Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

6. The Emptiness of European Identity and the Discourse on Turkish EU Membership

125 Chapter 6 The Emptiness of European Identity and the Discourse on Turkish EU Membership Dirk Nabers Introduction The European Union (EU), the grand example of every integration process in the world, has grown in size with successive waves of accessions. Denmark , Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined the original six members of the European Communities in 1973, followed by Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986, and Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995. In 2004, the EU welcomed ten new countries: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary , Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia; Bulgaria and Romania joined the union in 2007; and Croatia and Turkey began membership negotiations in 2005, with Croatia joining the EU as its twenty-eighth member in 2013. Successive enlargement processes of this kind raise important questions about the identity around which the community, and with it the whole notion of “Europe,” is constructed. Representations of identity seem to be significant as a frame of reference for international relations (IR) (Larsen 1997; Campbell 1998; Diez 1999; Brown 2001; Fuchs and Klingemann 2002; Nabers 2006; Kratochwil 2006), but identity is also constructed through foreign policy and international politics (Hansen 2006; Manners and Whitman 2003; Nabers 2009). As I will demonstrate in the course of this analysis, identity is neither stable nor undisputed, and it might not be appropriate to talk of straightforward, categorical identities. As a result, it is theoretically not obvious at all when the process of EU enlargement will come to an end. This is all the more interesting because new rounds of enlargement will stretch beyond what was originally seen as the “natural” geographical borders of the region. Chapter 6 126 On the background of these preliminary thoughts, with this analysis I seek to scrutinize ongoing constructions of regional identity in Europe as the basis for further institutionalization and institutional enlargement. Taking the works of Thomas Diez (2004) and Ole Waever (2000) and their notion of temporal othering as a starting point, I argue that once the process of accession negotiations has started, discussions of identity are expected to move from general concepts such as “freedom,” “democracy,” and temporal othering to more specific issues like market economy, institutional reform, and a cultural form of othering. While constructing the self relies on historical self-reflection and the creation of chains of equivalence between ingroup members, the construction of the other is shaped by antagonism and difference. The prospect of integrating new members into the community must thus be seen as overcoming difference. Enlargement hence depends on the stability of constructions of difference. The analysis proceeds in five steps: Following this introduction, I will set out the ontological premises of the study, outlining a theory of identity that is characterized by the key concepts of difference, equivalence, the construction of so-called empty signifiers, and an excluded other. Subsequently , I will show how identity can be operationalized methodologically, and follow with an empirical analysis of identity constructions in the process of European Union negotiations with Turkey between 2005 and 2008, that is, the first three years of accession negotiations. The final section will sum up the results along the lines of the developed theoretical framework. Constructing Identity The following discussion of the concept of identity is very much indebted to new developments in post-structuralism, critical theory, and linguistics. First and foremost, it is inspired by the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In their research, “identity” is conceptualized as an unstable and negative term, never closed in itself, ephemeral in character and relying on the constant movement of differential relationships (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 95; Smith 1998, 87). The undecidability of structure leads to the incompleteness of identities: “the presence of some objects in the others prevents any of their identities from being fixed” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 104). This basic idea has been reflected in the notion of the EU’s malleable and fluid external borders, leading to unclear and moving boundaries and overlapping identities (Zielonka 2000; Drulák 2006). Laclau and Mouffe compare the concept of identity to the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of signs, rejecting a referential theory The Emptiness of European Identity Dirk Nabers 127 of identity in favour of a relational account. This means that any element in a system gains significance only through its relations with other elements, rather than through essential qualities found in the elements themselves...