Contextual and Contested: Reassessing Europeanization in the Case of Turkey

Introduction

The successive fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has had tremendous implications for Europe, including the integration process it has been experiencing. Among others, it gave an unprecedented momentum to European integration toward Eastern and Central Europe. The European Union (EU) created ‘powerful tools to shape institutions’ and political structures in the CEECs through the mechanisms of conditionality, financial aids, and other instruments, which were directly associated with accession to the EU. ¹ Therefore, the EU found the opportunity to impose its conception of development and modernization through accession; modernization ‘legitimated around a collective identity based on liberal norms of capitalist democracy’. ² After the 1980s’ Southern European enlargement, the EU has once more appeared as the external modernizing subject and ideal model to emulate for the countries undergoing postcommunist transformation. The political and economic models of its core members ‘were seen as normatively superior and readily transferable to displace inferior models in candidate countries’. ³

The last wave of EU enlargement ran parallel to the rapid increase of a rather ‘post-ontological’ ⁴ research agenda, and its literature on Europeanization was dedicated to understanding the domestic impact of the EU on the member and candidate countries. ⁵ This is comparable with the rise of the 1950s’ neoevolutionist modernization school in the United States as a response to the wave of independence in the developing world from the colonial rulers. I argue that the current usage of the term Europeanization has resulted in teleologically fixated research, where the EU represents, a priori, the most developed, the most modern, and the to be adapted to. Change is not only taken as read, as a linear process of development in the member or applicant states but is also often associated exclusively with the EU, ‘thereby de facto excluding other processes which may also logically be regarded as Europeanization’. ⁶ The EU’s norms, policies, and rules of conduct are often straightforwardly identified with that of Europe and assumed as established and even fixed identities to be exported to the less or non-European societies. Yet, as in the case of all other collective identities, the meaning, norms, and boundaries of European identity are always subject to change reflecting the inherent power relations, ideological premises, and cultural practices of a specific historical period of time ⁷ and of a specific national context. ⁸ Therefore, any scholarly reflection of Europeanization should consider the ‘historically contingent’ ⁹ and politically constructed nature of Europe and the implications of that on the impact of Europeanization on different societies.

Thus, the current study rejects any notion of Europeanization as a linear and evolutionary process of adaptation, furthering stage by stage and experienced by all societies in similar modalities. To get a deeper insight into the impact of Europe in domestic settings, a novel epistemological and methodological approach to Europeanization is needed: Europeanization, not as a teleological process of change and development but as a context that is continually renegotiated by European societies in their domestic and European-level debates and Europeanization, not merely as a technical, formal process of adaptation to the EU, but as a context whereby domestic and European actors renegotiate European norms, policies, and institutions. While Europeanization as the EU-required domestic process of adaptation is already a subject of considerable academic interest, less attention has been paid to analyzing the various ways in which European integration is conceptualized and politically used by domestic actors. This lack is even sharper on the scholarly analyses regarding Turkey’s Europeanization where theoretical assumptions of the current study will be testified. Largely departing from the mainstream definition of the term, the literature on Turkey’s Europeanization often discusses the issue mainly in technical/institutional terms and in relation to the EU-induced legal and constitutional harmonization processes. ¹⁰

The aims of this article are mainly twofold: first, problematizing the mainstream usage of the term Europeanization, and the notion of change that it has embraced, and second, developing a fuller account of the impact of European integration on societies. This article is also an attempt to redefine the scope and boundaries of Europeanization and to relocate it within a broader sociological terrain. Analytically, it develops a clear distinction between EU-ization as a formal process of alignment with the EU’s institutions, policies, and legal structure and Europeanization as a wider sociopolitical and normative context. Such distinction allows us to reveal that Europeanization is more than the formal institutional and policy adaptation processes and transformations that it triggers and that it goes ‘much deeper than that’. ¹¹ This study argues that the impact of Europeanization in a given society is heavily conditioned by the extent of and the ways in which Europe is used as a context by domestic actors to promote their political/social projects. The mainstream literature on Europeanization often considers domestic actors only ‘as mediators’ of the European impact. However, as I will try to indicate with respect to the Turkish case, domestic actors are not ‘mediators’ but creators of Europeanization. It is also proposed that European-level developments overwhelmingly influence the ways in which domestic actors react to and make use of Europe and the context of Europeanization.

