Turcoscepticism and Threat Perception: European Public and Elite Opinion on Turkey's Protracted EU Membership

Abstract

This article examines the political debate surrounding Turkey's protracted accession to the European Union (EU) from the viewpoints of mass and elite opinion in Europe, focusing on the impact of Islamophobia and the fears about immigration. It investigates how threat perception reflects itself in the form of Turcoscepticism. It concerns itself with (i) whether Turcoscepticism is based on perceived threats of Islamic extremism or immigration influxes, and (ii) how these perceived threats affect public and elite attitudes towards Turkey's EU membership. Through a quantitative investigation of public and elite polling data (2006–08), the analysis reveals that Islamophobia and fear of immigration contribute to Turcosceptic anxiety in Europe only at the mass level.

Keywords:

• Turkey
• European Union
• Public Opinion
• Elite Opinion
• Islamophobia
• Immigration
• EU Membership

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Gamze Avçi and Ali Çarkoğlu, the editors of this special issue, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and useful hints on the data.

Notes

 [1] See Foyle (1997) for the role of elites' complex influence on public opinion. See Russett (1990) and Holsti (1996) for an extensive debate on the influence of public opinion on decision-making.

 [2] This is an important question, since after the European Council approves of, and the European Parliament gives assent to, an accession treaty, it is sent to member states for ratification. Member states either ratify the accession treaty in their parliament or submit it to referendum. Either way, a candidate country's accession is subject to the consent of a member state's citizens.

 [3] In the remainder of the article, the political and bureaucratic elites will be called the ‘elite’ or ‘EU elite’ interchangeably.

 [4] The data utilised in this article were made available through http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR.

 [5] These include the controversy in France over the incompatibility of the Islamic headscarf with French laïcité, the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker, by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim man, the controversy about cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammed, and the controversial Regensburg lecture of Pope Benedetto in Germany reflecting the Vatican's struggle over how to confront Islam (2006).

 [6] The TTS and EES 2006 and 2007 studies included public opinion in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom. Bulgaria and Romania are included in 2008. To compare the data from the EES with that gathered by TTS, results from the public were weighted according to the size of each member state. The results of the survey of MEPs were weighted according to the size of the MEPs' national delegation and of each European parliamentary group. ‘Don't know’ and ‘refusals’ are excluded from the analysis. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the sponsor of the studies bears any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here.

 [7] The survey question read: ‘[To Europe]: I am going to read you a list of possible international threats to Europe in the next 10 years. Please tell me if you think each one on the list is an extremely important threat, an important threat, or not an important threat at all: (a) Islamic fundamentalism (the more radical stream of Islam) [TTS and EES 2006]; (b) large number of immigrants and refugees coming into Europe [TTS and EES 2006].’ (I created a dummy measuring ‘important’ [1] and ‘not important’ [0].) ‘[Personal exposure]: In the next 10 years, how likely are you to be personally affected by the following threat? (a) Islamic fundamentalism [TTS and EES 2007 and 2008]; (b) Large number of immigrants and refugees coming into Europe [TTS and EES 2008].’ (I recoded them as a dummy ‘likely’ [1] and ‘not likely’ [0].'

 [8] Age is recoded as (1) ‘young’ (18–34), (2) ‘middle-aged’ (35–54) and (3) ‘old’ (55+). Ideology is recoded as (1) ‘left’, (2) ‘centre’ and (3) ‘right’. Each country origin was computed as dummy variable (1) against Slovakia (0). Gender is created as a dummy with (1) ‘male’ and (0) ‘female’. General opinions on EU enlargement and integration are important control variables that might have an impact on attitudes towards Turkey-specific enlargement of the EU; since datasets do not include them, this study omits their analysis.

 [9] Ordinal logistic regression is the most appropriate technique for ordinal categorical response data when there are more than two events. For a categorical dependent variable Y and an explanatory variable X, the regression model is

(Norušis 2005, p. 70).

[10] Since it is the logit, we interpreted the coefficients instead of the odds ratio in the results (Gelpi, Feaver & Reifler 2005, p. 32).