EUROPE'S OTHER

ABSTRACT

As ‘Eurobarometer’ surveys indicate, European populations are increasingly sceptical about further EU enlargement, especially as far as Turkey is concerned. Austria's rejection of negotiations with Turkey has been remarkable. While the Austrian government has been in line with European council resolutions, policy makers of different parties have reiterated their claim for alternatives to full membership for Turkey. Furthermore, opinion polls have shown that the Austrian population's refusal of Turkey is above EU average. Embedded in the popular arguments why Turkey should stay outside the EU, we find what Ralf Grillo has called ‘cultural anxiety’: essentialist views of ‘our’ and ‘their’ culture cause fears about a fast growing and predominantly Muslim population that would flow into EU labour markets and threaten ‘us’, in particular ‘our’ democracy, equality and human rights. Against this backdrop my interest will neither be focused on a further analysis of whether Turkey is sufficiently prepared for EU accession nor on the European Union's absorption capacity. In this paper I will rather focus on the emergence of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural practices of selfing and othering in order to better understand the extensive refusal of Turkey's EU accession in Austria.

Keywords:

• EU enlargement
• orientalism
• cultural essentialism
• transnationality
• Turkey
• Austria

Notes

For cooperative exchange I thank Elisabeth Holzleithner, Christa Markom and Ines Rössl, my current research team (‘Contesting Muliculturalism. Gender Equality, Cultural Diversity, and Sexual Autonomy in the EU’; sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research; www.univie.ac.at/NODE-CMC or www.node-research.at). I would like to particularly thank Gamze Ongan, Senol Akkilic, Gülmihri Aytac, Gerti Seiser, Herta Nöbauer, and Thomas Fillitz for comments and suggestions. For adaptation of the English I am indebted to Judith Hansen.

²Ninety percent of Turkish citizens living in the EU are located in four countries, namely Germany, The Netherlands, France and Austria. In addition, one million migrants from a Turkish background are assumed to have been naturalised. 2.5 million Turkish migrants (including naturalized German citizens) are living in Germany (Zentrum für Türkeistudien 2003: 11).

³EUMAP is a program of the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundation Network, see http://www.eumap.org (download date April 10, 2007), currently conducting a research on ‘Muslims in the EU: City Reports’ since 2006.

⁴Gingrich (1998: 101ff) identifies groups of European countries showing significant differences in respect to the history of interrelation with the Muslim world. Spain, Austria, Hungary and (partly) Russia in this comparison represent a group characterized by what he calls the central European ‘frontier myths of orientalism’. These countries were not classical colonial rulers (like France, UK or The Netherlands) but had limited power in the periphery of the Muslim world. The Hapsburg imperial history and its experience of two Ottoman Sieges (1529 and 1687) have still been emerging in the post-1945 public debates and in the popular culture. Particularly in Eastern Austria this popular version of orientalism has had a tremendous impact on political polemics, anti-immigration issues as well as on anti-EU enlargement in Austria.

⁵ www.esiweb.org; download date September 15, 2005.

⁶The BZÖ had split from the FPÖ in April 2005, but did not retreat from government.

⁷Haider in September 2004 even warned against a ‘fundamentalist theocracy in front of the doorstep of the EU’ and called opponents of Turkey's accession ‘idiots’ (orf.at/040926-78856/78858txt_story.html; download date June 22, 2007). In 2005 he has detected a ‘veritable crisis’ within the EU and since then claims respect for the public attitude that rejects Turkey (Kurier August 30, 2005).

⁸According to the Eurobaromenter 63 (Spring 2005) the attitude concerning Turkey's EU accession is shaped by political orientation, yet 74 percent of those who consider themselves as ‘left-wing’ oppose Turkey.

⁹The European Stability Initiative has published a collection of opinions as part of a wider project to assess the debate on Turkey and further enlargement in the EU (www.esiweb.org; download date September 15, 2005).

¹⁰Kanak is a derogatory term for people of Turkish background in Germany. In Austria, the term Tschusch is used in a similar way. The expression for Ottoman Siege in German is Turkish Siege (Türkenbelagerung) and the Third Siege refers to the already mentioned Turkish Sieges in 1529 and 1689 and the Turkish/Muslim presence in Austria today.

¹¹Announcement of the installation by the Kunsthalle Wien (www.kunsthallewien.at/cgi-bin/event/event.pl?id=1075).

¹²Red-white-red is a metonym for the Austrian flag.

¹³The FPÖ won 14.9 percent of the votes, whereas exit polls had predicted a maximum of 11 percent (Kurier October 24, 2005).

