession) criteria’ such as democracy and human rights, as well as playing an active role in the attainment of that criteria (Parker, 2009). Nevertheless, one can argue that it is difficult to account for certain policies of the Commission in the light of this interpretation. A ‘cosmopolitan agent’ as such may be expected to apply a policy of equal treatment towards candidate countries, where progress on ‘acquired characteristics’ would be the main yardstick. Yet, the Negotiating Framework for Turkey drafted by the European Commission (and later approved by the member states in the Council) suggests that, if needed, member states can apply permanent derogations to Turkey in fields such as free movement of people, structural policies and agriculture, violating a key item of EU doctrine in previous enlargements that there should be no permanent derogations from EU law, and thus opening the door to a ‘second-class membership’ for Turkey (Emerson, 2004: 2). If one takes the poststructuralist assumption that ‘foreign policies draw upon representations of identity’ (Hansen, 2006: 6), then it can be argued that there is a certain degree of incongruence between what has in the literature been argued to be the Commission’s constructs of ‘European’ identity vis-à-vis Turkey and the articulations of the Commission’s policies towards the country. This study also aims to account for this incongruence by undertaking a detailed analysis of the discourses in the Commission on Turkey, by tracing the key representations of European/Turkish identity articulated in the Commission through discussions of security-related implications of Turkish accession to the EU.

The next section of this article reviews the poststructuralist international relations literature on identity and foreign policy; discusses how it can help us in the conceptualisation of EU enlargement policy; and introduces the concept of the modern state, with a specific emphasis on the ways in which the concept of ‘security’ has occupied a key role in its construction. It also details the data utilised and the methodology undertaken (critical discourse analysis (CDA)) in the empirical analysis of the texts. The third section reports the findings of the empirical analysis whereby the constructs of ‘Europe’ in the Commission discourse along the theme of ‘security’ are presented. In conclusion, the extent to which (and the way in which) the Commission discourse reproduces the modern state in its security discourse on Turkey is assessed, its policy implications for EU–Turkey relations are discussed and the possibility of alternative discourses is explored.

Identity, foreign policy and enlargement

The importance accorded to identity and its conceptualised role in the international relations discipline varies according to the theoretical framework adopted in analysing the international system. While rationalist approaches to international relations such as realism and neoliberalism have sidelined the concept in their analyses, constructivist and poststructuralist works have integrated the concept into their conceptualisation of international relations. Nevertheless, constructivists and poststructuralists differ in the ways in which they perceive the role of identity in international relations. Constructivism is mainly an ‘explanatory theory’, whereby identity is theorised as a ‘variable’ in foreign policy analysis whose importance rests in its influence on the policies of international actors (Katzenstein, 1996; Laffey and Weldes, 1997; Wendt, 1999). Poststructuralists, on the other hand, argue that identity cannot be conceptualised as a variable in foreign policy, since representations of identity are in fact ‘constitutive’ of foreign policy (Campbell, 1992; Der Derian, 1987; Hansen, 2006). For poststructuralism, identities are (re)constructed in discourse, where language is not viewed as a simple mirror of reality, reflecting what takes place in the social world, but as constitutive of social reality where there is no social reality existing outside language, rendering the process of interpretation crucial. Foreign policy, in this framework, is conceptualised as a discursive practice. In fact, the discourses instantiated by foreign policy makers, as well as members of bureaucracies drafting reports and policy positions, ‘produce meanings and in so doing actively construct the “reality” upon which foreign policy is based’ (Doty, 1993: 303). Conceptualising foreign policy as a discursive practice also implies that ‘policy and identity are ontologically interlinked’ (Hansen, 2006: 21). It is through foreign policy that particular subject identities are constructed for states, positioning them vis-à-vis one another, and thereby constructing a particular reality in which certain policies become possible (Doty, 1993: 305).

Another major difference between constructivist and poststructuralist approaches relates to the role of difference in identity formation (Hansen, 2006; Rumelili, 2004). Social constructivists, most prominently Wendt (1999: 224–228), argue that identity does not necessarily have to be constructed through difference. He highlights that states have pre-social corporate identities (as bodies and territory) in addition to their social identities, and these corporate identities are self-organising structures that remain aloof to self/other relations (Wendt, 1999: 225). He also distinguishes between two types of state identity, namely ‘role identity’ and ‘type identity’. While the ‘role identity’ is constructed in relation to other states, ‘type identities’ such as democracy are intrinsic to a state and thus require no interaction with others (Wendt, 1999: 226). For poststructuralists, however, identity is unthinkable without difference. Identity is thus theorised as relational in the way in which it is constructed through difference. However minimal differences are constructed to be, they are still central in the very construction of the identity of the self. As Neumann (1999: 35) highlights, ‘any difference, no matter how miniscule, may be inscribed by political importance and serve to delineate identities’. However, this discursive dependence of identity on difference does not necessarily entail a relationship of Othering between the self and the other, whereby the other is represented as a danger or threat to the identity of the self. Previous poststructuralist research suggests that representations of the other may well be cast in less negative terms, leading to binary dichotomies such as leader/partner (Milliken, 2001) or parent/child (Doty, 1996) in the respective construction of the identities of the self and the other.

