Foreign policy and identity change: Analysing perceptions of Europe among the Turkish public
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395717729932 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Senem Aydın-Düzgit |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717729932
Politics
2018, Vol. 38(1) 19 –34
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395717729932
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Foreign policy and identity
change: Analysing perceptions
of Europe among the Turkish
public
Senem Aydın-Düzgit
Sabancı University, Turkey
Abstract
Foreign policy is a key area through which state officials’ role in the discursive construction of a
state’s identity becomes possible and visible. From this viewpoint, Turkey presents an interesting
case worthy of analysis due to the significant transformation of its foreign policies in the recent
decades. This article first reviews the current literature, which points out that the shift in Turkish
foreign policy and the souring of Turkey–European Union (EU) relations in the second half of
the 2000s not only entailed a policy change but also a change in the crafted identity of the state
at the elite level as distanced from Europe. This article then aims to undercover whether this
crafted identity at the elite level is also visible across the changing perceptions of Europe among
the Turkish public. Hence, it seeks to observe the ways in which public discourse does or does
not follow elite discourse on representations of Europe, and, in turn, engages with the conceptual
question of whether public constructions of state identity simply follow elite constructions. This
is done through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of texts produced by focus group interviews.
Keywords
constructivism, discourse analysis, focus groups, foreign policy, identity change, Turkey and the EU
Received: 3rd June 2016; Revised version received: 25th July 2017; Accepted: 27th July 2017
Introduction
There has been a long-standing debate in political science over the extent to which politi-
cal elites are able to shape their citizens’ opinions. The literature on US public opinion
was the first to point out that citizens are cued by political elites, meaning that if they
Corresponding author:
Senem Aydın-Düzgit, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Orhanlı, Tuzla 34956, Istanbul,
Turkey.
Email: saduzgit@sabanciuniv.edu
729932POL0010.1177/0263395717729932PoliticsAydın-Düzgit
research-article2017
Special Issue Article
20 Politics 38(1)
support a certain political party, they will tend to follow their line in making their political
decisions (see, for instance, Zaller, 1992). Studies in the field of European integration
have similarly found that political cues also matter in shaping the views of European
publics on European integration. It was argued that elite discourse is likely to be reflected
in public debates on Europe and can play an important role in individual opinion forma-
tion on integration (Gabel and Scheve, 2007).
Since European integration is often an elite-driven process of inclusion/exclusion,
where public identifications also play a certain role, the role of identity quickly became a
focal point in studying citizens’ opinions on Europe. The role of political elites is particu-
larly significant in the case of identity-based public attitudes towards Europe. Individuals
who are prompted to think about national identity in a certain way do so, particularly in
cases where there are already deep divisions of identity and polarisation across the elites
and the public (Diez Medrano, 2003; Hobolt et al., 2011; Hooghe and Marks, 2005).
Much of this literature has engaged with the ways in which the political elite ‘acti-
vates’ the existing identities in society (Vössing, 2015: 158). This article aims to move
this debate forward by providing a test case to observe how and to what extent the politi-
cal elite can change the identity stances of citizens on Europe. It provides a qualitative
method by which the mechanism and the extent of the change can be tested in the context
of, but not limited to, the foreign policy discourse on Europe. This is carried out through
a study of the impact of elite discourse on the perceptions of Europe in the case of Turkey,
a long-standing candidate country in the queue for European Union (EU) membership.
Turkey presents an interesting case worthy of analysis in the context of identity change,
due to the significant transformation of its domestic and foreign policies in the recent
decades. Much of that transformation has been attributed to the role of the Adalet ve
Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party), which has been governing the
country as the single party in power since November 2002. The AKP, which was a splin-
ter party of the Islamist Fazilet Partisi (VP; Virtue Party) that was closed down by the
Turkish Constitutional Court in 2001 on the grounds of anti-secular activities, undertook
key policy changes in the domestic and international realm, which have also raised ques-
tions over Turkey’s identity. A plethora of works have explored the change in articulated
Turkish identity in AKP discourse, with reference to the AKP’s changing representations
of Europe which have been a key component of the discursively constructed Turkish
identity, since the establishment of the Republic (Alaranta, 2015). Nonetheless, there has
been little discussion of whether, and if so how, this change has penetrated into the dis-
courses of the Turkish public on Europe.
This article aims to remedy this gap by focusing on how ordinary Turkish citizens
view, debate, and contest Europe and Europeanness today. In analysing contemporary
public representations of Europe, it inquires how the AKP’s discourse on Europe has been
received and contested by the Turkish public, and whether the public’s representations of
the European Other(s), in relation to their discursive articulations of the Turkish Selves,
have changed over time. By doing that, the article aims to shed light on the two paradoxes
of identity change outlined in section ‘Introduction’ (Rumelili and Todd, 2017); namely,
the consensus/contestation paradox through an analysis of the interrelationship between
the governing elite’s discourses (the AKP discourse) and the public discourses on Europe
(whether the AKP discourse is contested or a consensus is formed with it across public
discourse), and the continuity/change paradox through inquiry into the degree to which
understandings of the Turkish Self and the European Other have been changing across the
Turkish public. It tackles these two paradoxes by conducting the first in-depth qualitative
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