A Bakhtinian Approach to EU–Turkey Relations

Abstract

This article proposes that dialogue between the EU and its candidate countries should be institutionalised in the EU accession framework. Using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, it argues that the current deadlock in EU–Turkey accession negotiations is partly due to a lack of genuine dialogue between the parties. In the current structure, Turkey has been finalised, closed and determined in its image as the ultimate other vis-à-vis Europe. For the relations between the EU and Turkey to move forward, Turkey should be allowed to speak and answer back in the formal framework of the accession process.

Keywords:

• EU
• Turkey
• accession
• process
• Bakhtin
• dialogism
• alterity

Notes

¹ Turkey in Europe: breaking the vicious circle, Independent Commission on Turkey, 7 September 2009.

² Xavier Guillaume (2002, p. 4) writes that:

[s]ince the West discovered his work in the 1970s, Mikhail Bakhtin has been a major influence and source of renewal in many disciplines of the humanities, to the point that he unfortunately has become more and more an intellectual (and fashionable) icon, or even cliché, in the field.

³ For example Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb argues that Turkey is ‘more influential in the world than any of our member states together or separately’ and ‘one of the top five countries in the world today’ (Today's Zaman (online version), ‘Finland's Stubb: “Turkey one of world's top five countries”’, 13 September, 2010).

⁴ Berlin Plus refers to the transfer of roles from WEU to the EU in NATO's Berlin Ministerial meeting, 3–4 June 1996.

⁵ ‘Stubb: Three ‘commandments’ for a new EU foreign policy’, Press Release, 12 November 2010, Finland's Permanent Representation to the European Union.