In recent years the concept of European identity, specifically with respect to enlargement, has begun to occupy an increasingly important space in the literature on European integration studies. Some of these works (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2002; Sjursen, 2002, 2006) have focused mainly on the causal dynamics behind enlargement policy. Hence, drawing from constructivist underpinnings, they have conceptualised identity as an explanatory variable that helps us understand EU enlargement policy in general and in some cases, the EU enlargement policy towards Turkey in particular. From a poststructuralist perspective, however, enlargement policy can be conceptualised as a specific type of foreign policy tool that is central to the construction of the self identity of ‘Europe’. The Treaty stipulates that any European country can apply to become a member of the EU. This condition alone suggests that the enlargement policy involves primarily a decision to include/exclude on the basis of an evaluation of who is European or not. By doing that, it invites various constructions on what it means to be a European state in discussing the accession prospects of an aspiring member country. Identity constructs can also be expected to be traced in discussions over various other criteria that member states need to fulfil, namely the so-called Copenhagen criteria. The Copenhagen criteria are upheld by EU officials as the official tenets of inclusion/exclusion. Since discourses of inclusion/exclusion entail key representations of identity depending on the context (Hansen, 2006: 53), in the case of enlargement policy the key representations can be cultural, geographic, historical referents and/or political concepts such as democracy, human rights, security and the integration capacity of the EU.

Rumelili (2004) has approached enlargement policy from a poststructuralist perspective where the representation of the candidate countries is integral to the construction of the ‘European’ self, and constitutive of the enlargement policy applied to candidate states. She has argued that the EU does not necessarily erect firm boundaries of danger and threat with the states on its periphery, and thus a more complex analysis that delivers a more differentiated account of the representations of the ‘European’ self and the others is required. She underlined that the more the EU moves away from constructing the others as a threat to its identity, the closer it gets to resembling a postmodern collectivity that does not rest on modern – and thus strict and threat-based – differentiations between the self and the other.

It is hereby argued that discourses on security provide a valuable lens through which representations of European identity and their resemblance to that of the state as a modern collectivity can be discerned. This stems from the concept’s key traditional role in the discursive construction of the modern state. The modern state is not hereby taken as a given fact that exists out there, but as an ‘ideal-typical set up’ that is discursively constructed and that ‘comes in many different varieties’ (Diez, 2004: 322). Nevertheless, as aptly put by Diez (2004: 322–323), ‘the notion of a territorial form of governance tied into a national identity is the minimum common denominator for the discursive construction of a state within modern international society as configured in diplomacy, the United Nations and the textbooks of IR [international relations]’. This implies the imposition of a certain constructed identity over a given territory that also involves the construction of borders between the ‘national self and the other outside’ (Diez, 2004: 323).

The concept of ‘security’ has long demarcated a radical difference between the national self and the other outside, thus ‘construct[ing] identity in terms of a national self in need of protection against a radically threatening other’ (Hansen, 2006: 34; see also Campbell, 1992). Since security discourse is about survival, it contributes to the naturalisation of the national community by constructing existential threats to the state (including government, territory and society) (Buzan et al., 1998: 21). Thus, not only are security threats perceived as ‘potentially undermining the state’, but in fact they constitute the state itself by posing fatal risks to certain invoked ‘national interests’ (Hansen, 2006: 34).

Security discourse need not be limited to issues related traditionally to the military sector; it can also be used in reference to political and societal concerns. The process through which a certain issue is discursively presented as a matter of security can be defined as an act of ‘securitisation’. Since security discourse is perceived as a ‘political discourse that installs responsibility and legitimises the exercise of power’, political actors find it attractive to utilise the concept outside the boundaries of the classic military security of the state, and thus become engaged in a broader process of securitisation (Hansen, 2006: 35). Thus, existential threats to the state may comprise non-military threats that undermine its sovereignty and/or its ideological legitimacy and/or (constructed) ‘rival identities’ that threaten national cohesion (i.e. in terms of language, customs, ethnic purity, etc.) (Buzan et al., 1998: 21–23). Since it rests on the perceived presence of an existential threat, once an issue is designated as a security matter and accepted as such by a significant audience, it is implied that ‘emergency actions or special measures’ can be taken to deal with the security threat that can allow for the ‘breaking of the rules’ in dealing with the subject matter concerned (Buzan et al., 1998: 33). Political actors do not necessarily need to use the term ‘security’ in their argumentation where it suffices to discursively construct certain existential threats that require priority action (Buzan et al., 1998: 33).

