Turkey and the European Union

The Politics of Belonging

Lucia Najšlová

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781838602680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

Turkey's EU accession talks, which began in 2005, were intended to strengthen Turkey's democracy and the EU's ability to embrace difference. Instead, we have seen repeated questioning of Turkey's 'Europeanness' and mutual exploitation of the other's weaknesses. Offering a unique analysis of conversations in and about Turkey and the EU, Lucia Najšlová adopts an interdisciplinary ethnographic lens, taking the reader through misunderstandings in the diplomatic framework and into everyday interactions between various protagonists of the relationship. Questions of belonging and recognition underpin the analysis and connect various research sites, including the 2016 refugee deal and the status of Turkish Cypriots. Najšlová delves into the temporal dimensions of this dynamic, such as questions surrounding Turkish modernity and nation-building, and asks whether there is such a thing as good timing for democracy and what would happen if the diplomatic framework of Turkey-EU relations started moving faster.

Part One

The Clock, the Compass, and the Typewriter

In the early spring 2010 a group of Istanbul residents, including a playwright and an engineer, organized a press conference to tell the world that from now on we should date our present epoch from the moment of the invention of the wheel some 4,000 years ago. “Such a switch would help mankind build on what connects it rather than divides,” a writer behind the initiative said. “The current calendar is limiting,” he continued, “in that it departs from one religion, one tradition.” Shortly before the conference initiators found out that a group of creationists elsewhere in the world recently also added this same number to their calendar, something that made the present group emphasize that theirs is a strictly secular project. The conference was convened in a place called °360, a high-end club at night-time, restaurant at daytime, a few steps from Galatasaray Lisesi, a well-known elite high school in Beyoğlu neighborhood. The choice of the venue, °360 was symbolic—it literally offered a view into all four corners of the world and angles between them. On a second reading, perhaps it matters that the possibility to see all the angles of the world can be rather exclusive. Only few residents of the city could enjoy a meal at this venue, or would even consider finding out whether they could. But what was served at this occasion was the story, fairly revolutionary to my ears. It has never occurred to me before that one could just propose changing the calendar. I was surprised that very few journalists attended, and the initiative, read amidst the sounds of church bells and ezan, barely made headlines.

The signatories wanted to follow up with letters to the UN, Council of Europe and European Commission, but, by the time of writing of this book it did not happen. A few years later, one of its founders, Tarik Günersel, launched an Earth Civilization Project, a call to “reconsider our collective existence on this planet.”¹ In our many conversations, in which I sometimes skeptically compared calls to synchronize calendars to Esperanto, Tarik never seemed to have wavered or been discouraged that the idea is not (yet?) getting massive appeal, always claiming that even if one person listens to your thought, you’ve done your job. For him, the making of that appeal—how about we look at common beginnings—has been a way of exercising freedom, autonomy, and an act of exploring the possibilities of connection. As another signatory told me, “Turkey is now living a historic time,” so it is a propitious moment for sharing the idea. Going all the way through with technicalities has not been the priority. The most important part was the creative process, the act of suggesting that there are more ways how humans can relate beyond what divides them. Tarik after all is a writer and at the time of announcing this initiative, he was also the chair of Turkish PEN.

The city of Istanbul is very rewarding if one wants to think about how we organize times and places. In fact, it provides many invitations to this journey. Synchronization of clocks and the difficulty thereof is a theme weaving through Turkish history. In the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers pledged to bring the empire closer to Europe, a project of travel in time, rather than space, hence the frequent references to “catching up.” Successive generations of politicians and writers have stocked whole libraries with dreams generated by this process and frustrations when Europe seemed a too difficult, even unreachable, destination. But it is not just texts—it is also visual monuments, spaces and their accessibility—that provide a perspective on being and becoming. It takes less than an hour to get from Sinan’s sixteenth-century mosques in Sultanahmet to skyscrapers in Levent or the twenty-first-century gated communities, such as Mashattan in the Maslak area, the latter being a world fully self-sustaining, with its own restaurants, shops, and even a little lake. But such a journey does not neatly mark centuries and decades, from earlier to later; Istanbul’s old and new are not laid out like in a museum catalogue. Perhaps the closest way of describing how they are laid out would be in the words of physicist Carlo Rovelli contending linear understandings of time: “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English, they crowd around chaotically like the Italians.”²

