Turkish Accession and the Quest for a European Polity: Discursive Strategies and Organized Hypocrisy.

This paper examines the current political debates and discursive strategies provoked by the question of Turkish accession into the European Union. The specter of Turkey, a predominantly Islamic nation, becoming a member of the European Union (EU) divides European Parliamentary (EP) political parties. Our analysis indicates that recent EP debates reveal a sense of political anxiety over the nature and future of the EU if Turkey were to join. Turkish admission cuts to the core issue as to whether and how the EU would hold onto its political legitimacy in a post-accession era as a confederated democratic polity. This legitimacy that anchors the EU is perceived in nationalist terms across the spectrum of EP political parties, although how this legitimacy is articulated differs according to political persuasion. The debate over Turkey thus devolves into a debate over the Europe of the EU, its structures, politics and character as a political system and culture. But the question of a post-national Europe hardly arises as such within the debates regarding Turkish admission. In this, reside the manifestations of organized hypocrisy: what is said is delinked from what is done during the course of EU-Turkish negotiations, and, more recently, what is stated by EP Members of Parliament (MEP) with respect to what the Turks must do to satisfy accession criteria. The EP debates thus omit what Europeans must do to reconstitute the EU as a viable (at least) or effective (at most) political structure at the supranational level. This defines the discursive strategies shaping EP debates: how to avoid confronting the political task of creating a truly supranational polity that is at once political but tolerant, multiperspectival but unified, while emphasizing the presumed threats posed by Turkish accession to the EU as a whole but grounded in traditional notions of national interest. We find that debates over Turkish EU accession demonstrate a pervasive pattern of denial regarding the political fragility of state legitimacy within the EU. This discursive pattern ignores the central issue of the hegemonic status of the EU as constituted by a “community of sovereign states ” and the need to develop a “popular” form of supranational politics, one that would engage European citizens in a manner appropriate to a singular political formation. To demonstrate this, we review the history of negotiations leading to conferral of candidacy status on Turkey and critically examine the discursive or rhetorical templates clustering around the major EP political parties, particularly during the EP debates over the Eurling Report recommending a positive vote on behalf of Turkish candidacy. Finally, we examine the dynamics of Turkish accession in reverse images by analyzing how and in what ways the EU and Turkish membership is represented by Turkish political parties in order to assess congruence between discursive strategies, political persuasion and popular will. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]