Commissioned Book Review: Bilge Firat, Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics
| Author | Berkay Gülen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920916076 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) NP17 –NP18
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
916076PSW0010.1177/1478929920916076Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s
Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics
by Bilge Firat. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2019. 224 pp., £80.00 (Hardcover), £96.00
(E-book), ISBN: 9781526133625
Just a decade ago before it was marked with
Brexit, austerity measures, and migration cri-
sis, the European Union (EU) was promising
enlargement, prosperity, and liberal values that
candidate states compete to embrace. After
decades-long waits, however, Turkey’s acces-
sion negotiations were still the hardest exam
that the EU had to pass until its legislation was
tested by thousands of migrants on its borders.
Bilge Firat tells the story of the dual swing
between the EU and Turkey in the late-2000s
when Turkey’s accession negotiations were in
full run. Diplomacy and Lobbying during
Turkey’s Europeanisation discusses “the
human dynamics of failed integration between
the EU and Turkey.” The book analyzes the
integration beyond state-to-state relations and
focuses on the role of particular people, spe-
cifically, diplomats, bureaucrats, politicians,
and lobbyists, in order to explain how Turkey’s
Europeanization was impeded by both the
European and Turkish sides. Firat argues that
“interest holders used membership negotia-
tions to get or to bar access to markets and
polities in Turkey and the EU” (p. 174) rather
than completing the talks with Turkey’s full
membership to the EU. There were competing
priorities of the acquisition of resources and
power on the negotiators’ sides that would be
lost if Turkey’s accessions would have com-
pleted with full membership (p. 5). In that
sense, negotiators did not prioritize Turkey’s
EU membership, but highly considered their
personal, professional, and public ambitions as
well as interests.
One of the original contributions of the
book is the discussion on the “accession peda-
gogy,” where the EU was in the role of “instruc-
tor” while building norms for Europeanization,
and Turkey was the resistant actor that refused
to play the role of “pupil” while going against
the EU demands for policy changes to align
with the acquis, EU law and practice. Rules of
the EU accession process were strict, and there
was no platform to discuss to change the
acquis. It was not a smooth bargain between
equal actors, rather a fast and constantly chang-
ing agreement in favor of the EU to teach the
candidate state how to govern.
The author also compares accession pro-
cesses of a few member states with the Turkish
experience and argues that the EU builds a
hegemonic relationship with candidates and
demands quick responses and full disclosure
of reforms which required, for instance,
Central and Eastern European countries to
confess weaknesses and failures of their cur-
rent bureaucratic systems. However, the
exchange between unequal partners, accord-
ing to the author, did not work because the
Turkish bureaucrats demanded some change
in the acquis in return of altering their national
legislation. The Turkish side “saw accession
negotiations as a threat to their existing ways
of governing” while refusing to be treated like
other EU candidates (p. 78). Also, the Turkish
diplomats found the accession process stress-
ful and complicated since there were various
chapters that their limited authority did not
allow them to negotiate because of the solid
hierarchical structure of the Turkish bureau-
cracy. Besides, the “collective feeling of being
an outsider” discouraged the Turkish negotia-
tors to socialize and work with the EU bureau-
crats which would have been a lobbying
opportunity to influence the decision-making
of the EU institutions.
The book, still, needs potential improve-
ments despite its originality in its discipline.
First, the argumentation mainly concentrates
on the change in Turkish politics rather than
including the change within the EU, such as
the reflection of the 2008 European debt cri-
sis on Greece, Portugal, and Spain and the
reaction against further enlargement policies.
Second, a further discussion about the alter-
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