Turkey is a case where Europe has extensively been implicated in its modernization and nation-building processes long before the emergence of the European Community (EC)/EU. The Turkish case provides ample evidence about how Europeanization works out not as a linear process of adaptation but rather as a normative–political context, a context experienced and mobilized by different social groups in varying degrees and modalities in different historical periods of time. This is not only due to the fact that Europe and the Western modernity that it has symbolized have been extensively mobilized by the modernizing elite to justify their vision of state and society since the nineteenth century, but also because different political groups taking part in contemporary debates about the nature of the domestic regime in Turkey have often framed their political arguments by making reference to European norms, policies, and expectations. Therefore, different discourses of Europe and Europeanness have been an integral part of modernity and regime debates in Turkey. The current intervention argues that mainly two different rhetorics (‘Republicanist’ and ‘Integrationist’) of modernization and Europe have dominated these public debates. The Republicanist rhetoric foregrounds the Turkish Republican–Kemalist values, that is, Westernization, relentless secularism, and nationalism as the guiding principles of Turkish modernity and its relations with Europe. It uses a more state-centric conception of Europe: Europe as the birthplace of nation state, modernity, and Enlightenment. The Integrationist discourse advocating economic and political liberalization, and integration with globalized politics and market, associates Europe with pluralism, individual rights and freedoms, market economy, and economic welfare. It does not draw on a notion of modernity, which is necessarily linked to Westernization. ¹²

The article first examines and problematizes how change in the domestic actors through Europeanization is understood in the current new institutionalist literature. Second, it unpacks the distinction it has made between EU-ization and Europeanization and relocates the latter within a broader sociological terrain. Then, the article turns to the Turkish case, with the aim of historicizing the experience of Europeanization as a normative–political context. Focusing on the post-1923 period, the study examines changing meanings of Europe–Europeanization for different segments of the Turkish society in different historical periods of time. Yet, the emphasis will be placed upon recent regime and identity debates that have been informed by the distinct perceptions and representations of Europe.

Europeanization: change as institutional adaptation

At the most fundamental level, Europeanization is a concept presuming a necessary relationship of diffusion between the EU-level ‘institution building and identity formation’ ¹³ and the domestic change in member and applicant states. It suggests a ‘post-ontological’ research agenda through which the possible and materialized outcomes of this relationship are analyzed, but the causality behind this relationship is often omitted. To put it differently, the literature is largely inclined to explore the domestic effects of already established EU institutions. The common denominator in most usages of the term is its definition as a ‘process of change and adaptation which is understood to be a consequence of the development of the European Union’ ¹⁴ both at the domestic and European levels. In the literature, ‘it has become common to use Europe with reference to the European Union and its member states’. ¹⁵ The straightforward identification of Europe with the EU makes the EU the principal agent of change and the only body politic in which Europe-wide norms, policies, and institutions are (re)constructed and exported to the domestic polities of the member states. In their top–down approach, Boerzel and Risse ¹⁶ understand Europeanization ‘as a process of change at the domestic level in which the member states adapt their processes, policies, and institutions to new practices, norms, rules, and procedures that emanate from the emergence of a European system of governance’. In essence, in its most usages, Europeanization refers to an EU-induced process of domestic adaptation to the penetrating ‘European values, directives and norms’, ¹⁷ and hence, ‘the EU level is mostly treated as the starting point of a Europeanization study’. ¹⁸ Thereby, to many, EU-ization ‘is a more relevant term’, ¹⁹ since ‘it occurs in the context of, and can be seen as sparked off by, European integration’. ²⁰

The Europeanization literature, overwhelmingly under the influence of rationalist and sociological variants of neoinstitutionalism, tends to explain patterns of domestic change in the member and associate countries ‘via the institutional goodness of fit of domestic and European arrangements’. ²¹ ‘Changes in and among the key institutions’ are deemed as the fundamental and most reliable unit of analysis. The intensity of pressure for institutional and policy adaptation exerted by the EU is largely determined by the degree of misfit between the domestic and European-level institutions and policies. Misfit is often taken as the exclusive factor inducing Europeanization of domestic settings. ²² ‘The lower the compatibility between European and domestic processes, policies, and institutions, the higher the adaptational pressure’. ²³ In the policy areas and institutions where compatibility between the domestic and European level has already been maintained, no fundamental change should be anticipated. In contrast, when the domestic structure does not resonate or clash with European arrangements, the compliance problems occur and adaptational pressure increases, creating new opportunities or constraints for the domestic actors. ²⁴