The analysis approaches the Commission’s security-related discourses on Turkey through a ‘dual methodology’ (Pace, 2006: 11), where both Commissioner speeches on enlargement to Turkey and in-depth qualitative interviews with the relevant officials from the Commission are the subject of analysis. Such a methodology not only allows one to observe the official discourse of the high political authority of the Commission on Turkey and Europe, but also provides further insight into the Commission talk on Turkey and Europe at the level of the civil servants – also known as ‘Eurocrats’ – who play significant roles in formulating the debate and the policies, yet whose constructs on Turkey and Europe, intertwined with their policy initiatives, are little known since they do not express them publicly. The time frame in the case of the speeches covers the period between the December 1999 Helsinki Summit, when Turkey was granted candidacy status, and June 2010, the time by which negotiations seemed to stall. ³ Nineteen interviews were carried out between April 2007 and October 2007 with selected members of staff of the Commission.

Those who were interviewed were all AD-levelrank staff of the Commission and consisted of mid-level desk officers, international relations officers and programme managers working on enlargement in their Directorate-Generals (DGs). Among the 28 DGs, only those DGs (14) that had a specific department/desk dealing with enlargement-related issues including relations with Turkey at the time of the fieldwork were approached. ⁴ Individuals who were interviewed were selected on the basis of ‘relevance’ and ‘accessibility’, meaning that attention was paid to contacting and speaking with officials who were sufficiently familiar with the affairs of the country and its relations with the EU as well as being willing to speak on the matter. It is in fact the case that narratives delivered through the interviews cannot be generalised for the whole of the European Commission. The Commission is not a monolithic organisation (Hooghe, 2001). Hence, while it cannot be dismissed that any official working for the European Commission may have personal opinions on the issue of Turkish accession, opinions of many would be highly irrelevant to the purposes of this study. Firstly, speaking to ‘any’ official would make the study little different from any public survey on attitudes towards Turkish accession since those officials working on other matters have little input and influence in the policy-making and debate-formulating process regarding Turkey. Secondly, such an approach would run the risk of weakening the spoken data and hence delivering ‘limited narratives’ because of the possibility of ‘limited knowledge’ that a professionally uninvolved official could possess in order to construct his or her arguments on the subject. These considerations overlap with the research objective, which is not to provide a quantitative distribution of attitudes on Turkish accession in the Commission, but to attain lengthy narratives on the ‘substantive content of identity’ that ‘captures variability in meanings’ (Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009: 17).

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is utilised as a methodological toolkit to analyse the texts. CDA is a method of discourse analysis that focuses on the study of the relations between discourse and social and cultural developments in different social domains. Discourse is hereby defined as ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about – i.e. a way of representing – a particular kind of knowledge about a topic’ (Hall, 1992: 291). Discourses systematically produce multiple subject positions from which individuals or groups act. CDA views discourse as an important form of social practice that contributes to the constitution of the social world, including social identities and social relations, and adopts Habermas’s notion that critical science has to be self-reflective. Such a standing leads to a focus on the role of language in power relations, processes of exclusion, inequality and identity building in works that place themselves under the CDA umbrella (Wodak, 2011). However, its Habermasian premises also lead to the emergence of an emancipatory mission in CDA where the researchers take explicitly normative positions, which is absent from the poststructuralist approach adopted in this study. Since poststructuralist discourse analysis does not share the distinction made in CDA between the discursive and non-discursive realms of social life, it does not adhere to the emancipatory goal in CDA, which involves comparing various representations with an implicit version of the way things really are (or should be).

Despite this divergence, employing CDA in poststructuralist approaches can be justified on two main grounds. Firstly, poststructuralism broadly shares CDA’s concern of adopting a critical approach to taken-for-granted knowledge, where they both acknowledge the historical and cultural specificity of discourse. Furthermore, although it does not establish rigid emancipatory foundations for the interpretation of discourses, the ‘ethos of political criticism’ adopted by poststructuralism constantly questions ‘the idea that the national community requires the nexus of demarcated territory and fixed identity’ to challenge the nationalist imagery that can lead to negation of difference, and even to violent relationships with the others (Campbell, 1998: 13). Secondly, as Torfing (2005: 9) had argued, the fundamental linguistic tools of CDA for analysing concrete discourse can be combined with concepts from poststructuralism in demonstrating the subject identities that are discursively constructed. This rests on the assumption that a distinction can be made between CDA with its political/ideological content and CDA as a technique valuable for its empirical contributions.

Amongst various different strands under CDA, this study draws closer to the ‘discourse–historical’ approach of the Vienna School. This approach has been commonly used in the analysis of national identities (Wodak et al., 1999), and has more recently been utilised in analysing the construction of European identities (Krzyzanowski, 2010; Krzyzanowski and Oberhuber, 2007). It is distinguishable by its specific emphasis on identity construction, where the discursive construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is viewed as the basic fundament of discourses of identity and difference (Wodak, 2001: 73). In addition to providing an analytical toolkit in the analysis of texts, it incorporates the central concept of intertextuality in the analysis, which refers to the ways in which ‘individual texts always relate to past or even present texts’ (Tekin, 2008: 733). This implies that similar discursive practices can be reformulated in different contexts.

