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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on an analysis of the recent discourse of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) on the European Union, in the context of increasing de-Europeanisation in Turkey and the increasing lack of credibility of Turkey’s accession prospects. The analysis is informed by the Discourse Mythological Approach, which combines the analysis of political myth with Critical Discourse Analysis (in this case, the Discourse Historical Approach). On this basis the paper focuses on the interaction of AKP discourse with the EU’s own political mythology, most notably its (self) portrayal as an entity founded on so-called ‘European’ values such as democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Recent AKP discourse, however, attempts to reverse this depiction of a tolerant, liberal and democratic EU by arguing that the EU is unable to escape from the intolerance and xenophobia of the European past. In contrast, Turkey itself is depicted as the true bearer of ‘European’ values.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable constructive criticism which, I think, has helped to improve this article considerably.
2. The search was carried out using ‘AKP’ or the individual politician’s name together with EU and European Union as keywords in both Turkish and English. The dates of the search were 2016–2019.
3. It also produced its own report in 2013. Cebeci, for instance, interprets these reports, along with ‘Turkey’s New European Union Strategy’, published in 2014, through the Foucauldian framework of counter-conduct (Cebeci Citation2017, 128).
4. See, for example, Aydın Düzgit (Citation2017,) Aydın Düzgit and Kaliber (Citation2017), Alpan (Citation2017) and Cebeci (Citation2017), among others, for further discussion of de-Europeanisation in Turkey.