Domestic actors are often ‘only considered as mediators’ of these top–down pressures, and they have no real political role and discretion. ²⁵ Rationalist institutionalism cites the number of domestic actors having veto power and provision of ideational and material support by formal institutions to the pro-European actors as the two factors mediating change through Europeanization. These mediating factors, for the sociological account, are the capacity of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ (e.g. epistemic communities, advocacy networks) to promote change and the existence or absence of political culture ‘conducive to consensus-building and cost-sharing’. ²⁶ According to the rationalist variance, the elimination of mismatch between domestic and European settings is contingent upon the ability of domestic pro-EU actors to use opportunities and constraints emerging from Europeanization at the expense of their rivals. ²⁷ The sociological variant, suspicious of, yet not totally rejecting this crude positivism, conceives change as a product of intersubjective, interpretative socialization processes. ²⁸ Domestic change occurs when ‘European elites and institutions socialize candidate states into changing first their identities and then their preferences and interests’. ²⁹

To sum up, in both accounts, adaptational pressure comes from the EU; it is mediated by some domestic factors, and then ‘the domestic’ changes through Europeanization. ³⁰ In either case, change refers to a linear, empirically observable, and testable process, the success of which mainly depends on the adaptational ability and learning capacity of the European societies. It is a teleological process of progress toward ‘the more European’ and ‘the more modern’ embodied in the core Western members of the EU. The process of transformation through Europeanization is presumed to be unilinear and evolutionary and is applicable to and experienced by all societies engaged in Europeanization in similar modalities. For instance, according to Grabbe, ³¹ the newcomers ‘are already subjected to substantially the same pressures of adaptation to the EU policies as current member states’. She also assumes that the same accession criteria are applied for the current and future applicants and ‘the same policy structure and implementation procedures are used’ by the EU. ³² National institutions largely imagined as like-units and homogenous entities are thought to be subject to similar laws of change and adaptation under the impact of Europeanization.

Yet, one should note that unlike earlier studies, the recent research takes account of the fact that the domestic impacts of Europeanization are not fixed, ³³ pregiven, or even predictable. The response of different societies to change imposed by Europeanization differs by virtue of their different internal structures and specificities. ³⁴ All societies exposed to Europeanization experience it differently ‘depending on factors such as specific state formation, the patterns of policy making, the political culture, but also the balance of power between state and society on the one hand, and national and sub-national units on the other’. ³⁵ As Brigid Laffan indicated, ³⁶ this is also related to the historical/political meanings and values assigned to Europe and Europeanness varying extensively across countries and domestic actors. Various meanings attached to Europe within a society determine to a large extent the distinct nature of its integration into Europe. Thus, the present task of the literature should be ‘to examine how structures, behaviors, agency, and beliefs shape, or alter the ways in which the process of Europeanization works out—over countries, over time and over issue areas’. ³⁷

Unpacking the EU-ization/Europeanization distinction

I suggest in this study that neoinstitutionalism tends to conceive the Europe-wide norms, principles, and institutions as established and even fixed identities to be internalized by the member states. The literature often hinges upon the presumption that European integration ‘takes place “up there”, while “down here” actors and institutions try to make sense of it and adapt as best they can’. ³⁸ Europeanization is imagined as a unidimensional process, whereby the norms, rules, and institutions that are typical of Europe are constructed at the EU level and diffused through various mechanisms into the domestic/national polities, policies, and political structures. ³⁹ It is at this stage that a fundamental question imposes itself: Which Europe are we talking about? Since the literature overwhelmingly ‘has not been reflexive about the concepts it is employing’, ⁴⁰ it does not need to problematize this notion of Europe, frequently identified with the EU or its member states. ⁴¹ The commonly used formula in which the EU stands for Europe persistently reproduces the illusion that there is no Europe other than the EU. The EU is assigned a self-evident quality legitimately speaking on behalf of the whole of Europe. It is both the producer and exporter of the distinct European values and the mode of governance to the less European, that is, peripheral Europe and non-European societies.

Given the reductionist and essentialist presumptions of scholarly reflection on Europeanization, a consequential need arises to make an analytical distinction between EU-ization and Europeanization. As Tim Haughton reminded, ⁴² such a distinction, though underdeveloped, was already drawn by Helen Wallace, where EU-ization denoted change required exclusively by EU membership. However, I do not use the category of EU demand, which may also include formal/informal utterances made by EU bureaucrats or Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and political figures from different EU members, declarations of the European Parliament, and other documents speaking on behalf of the EU. The category of EU demand is too vague and not helpful enough as a criterion along which to differentiate Europeanization and EU-ization. In my distinction, EU-ization refers to a more concrete and restricted sphere of alignment with the EU’s body of law and institutions. It is a formal and overwhelmingly technical process of adjustment, the most radical impacts of which are manifested during the accession negotiations. Alignment with and implementation of the acquis communitaire is the sine qua non and the yardstick against which to measure the achieved level of EU-ization. It denotes more or less a process of progression, albeit open to deviancies, easier to measure and leading to the convergence of the domestic and the EU-level laws, institutions, and policies.