This study utilises three major empirical questions of the discourse–historical approach in analysing the relevant texts (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 44): How are the chosen subjects (Turkey, EU, Europe) named and referred to linguistically? What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them? By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes are certain representations of the subjects justified, legitimised and naturalised in discourse at the expense of other competing interpretations? These questions all relate to how various ‘we’s are constructed in discourse, as well as the ways in which they are organised and articulated.

The analytical apparatus that is utilised in responding to these three empirical questions directed at the texts consists of three main steps. The first step involves outlining the content of the themes and discourses, namely the macro discourse topics. The second step involves the exploration of discursive strategies deployed in the construction of identities in the narrative. In discourse–historical works of CDA, the totality of discursive practices that undergo analysis to answer these empirical questions are referred to as ‘discursive strategies’. The term ‘strategy’ does not hereby denote a deliberate ‘intentionality’ or ‘instrumentality’ as one may come across in many studies that employ the discourse–historical approach. From a poststructuralist standpoint, it is not possible to reveal the ‘true’ motives of the actors concerned. However, the discursive tools utilised by these actors, at whichever level of cognition or with whichever aim that is impossible for the analyst to truly discern, help construct a discursive space that enables certain actions. Hence, identifying discursive strategies in fact corresponds to the exploration of historically contingent discursive practices through which policies are formulated. The third step of analysis explores the linguistic means that are used to realise the discursive strategies, which then have consequences for the discursive construction of identities via the realisation of certain objectives in discourse. The analysis will be organised around the main discourse topic discerned (namely security, on which more follows), where the discursive strategies and the linguistic means utilised in this given discursive topic will be demonstrated via selected excerpts from the text.

‘Europe’ through ‘security’

The analysis demonstrates that, although in the classic realist military sense Turkey is constructed as a ‘security asset’ rather than a ‘security threat’ for the EU, it is through the debates on Turkey that the EU’s Southern neighbourhood is construed as a source of existential threats for the Union.

Commissioner speeches are particularly useful in tracing temporal shifts in the security discourse on Europe/Turkey, and hence in demonstrating the way in which the ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse (Huntington, 1996) became almost hegemonic in the Commission’s security-related discussions on Turkey in relation to Europe/EU. Security-related talk on Turkey is not solely confined to the post-September 11 period. In fact, within the time scope of this study, it can be observed that Commissioner speeches prior to September 11 also highlight the geostrategic importance of Turkey to Europe/EU. ⁵ Nevertheless, further elaboration of this geostrategic importance with intertextual references to ‘international security’, ‘the fight against terrorism’ and ‘clash/dialogue of civilisations’ becomes first visible in the speeches of late 2001, intensifying from the year 2004 onwards: ⁶

With the formerly communist East now part of the family, we no longer face the East–West arms race. In our era, without denying the role of geopolitics, it is evident that global cultural and identity politics have become more dominant. Thus, the relations between Europe and Islam – inside and outside Europe – is a, if not the major, challenge of our time…The European Union shall show resolve against terrorism and firmly contain all kinds of fundamentalism, while at the same time we shall continue building bridges with the moderate strands of Islam which respect universal democratic values. The 21st century world is not doomed to a clash of civilisations, but can be built on dialogue and cooperation. This is not the least of the reasons why the EU is going to get accession negotiations started with Turkey on 3 October, now that the remaining conditions have been fulfilled. (SPEECH/05/465)

The excerpt above is only one of many instances in which the Commission talk on Turkey reproduces the ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse. The excerpt is thus also demonstrative of the shift taking place in EU foreign-policy talk from one that avoids geopolitical discourse to another that orients to ‘civilisational geopolitics’ (Bilgin, 2004; Van Ham, 2006). It needs to be noted that the Commission officials are not found to engage in the clash of civilisations discourse with the argument that civilisations are bound to clash. In fact, the opposite is often found to be the case, as observed in the excerpt above where the role of the EU in preventing this clash is emphasised. Nonetheless, the main intertextuality with this thesis is incurred through the ways in which cultures/civilisations are treated as monolithic entities with the propensity to clash. Thus, the key assumptions of the thesis are being discursively reproduced over the topic of Turkish accession. For instance, in the excerpt above, the communist ‘East’, which constituted the major other of ‘Western’ Europe during the Cold War, is no longer constructed as a security threat, now that it is integrated into the ‘family’, a metaphor which naturalises ‘Europe’ by connoting a self-evident naturalness, clear boundaries and thus exclusion, material safety, security and protection to it. Following the inclusion of the ‘East’ in the ‘European family’, the new dimension of conflict is constructed as one between cultures, identities and civilisations. By the use of the modality – ‘it is evident that’ – the former Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn (2005a) projects the existence of such a conflict as a self-evident and universal one rather than his own personal perception, and hence implies an important degree of power via ‘transforming into “facts” what can often be no more than interpretations of complex and confusing sets of events’ (Fairclough, 1992: 160). Furthermore, this culture/identity/civilisation conflict is reduced to that of one between ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’ where Europe is not identified by Christianity, but juxtaposed against an encompassing religion, with no scope for diversity. This constructed ‘Islam’ is so monolithic that it denotes a specific challenge not just regarding Europe’s relations with other countries, but also for its relations with its immigrants.