¹⁴The bell was destroyed during the Second World War and was rebuilt in 1951. It is used only to commemorate important Catholic holidays or national events, such as the funerals of Austrian federal presidents or Viennese archbishops. It also rang on May 15, 1955 to announce the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty.

¹⁵‘Damit der echte Wiener nicht untergeht!’, is one further slogan used by the FPÖ in the campaign of 2005.

¹⁶See Andre Gingrich (1998) for a detailed analysis of these events and further examples of anti-Turkish symbols in Austrian society.

¹⁷Rohe developed a typology differentiating between religious conservatives, traditional conservatives (both living in a decided distance to mainstream society), moderate liberals and those not practicing their religion. There is also an explicit difference within Muslims: Bosnians have compared to Turkish Muslims successfully adapted to the Austrian way of living in a shorter period of time. The typology is based on questions about living conditions in Austria, evaluation of integration, the impact of religion in their life, the Austrian way of living, forced marriage, hate preachers, honour killings, and suicide bombing in London.

¹⁸Denmark, for example, amended its Alien Act in 2002, which now makes it impossible to employ the right to family reunification for spouses who are ‘third country nationals’ and under the age of 24.

¹⁹Ethnic or religious minorities’ conservative representatives on the other hand are trying in a similar way to gain moral superiority via gender relations of the ‘majorities’. It is sexual ‘freedom’ and body politics that is criticised harshly by some religious dignitaries who oppose Western norms. From this perspective, cultural threat is represented by the ‘majorities’ although they, of course, have privileged access to the distribution of knowledge, labour, institutions, wealth and power.

²⁰Nihal G. Ongan was one of the political activists I worked with during my research project ‘Beyond Belonging. Cultural Dynamics and Transnational Practices in Austrian Migrations policies from below’, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund. My field work was shaped by the question of how to study complex identities of transnationals in a globalising world. ‘For such persons there are no self-evident cultural truths or subjectivities. Often, they no longer even imagine themselves as belonging to spatially bounded, culturally separate social entities or “communities”’ (Caglar 1997: 170). For this reason biographical narratives and extensive participant observation provide convenient tools to examine the interrelation of multiple belonging and political tactics. Participant observation in this multi-sited field work included professional meetings, private parties, transnational political and family events in Vienna, Istanbul and two Anatolian cities as well as extensive observation and discussions of tactics and claims of the anti-racist movement in Austria. Biographic narratives focused on belonging and participant observation allowed me to reconstruct and contextualize self-representations of the political activists I was working with. In order to better understand the interrelation of multiple belonging and tactics this network uses I will briefly offer some of her turning points in Nihal G. Ongan's ‘biography of belonging’. Following Elspeth Probyn I use the notion belonging (Probyn 1996: 5) as a mode of thinking about how people get along and how various forms of being and longing are articulated. This is an attempt to understand the complexity of their belonging as well as their networking and tactics of intervention (place making) (see Strasser 2003). A version of Nihal G. Organ's “biography of belonging” will be published in Strasser, forthcoming.

²¹Kurt Waldheim was Secretary-General of the United Nations (1972–1981) and Austrian President (1986–1992). Waldheim was put on a watch list until he died in June 2007 and thus prevented him from entering the USA. During his campaign for presidency in Austria in 1985 he gained international notoriety because he had falsified in his memoirs both the duration and the nature of his service as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer during World War II. The ‘Waldheim Affair’ caused fierce debates within Austria about whether his offence has been to lie about his military record or about the involvement in military crimes. Lying and forgetting as a feature of Austrian's attitude towards National Socialism became a highly contested issue in the late 1980s (Kurz 1993).

²²Concerning the link between the letter bombs and the ‘Turkish Siege’ see p. 8.

²³The colors refer to the Austrian political parties ÖVP and FPÖ.

²⁴ TschuschInnenPower was founded after the 1999 elections, when the FPÖ after a xenophobic campaign won almost 27 percent of the votes. ‘Tschusch’ is a derogatory term in Austrian German for a migrant worker from South-Eastern Europe.

²⁵Full text at www.ballhausplatz.at/johcgi/ball/TCgi.cgi?target=home&ID_News=611 (download June 22, 2007)

²⁶A problem with this tactic has already been identified by critics of Edward Said (1978). Although Said shows that the Orient emerged as a consequence of the desire to construe ‘the other’, he still contributes to the image of the West as a bounded entity. Nihal's network takes up Said's approach of unmasking the us/them opposition as a Western construction of exclusion. Yet, by doing so, it risks transforming counter-Orientalism as a means of criticism into an essentializing Occidentalism. They are bad, so we are good.