On the other hand, Europeanization, rather than being a process, refers to a context or a situation ‘where certain effects can be shown to have occurred’. ⁴³ As Buller and Gamble ⁴⁴ suggest, defining it in this way is important to reveal ‘its variable and contingent nature’ and not to assign it any irreversibility and inevitability. Europeanization develops as a wider historical context embracing also other institutions of European integration, whose main object of reference is not the EU, but Europe. As put by Vink, ⁴⁵ ‘“European integration” in itself covers a wider range of processes and institutions. Europeanization is more than just EU-ization’. To illustrate, the gradual liberalization of Greece’s minority and citizenship policies from the 1990s onward was much more closely connected to the Council of Europe’s activism and reports than to the endeavors of the EU. ⁴⁶

The norms and values generating the transformative impact of Europe are always redefined by European societies in their domestic/national and European-level debates. Intensifying relations with Europe, particularly the EU, make (EU)rope increasingly involved in the reconstructions of ‘systems of meanings and collective understandings’ ⁴⁷ in these societies. The varying conceptions of Europe and Europeanness articulated by different segments of society increasingly come to determine their visions of change and vice versa. The more the national- and European-level political, bureaucratic, and civil societal actors make reference to specific European norms, policies, or institutions, the more Europe can be expected to have an impact on domestic policies, polities, and political structures. In the same vein, the more the domestic/national issues are discussed in a European frame of reference, and the more European-level actors are involved in these debates as speakers or addressees of claims, the more penetration of Europeanization as a context can be expected. All utterances and actions by domestic and European-level actors making reference to Europe and Europeanness reconfigure Europeanization as a context from which varying ideas, norms, and values can be extracted and used at subnational, national, and supranational politics.

This study argues that the impact of Europeanization in a given society is largely determined by the extent of and the ways in which Europe is used as a normative–political context by domestic actors. Europeanization penetrates into domestic politics, if and when these actors use the European context as a ‘mobilising political instrument’ ⁴⁸ to promote their political, social agenda. As Jacquot and Woll propose ⁴⁹ ‘political usage is necessary for any impact of the European integration process on national political systems’. Europeanization exists as a context to the extent that the European norms, values, and institutions are incorporated into the public narratives by domestic actors. Domestic elites support EU-ization reforms and consolidation of Europeanization as a normative–political context only when they think that this best serves either the national interest or their own electoral purposes. To do this, they often frame EU-ization–Europeanization demands in a way as ‘to fit the already broadly shared views in society. We are European we deserve to be in Europe’. ⁵⁰ National actors strategically emphasize already existing domestic norms and values, which they consider resonate with that of Europe’s. For instance, the Turkish foreign ministry, in a document justifying Turkey’s integration with the European Economic Community (EEC), stated that Turkey, since its foundation, has become ‘an inseparable part of Western world’ and has joined various Western organizations ‘whose economic and political principles were commensurate with those of Turkey’ in the postwar period. ⁵¹

Thus, unlike what the relevant literature often implies, domestic actors are not ‘mediators’ but creators of Europeanization. Yet, they are not the only creators of Europeanization either. European-level developments (policy making, the scope of integration, and Europe-wide debates) shape perceptions of domestic actors and the political structure within which they react to and make use of this context. There is no doubt that how Europeanization is experienced in a society also depends on the actions and discourses of European-level actors shaping the normative, ideational, and institutional structure of Europe–Europeanization. Europeanization manifests itself as a context where various meanings of Europe and being European have emerged, have been negotiated, and have been mobilized by domestic and European-level actors. Change in such a context occurs ‘not simply because it is imposed from the outside, but also because it interacts with domestic developments on the inside’. ⁵² In view of the theoretical arguments advanced so far, the remainder of this study is dedicated to understanding the Turkish experience of Europeanization.

Turkey: Europeanization as a context for political contestation and modernity

Turkey’s centuries-long and arduous integration with Europe delivered a historical breakthrough when its candidacy status was formally recognized in the EU’s Helsinki summit of 1999. Yet, the implications of Europeanization as a context of norm definition, modernization, and identity confirmation may well be traced back to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The historically constructed perceptions that societies have of Europe to a large extent determines how they make sense of Europeanization and how they associate themselves with it. Then, it may be helpful at least to glance through the changing meanings of Europe for different segments of the Turkish society to shed light on how they experience Europeanization. Due to limited space, the current intervention rather focuses on the post-1923 period and recent identity debates in particular where different conceptions of Europe have been disseminated and mobilized.