It is notable that a chain of equivalence is formulated between immigrant populations and Islamic religion as their defining trait, setting them apart from ‘authentic’ Europeans by constructing them as a challenge that needs to be managed within a certain scope of power relations. The over-lexicalisation attained by the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ in combination with Islam/Europe tends to lend support to the claims that the Union is attempting to close the transatlantic gap on ‘threat’ constructs that has opened up in the immediate aftermath of September 11 (Van Ham, 2006: 260). Hence, as Van Ham (2006: 265) highlights, it can be argued that the ‘discourse of fear’ as accustomed from the US foreign-policy discourse has been entering the EU discursive terrain on security in competition with the hegemonic nodal points of traditional EU security discourse consisting of ‘challenges, risks and possibilities’.

The analysis of the excerpt above also constructs a Europe that moves beyond a focus on its internal sphere towards a more global role via combating a potential clash of civilisations and related ‘threats’ such as terrorism. The title of the speech from which the excerpt is taken, ‘The European Union as a Global Actor?’, also helps to strengthen that claim. The global role that Europe/EU is supposed to play, however, goes further beyond in scope in some of the Commissioner speeches ⁷ as well as in some of the interviews:

Basically, Turkey is just placed at a strategically very sensitive and very important region, where you have a lot of political issues, crime issues, trafficking issues. You have huge political crises and a hot crisis. You have the energy supply issue, so it is a hugely important region for us. And if Turkey would become something like Iran, we would have a massive, massive problem. Our main task is to avoid that and the second is to keep Turkey going in our direction and to support the process of modernisation, economic development, which is the basis in my view to stop radicalism, terrorism and fundamentalism in the region. That is what we should do, and also we should think more in terms of institutional structures, give more weight, more substance to military identity, foreign and security policy. Look at what the US is doing, look at Lebanon. So the EU needs to step in. Turkey should be on our side with this, and this should also help to change the perceptions that the EU has a global role. (COM 7)

The excerpt above is reflective of the process of securitisation where the part of the EU’s Southern neighbourhood that Turkey borders is constructed as an ‘existential threat’ through predicates associating the region with ‘huge political crises’, ‘hot crisis’, ‘massive, massive problem’, ‘crime issues’ and ‘trafficking issues’. The over-lexicalisation attained through the use of these expressions, belonging to the conceptual domain of ‘danger’ and ‘threat’, in combination with extreme-case formulations such as ‘huge’ and the repeated usage of ‘massive’, constructs the region as a threatening other to the EU.

The implicit assumption is once again that a ‘modern’ and ‘economically developed’ Turkey would ‘inspire’ the countries of the region due to religious/cultural affinity that would lead to a policy of imitation. This can be interpreted as another case of conceptualising Islam as a monolithic religion, defining the region in its totality. Furthermore, modernisation as an ultimate goal of progress (as a hegemonic paradigm of enlightenment) is juxtaposed against the barbaric other defined, again via over-lexicalisation, by ‘radicalism’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘fundamentalism’. These concepts belong to the conceptual domain of what Fairclough (2005) refers to as the ‘discourses of malignity’. As Fairclough (2005: 47) finds in narratives of international security in the post-September 11 period, ‘the malignity of the antagonists is relatively explicit’, whereas ‘the benign character of the protagonists is by contrast assumed’. This ‘benign character’ in the second excerpt above is communicated via floating signifiers or, in the words of Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 55), ‘flag words’ such as ‘modernisation’ that convey a positive ‘deontic-evaluative meaning’. This demonstrates once again the close intertextuality with post-September 11 discourse, particularly emanating from US foreign policy talk. The combat with the ‘evil other’ as (re)defined in the post-September 11 period attributes to the positively predicated EU a missionary ‘global role’ within which it needs to assert itself among other great powers such as the US.

