Foreign policy and identity change

Analysing perceptions of Europe among the Turkish public

Bibliographic Data

ID7973506
AuthorsSenem Aydın-Düzgit (0000-0001-8177-9957)
Year2018
Volume38
Issue1
Pages19-34
Publication date2018-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0032-3268 • E-ISSN: 1467-9256
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0263395717729932
OpenAlexW2769500844
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited37

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

Aesthetics · Critical discourse analysis · Discourse analysis · Economics · Elite · Epistemology · European union · Foreign policy · Identity (music · Ideology · International trade · Linguistics · Perception · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Turkish · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · European Union Policy and Governance · Gender Studies · Law · Turkey's Politics and Society

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