Conclusion

The central aims of this contribution have been to problematize the mainstream usage of the term Europeanization and to develop a fuller account of the impact of Europe. It rejected the notion of Europeanization as a top–down and evolutionary process of adaptation furthering stage by stage and experienced by all societies in similar modalities. This study ventured to develop a clear analytical distinction between EU-ization as EU-induced process of legislative, institutional, and policy engineering and Europeanization as a wider political and normative context. Drawing on Buller and Gamble, ⁹⁹ it argued that Europeanization exists as a normative–political context where all European societies have been contributing to negotiating European norms, values, and policies. EU-ization is an integral part, and may currently be the most important instrument, of Europeanization, but not the whole of it. The penetration of Europeanization into domestic political structures of European societies is overwhelmingly contingent upon the willingness of national actors to mobilize this context to promote their political agenda. Therefore, this study suggested that domestic actors as the interpreters and implementers of European norms, rules, and policies in domestic settings are not ‘mediators’ but creators of Europeanization. It is also argued that European-level developments overwhelmingly influence the ways in which these actors react to and make use of Europe. This reconceptualization allows us to imagine Europeanization as a context (a) the only source of which is not the EU, (b) experienced in different societies in different modalities, and (c) which cannot be thought in isolation from other domestic and external processes. It also allows us to problematize the evolutionary and universalistic tendencies of the current scholarly reflection on the issue.

This article revealed that Europeanization as a normative–political context has extensively been implicated in Turkey’s modernization as well as in the recent debates concerning its identity and future orientation. By exploring changing notions of Europe within the Turkish society, this study indicated how Europeanization has been experienced by different social groups in varying degrees and modalities in different historical periods of time. It also suggested that the contemporary regime debates that have been dominated by the ‘Republicanist’ and the ‘Integrationist’ narratives have been informed by the distinct perceptions and representations of Europe and Europeanization. The Republicanists and Integrationists are converging on the idea that values, institutions, and policies described as modern and associated with democracy are largely embedded in the European model of society—mostly West European—of which Turkey should be a part. However, they are diverging in both the definition of these values and institutions and the ways in which Turkey should appropriate them (i.e. the speed, content, timing, and extent of the appropriation). The debates about Turkey’s place in world politics and its identity are not in any conditions grounded on the rejection of modernity and Europe but rather on their different interpretations. As these debates have increasingly been framed with reference to Europe, Europeanization has penetrated into Turkish politics as a normative–political context through which the participants of these debates justify and promote their deliberative positions and political agenda.

Turkey’s EU membership is viewed by society with growing suspicion thanks to various factors, such as the ongoing debate in Europe ‘on the desirability of Turkey’s membership’, ‘lack of a clear and consistent EU strategy and commitment’, ¹⁰⁰ and exclusionary discourses of some European leaders against Turkey. However, the society’s growing suspicion on EU membership should not be taken to mean that Turkey is distancing itself from European values, norms, and institutions. Europe is increasingly becoming a vantage point for Turkish society to compare and contrast the characteristics of the political regime and the course of daily life in Turkey with those of European states. In early October 2011, the Turkish parliament started to work on modern Turkey’s fifth, yet the first civilian constitution. The previous ones, which were authoritarian and statist in nature, were either heavily influenced or explicitly dictated by the military top brass. The political parties represented in the parliament, and other societal, economic actors, converge on the idea that this new constitution should be inspired by the constitutions in West European democracies in that it should be concise, clearly written, and based on protection of individual rights and liberties. Various actors taking part in the process made it clear that the soul and the text of the new constitution should draw on European norms, values, and principles. Thereby, one might expect that even if Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU are currently stalled, Europeanization as a normative–political context will continue to influence politics and society in the near future.

The impact of Europeanization on Turkey and her contributions to the European experience are not reducible to the ebbs and flows of Turkey–EU relations. These issues deserve to be the object of a more sophisticated and nuanced analytical inquiry, which may be possible only through a clear distinction between EU-ization and Europeanization. This distinction would allow us to comprehend better varying impacts of Europe on the Turkish society and politics in different historical periods of time. It helps us to understand how and why Europeanization can still impact the varying discourses of modernization and change in Turkey, despite the substantial slowing down of the EU-ization reforms since 2005. EU-ization reforms may be passed by the national parliaments, or the technical–institutional and policy requirements of the acquis could be implemented by the relevant bodies and institutions. However, as the Turkish case has clearly indicated, translation of these reforms into daily practices and their internalization by societies are taking a much longer time and effort and are dependent on the extent to which Europeanization penetrates into domestic politics as a normative–political context. Such a distinction could finally provide new insights about how and in what ways Europe-inspired reforms are appropriated, negotiated, and implemented by the European societies.