In a similar vein, one can consider the following extract from a speech by Verheugen (2007), the former Vice President of the Commission responsible for Enterprise and Industry:

In the world of the 21st century, the EU needs Turkey as an anchor and even exporter of stability and democracy in the most unstable and troubled regions in the world, where there is so much at stake at this juncture…Energy is another key area in which our cooperation with Turkey is set to grow in the coming years. Turkey is turning into a major energy hub for provisions to Europe from Central Asia, the Middle East and even North Africa. The completion of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline this year was a major step towards increasing security of the supply and mobilizing of the Caspian oil reserves…Turkey’s membership will make the European Union a truly global actor and that may be another reason why some people are hesitant. Let us not allow them to dodge the realities of the 21st century. As a strong and united Europe we can meet the challenges of our century. (SPEECH/07/28)

The excerpt above also construes Europe as a competitor for influence and power at the global level. This is realised via the topos of usefulness and the use of referential strategies through metaphorical expressions such as ‘mobilizing oil reserves’, ‘security of (energy) supply’ and ‘strong and united Europe’. This excerpt also securitises the EU’s Southern neighbourhood which Turkey borders by predicating it as the ‘most unstable and troubled regions of the world’. While the reference to the ‘dialogue with the Muslim world’ also bears the conceptualisation of Islam as a monolithic religion through which the EU could exert influence on the South by the accession of Turkey, other means of influence such as Turkish diplomacy and the Turkish military’s involvement in international conflicts are also raised. References to the increasing presence of Turkey in its neighbourhood as a foreign policy asset for the EU increase particularly after 2007 in parallel to other accounts that point to Turkey’s growing involvement in its wider neighbourhood (Kirişçi, 2011; Müftüler-Baç and Gürsoy, 2010).

The prevalence of the construction of ‘Europe’ as a global player in relation to Turkey discussions in both Commissioner speeches and officials’ interviews also suggests a strong intertextuality with certain policy initiatives articulated and spread by prominent figures in EU decision-making in the post-September 11 period, most notably Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat who worked as Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs in the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU and who is currently Principal Adviser to the Corporate Board of the European External Action Service. In a 2002 newspaper article that received wide coverage and attention in the EU, Cooper (2002: 18) advocates a policy of ‘new liberal imperialism’ for the Union that espouses a more interventionist role in the global system on the basis of the argument that

the challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.

Both explicit intertextuality realised through references to his work and implicit intertextuality utilising his main arguments are visible in the Commission discourse on Europe/Turkey. Turkey is constructed as a future actor needed to help the ‘internally’ postmodern ‘Europe’ combat the modern/pre-modern world via dominance in the global sphere. From another viewpoint, which will be further elaborated below, Turkey is viewed as an actor unfit to participate in the postmodern ‘Europe’ where sovereignty no longer matters, and hence would provide an impediment to such a ‘Europe’. Both constructions, however, reveal the increasing prevalence of a ‘Europe’ constructed along power politics in its external relations in the European Commission. The main security threats that the ‘global power’ needs to tackle are constructed on geopolitical grounds, where civilisational differences play an important role. Pointing out to the need for the EU to become an assertive global power as such in fact ‘reproduce(s) and empower(s) the state and the discourse of sovereignty’ amid definitions of the EU as a postmodern entity (Cebeci, 2012: 569).

In other instances, the significance of the ‘civilian power’ of the EU in stabilising its neighbourhood is underlined: ⁸

In reality, enlargement is a great success story. It has proven to be one of the most important instruments for European security. It reflects the essence of the EU as a civilian power; by extending the area of peace and stability, democracy and the rule of law, the EU has achieved far more through its gravitational pull than it could ever have done with a stick or a sword. The membership perspective works as an extremely powerful incentive for reform…Look at Croatia and Turkey in the last couple of years – and follow them in the coming years to see what the prospect of accession can do to enhance human rights and push economic reforms. (SPEECH/05/362)

The excerpt above, from a speech by Rehn (2005b), frames enlargement as a ‘foreign policy tool’ that allows the EU to construct its identity as a civilian power. However, it goes beyond describing the EU as merely an international actor that relies on civilian means rather than military instruments in its dealings with third countries to constructing it as a normative power (Diez, 2005; Manners, 2002), which, through norms, promotes stability and democratic change in the countries of its immediate neighbourhood. Metaphoric expressions of ‘extending the area of peace and stability, democracy and the rule of law’ and ‘gravitational pull’ help engage in the positive self-representation of Europe as a normative actor as opposed to a military power represented by the metaphors of ‘stick’ and ‘sword’.

While Turkey’s contributions to the EU’s global role and its normative power are underlined, the speeches, as well as the interviews, also reveal concerns over the impact of Turkish accession on the functioning of the EU as a coherent actor. There is a significant difference here between the interviews and the speeches in the way in which the potential impact of Turkish accession on the functioning of the EU is articulated. In the political speeches, one can observe that Turkish accession is constructed as a matter that may require extraordinary measures (such as permanent derogations) on the part of the EU. Nevertheless, there is little reasoning put forward to justify why this is the case, which results in articulations of policy rather than identity (or both): ⁹