First-time visitors to the city are often surprised that what they find to be some of its most European neighborhoods are on the Asian continent, or that bar streets are just a few steps away from very pious quarters. The air-conditioned shopping malls selling a mix of brands from around the world including Turkey have not yet fully replaced street markets. While various “re-vitalization” projects have destroyed parts of earlier fabrics, nothing has so far erased the many reminders that the city has lived through different eras and political projects, new time-zones not only replacing each other but also co-existing. As the anthropologist Partha Chatterjee reminds us, “People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it.”³

The three chapters in this part explore maps, time zones, and writers’ decision-making; in short, how we organize what and who belongs where and why. The aim is to outline contours of the worlds into which accession talks entered at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to show the locations from which Europe(s), West(s), and East(s), have been imagined and lived, how they served in political contestations and the organization of knowledge. While the year 2004 opened a new stage, the life of the relationship has not been cut off from its pre-accession pasts, it builds upon them. I open this discussion with a review of the many nuances of belonging, and its other side (denial, withdrawal, rejection, absence). The second chapter follows with ideas that have shaped Europe’s self-narrative as it started becoming an institution—the European Union. The third chapter reviews recurring themes in Turkey’s debate about (not) being part of EU-rope.

NOTES

^1. Tarik Günersel, “Earth Day and Earth Civilization Project.” Sampsonia Way, April 17, 2014, http://www.sampsoniaway.org/fearless-ink/tarik-gunersel/2014/04/17/earth-day-and-earth-civilization-project/

^2. Carlo Rovelli, quoted in The Guardian, “There is No Such Thing as Past or Future,” April 14, 2018.

^3. Partha Chatterjee, “Anderson’s Utopia,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999): 128–34, 131.

1

Belongings We Choose, and Those That We Do Not

“Where should I put this?” one may ask at home when unpacking the shopping bags. “Where does he come from?” could be a common question inquiring about someone who just joined a group. “How did this get here?” is sometimes uttered in surprise when things are not where they are supposed to be. What and who belongs where are also basic questions we ask when we do research, organize libraries, or draft new articles. They guide our learning and ways in which we convey knowledge. Humans dream of becoming part of something, think and feel they are a part of something, yet writers sometimes get them wrong. Belongings are fought for, rewritten, contradictory, and, probably, inescapable. They also often come in binaries such as eastern/western, democratic/undemocratic, or developed/developing. The problem with binaries is that they force us to define one entity in terms of what it is not. But then, who invented binaries, and can we escape some of them?

The calls for adjustment of clocks, setting them to a common starting point, such as the one described in the opening of this part, connect profoundly to debate about possibilities of connectivity, togetherness, and solidarity. Writers living in various eras and geographies have asked for unity, so did founders of political projects, be they national or imperial. Claims to universalism, however, are often translated into institutional histories built on disagreements with and about various types of “others.” The volume of commentary, political pamphlets, and scholarship produced in Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, Prague, and other places on a European map, in which authors watch “Turkey” from “Europe” or the other way around is enormous. It is now well-established that for Western Europeans and Turks alike, ideas about the imagined other helped to shape their “home” polities.¹ Imitating the others, frustrations at not being able to be like them as well as denying membership, and coming to terms with this rejection, have shaped a sense of “we” for many human polities. Turkey and EU-rope are then no exception—although, arguably, they have featured in their respective imaginaries more frequently, than, say, Samoa has. Where specifically is this difference, why do we need to say Turkey and Europe?

Finding the Border, Writing the Border

There are several types of maps. The first atlases I recall from elementary school usually came with two versions of the world: physical/natural and political. The former would show mountains in brown color, lowlands in green, and rivers and seas in blue. The latter would get more colorful—every state got one color—and also more determined on beginnings and endings, as borders were emphasized with a line. What is not immediately obvious when we look at such a map is that it captures a state of affairs at the time of its publication. Digital era has made it much easier to produce maps and thus to see series of images that show how authority over territory² has been changing over time. While such sequences already give a hint that political units are impermanent, they reveal the results, not the process that led to reordering. When thinking about lines of separation, in the European context, it is helpful to engage with Maria Todorova’s succinct description of the Balkans’ becoming “European” exactly by un-becoming Ottoman, that is, as they started imitating the European nation-state.³ Spaces shift in time, but the shifts do not just happen, they are made. Place-names reveal a bit more about histories of world-making.⁴ The terms Near (Middle, Far) East, stayed with us from a recent era in which distances have been measured from Europe, and so has the taxonomy that refers to the cultural heritage of map makers....