Hakan Yilmaz

Turkish identity on the road to the EU: basic elements of French and German oppositional discourses

Identifying a collectivity consists of producing a series of rational arguments, emotional judgments and aesthetic choices with the purpose of distinguishing that particular collectivity from the others. Each collective identification is, therefore, an exercise in boundary drawing, separating the insiders from the outsiders, ‘us’ from ‘them’ and ‘we’ from ‘the others’. Some recent studies on European identity have shown that Turkey is treated as an ‘other’ in the mental maps of many Europeans. Hence, according to an important cross-country qualitative study on European identity, carried out on behalf of the European Commission, the respondents have drawn a clear line between those countries that they believe form an ‘integral part’ of Europe and those that do not:

External-Internal Linkages in Democratization: Developing an Open Model of Democratic Change

This article presents an open model of democratization in the context of discussing some well-known approaches to the role of international factors in democratic transitions. The open model is applied to semi-peripheral states of the international system, more specifically the cases of political change in Spain, Portugal and Turkey in the aftermath of the Second World War. Starting from Dahls conditions for democratic change, it is argued that the impact of external factors on democratization should be examined closely where the regime expects the internal costs of suppression to be lower than the internal costs of toleration, in other words where the internal balance of forces is unlikely to impel a willingness to democratize. Two new external variables are introduced to open Dahls closed model: the expected external costs of suppression and toleration. It is shown that, in a democracy-promoting international environment, the leaders of an authoritarian state would base their decisions about whether to democratize on their expectations of both the internal costs of toleration and the external costs of suppression.

Turkish Conservatism and the Idea of Europe

In this chapter we are going to explore conservative beliefs and attitudes in Turkey and how they deal with the idea of Europe and Turkey’s integration with the European Union. First, we will offer a brief characterisation of conservative thought in general and of the major variants of Turkish conservatism today, namely Islamic and nationalist. Secondly, we will present, in two separate sections and in more detail, the nationalist and Islamic versions of contemporary Turkish conservatism, focusing particularly on their mind-sets on Europe. For both nationalist and Islamic conservatism, in addition to offering conceptual explanations of these modes of thinking and codes of operation, we will also make use of survey data to explain the degree to which these ideas have found an audience within the general public. In my account of nationalist conservatism, we will define and focus on two discursive patterns, the Tanzimat and Sevres syndromes, which we believe constitute the core of the Turkish nationalist discourse on Europe. We will argue that while the ‘deep policy’ imperative of the Tanzimat syndrome is a delegitimation of collective and individual rights, that of the Sevres syndrome is isolationism in the area of foreign policy and ‘westernisation without the West’ in the domestic arena. These two syndromes, we will argue, may help us understand the strategic shift of the nationalist conservatism away from Europe and the generally disapproving attitude of the nationalist conservative political parties and intellectuals to Turkey’s integration with the European Union.