The impact study we are presenting today is modest in its claims. It does not seek to be exhaustive or to predict the future while essential parameters such as economic growth in Turkey and the Union remain uncertain. Nonetheless, it does already draw attention to various sectors that will require lengthy periods of preparation and adjustment in Turkey’s policies, notably rural and farming policy. Long transition periods could be needed, and sometimes, as with the free movement of persons, permanent safeguard clauses could prove necessary. (Prodi, 2004)

Former Commission President Prodi, in his speech, primarily refers to the ‘impact assessment study’ requested by the European Parliament from the European Commission in the aftermath of the Copenhagen Summit of 2002, containing ‘the main issues arising in connection with the prospect of Turkey’s accession, with particular regard to EU policies and the Community budget’. Although the Commission President establishes the epistemic status of the report with a degree of prudence (via the use of words and expressions such as ‘modest’, ‘does not seek to be exhaustive’, ‘uncertain’), the articulation of related policies rests on the implicit assumption that Turkish accession may threaten the EU interest in its political and economic functions. The interviews articulate in further detail the reasoning behind such concerns, particularly in discussions over absorption/integration capacity of the EU and migratory pressures:

We first need to decide on deepening and strengthening the EU, before we go any further with enlargement policy. We need a strong Europe, with well-functioning institutions and feasible budgetary arrangements. Europe should be capable of decision-making. Clearly, Turkey’s size is an issue that needs to be looked at, and even if you project economic trends twenty years into the future, agriculture for example will play an important role in the Turkish economy. There are problems about immigration, again to do with size, and well, certain politicians have jumped on that for very specific reasons. As long as Turkey continues to boom as it is now, well hopefully they will create some jobs, because that is the main problem…Turkey needs to develop, Turkey needs to create jobs, Turkey needs to educate its population. When this happens, I would have no fears on the part of the EU. Otherwise, Turkish accession would be detrimental to the interests of the member states and the Union. (COM 15)

As the excerpt above demonstrates, the Commission officials are concerned that a politically and economically unchanged Turkey would weaken the institutional and budgetary capacity of the EU. Thus, while most of them argue that the term ‘absorption capacity’ is being used by the national politicians to conceal their underlying hostility to Turkish accession, they believe that there are causes for concern that can be resolved through reform within Turkey and of the EU.

Nevertheless, this results in a contradiction of their views on the problem of sovereignty in Turkish accession. Previous research suggests that Commission officials often perceive the attitude of Turkey and the Turkish officials towards national sovereignty as problematic. In other words, they stress the importance of supranationalism in the EU and are critical of what they see as manifestations of Turkish nationalism. Yet, when probed on the implications of Turkish accession for the EU, their conceptualisation of Europe does not significantly differ from that of the modern state where national sovereignty is replaced by the sovereignty of Europe. Whereas the discourses are critical of sovereignty and nationalism when it comes to Turkey, they become protective of European sovereignty and interests in their own discourses on Turkey without framing them as nationalistic. When the issue comes to the concrete impacts of Turkish accession to the EU and its member states, guarding the national as well as the European interest is acceptable to the Commission officials (see Aydın-Düzgit and Suvarierol, 2011).

Another contradiction in the type of argumentation displayed above is the way in which the most common predicates pertaining to the future political state of the Union include that of a ‘strong Europe’ (especially in the face of globalisation), ‘well-functioning institutions’ capable of decision making and ‘feasible budgetary arrangements’. Buzan et al. (1998: 150) highlight how the violation of sovereignty, thus ‘the ultimate right of self-government’ is constructed as an existential threat, and thus a ‘security problem’ for states. In the case of the EU, ‘integration’ itself is used as an equivalent of sovereignty (Buzan et al., 1998: 187–89). Hence, in the Commission discourse, Turkish accession becomes partly a matter of ‘political security’ where it has the potential to threaten EU integration which is necessary for the sovereign existence of the EU.

The effect of Turkish accession on migratory pressures is another common theme where Europe’s sovereignty seems to be at stake (Aydın-Düzgit and Suvarierol, 2011: 477–478). It hereby needs to be mentioned that, despite frequent references to this theme in the interviews, it seems to be absent from Commissioner speeches on Turkey:

If you look at the region at your Southern borders, it is clear that a lot of people will be knocking on Turkish door and their final destination is the EU. I think there is a problem, there is a huge migration pressure…The border question is a very complex one. You can not expect that a country bordering regions or countries like Iraq and Iran just applies the same Schengen standards as Poland does with Belarus or Ukraine. The situation is completely different. (COM 14)

The excerpt, which constitutes a part of the response to the question on the security dimension of Turkey’s accession, securitises ‘migration’ by constructing it as an ‘existential threat’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 21–25). Migration is also predicated as a ‘problem’ for the EU because of the Southern region that Turkey borders. This parallels the observation made for most European nation-states where migration and/or organised crime are often found to be constructed as ‘transnational problems’ that are ‘layered upon a state-centric and territorially delimited “national security” problematique’ (Tuathail, 1999: 19). The use of container metaphors such as ‘door’ and ‘pressure’ construct Europe/EU as a delimited entity that requires protection from external threats (Charteris-Black, 2006: 575–579). Research on the discourses of migration in EU nation-states tells us that container metaphors utilised as such play a key role in justifying restrictive border control policies, since ‘the existence of a clearly defined container also implies a conscious controlling entity that fills or empties the container’, which refers to the governments (Charteris-Black, 2006: 576).

Conclusion

This article has sought to analyse the constructions of European identity in discussions over Turkey in the European Commission. It has specifically focused on the constructs of ‘Europe’ articulated around the theme of ‘security’ with the intention of observing the extent to which the modern state, as an ‘ideal set-up’ with its specific focus on territoriality, is being reproduced in the Commission’s imagery of ‘Europe’. In line with the poststructuralist theorising of identity as relationally and discursively constructed through difference, the Commission discourse on Turkey’s membership to the EU was found to be, at the same time, a talk on what ‘Europe’ is and where it should be heading.

By undertaking a CDA of the speeches and interviews on Turkey, the article has argued in line with Rumelili (2004) that the modern and postmodern distinction in the construction of European identities can be misleading. The analysis of texts reveals that the construction of ‘Europe’ in the Commission discourse takes on complex dimensions that are impossible to reduce to the binary dichotomy of the modern/postmodern constructs of identity. It has, however, also demonstrated that in the institutional sphere of the Commission, the degree to which the modern state’s designation of territory and identity is employed is dependent not only on the entity against which a relational identity is established, but also on the nodal points (in this case, of security) around which identities are constructed.

Regarding military/political security, Turkey was not constructed as a radically threatening other to the ‘European’ self on all grounds. In other words, one can argue that discourses on security did not necessarily entail the radical distinction of the European self from the Turkish other. It was the debates on the implications of Turkish accession for the EU’s political and economic system that mainly designated Turkey as a threatening other to Europe. Turkey was construed as a potential destabiliser of EU integration, and thus of the EU’s political sovereignty, with its large population, economic system and the prospects of migration. Yet, especially on matters of military security, through the discourses on Turkey, it was the Southern neighbourhood that was often constructed as a threatening other defined on geopolitical grounds such as religion and civilisation. Strong intertextuality was found with the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis in the framing of this construction, providing support to the claims of Bottici and Challand (2006: 316) that ‘the narrative of the clash of civilisations…[has] turned into a successful political myth’.

Discussions on Turkey have also provided insight into the ways in which the European ‘self’ was conceptualised in the Commission discourse. Construction of Europe as a global actor has denoted Europe as a singular actor resembling the modern state in its external policy, in competition with other global players such as the US. In turn, in discussions over Turkey, the ‘cluster of interconnected challenges and threats to the security of the European Union’ such as migration, human trafficking, terrorism, radicalism and fundamentalism portrayed as emanating from the South have constructed Europe as a ‘deeper and more tightly unified geopolitical space’ (Rogers, 2009: 846). It was also observed that the EU was at times defined also as a civilian and normative actor promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law in its neighbourhood through the enlargement policy. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the construction of Europe as a normative power does not necessarily imply transcending the discursive boundaries of the modern sovereign state since it can be interpreted as a way of discursively replacing the state with the EU by transferring state’s governmentality, and thus its disciplining power on the international level, by defining the terms of what is regarded as ‘normal’ (Cebeci, 2012: 574).

This article has also demonstrated that analysing identity constructs in enlargement is integral to understanding the articulation of policies towards candidate countries. It has done that through problematising the designation of the Commission in the enlargement literature as a constructor of an inclusive (in some cases, cosmopolitan) European identity that treats candidates on an equal footing on the basis of so-called ‘acquired’ characteristics such as democracy and human rights. It is in fact the case that the Commission officials refrain from categorically rejecting Turkey to become a full member on the basis of cultural, religious and/or historical factors. Yet, it is difficult to account for the Commission’s introduction of the possibility of permanent derogations in selected policy fields, including the free movement of people, through the construction of the Commission as a ‘cosmopolitan agent’ in enlargement policy. However, construction of ‘Europe’ largely as a ‘political sovereign’, where integration is key to its survival, helps account for the incongruence between this attributed identity and the articulated policy. Since the political survival of the Union is at stake, what can be defined as ‘emergency measures’ unaccounted for by EU law can be justified. This also compromises the construction of Europe as a normative power whereby discriminatory practices that also involve imposing limits to movement within the EU are being justified.

This article has focused on the Commission’s security-related discourses on Turkey. Further research on discourses on other relevant themes such as democracy, culture and history can add to our understanding on the different ways in which Europe(s) is discursively constructed through Turkey (see Aydın-Düzgit, 2012). This could shed further light on EU foreign policy that extends beyond Turkey as well as help develop novel interpretive frameworks in analysing other contested EU policies such as those in the field of justice, freedom and security.