Research Turkey Panel Discussion: “Turkey’s EU Accession Process: What have We Learnt from Europeanization Research?”

Date:

Speakers: Dr. George Kyris, Dr. Diğdem Soyaltın, Dr. Didem Buhari-Gülmez and Dr. Seçkin Barış Gülmez
Title: Turkey’s EU Accession Process: What have We Learnt from Europeanization Research?
Location: K2.31, 2nd Floor, King’s College London, Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS
Date: Friday, 6 February 2015, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Chair: Gamon McLellan, Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London, and Former BBC World Service Journalist and Analyst

We are pleased to announce Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey)’s panel discussion entitled “Turkey’s EU Accession Process: What have We Learnt from Europeanization Research?” in which Dr. Diğdem Soyaltın, Dr. George Kyris, Dr. Didem Buhari-Gülmez and Dr. S. Barış Gülmez will give talks. This event will take place on Friday, 6 February 2015 between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. at  K2.31, 2nd Floor, King’s College London, Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS. Gamon McLellan, Senior Lecturer, SOAS, University of London will kindly chair the event.

Please find below the abstracts of the talks along with short biographies of our speakers and the chair. This event is free and open to public but it is a ticketed event that requires pre-registration. A ticket does not guarantee a seat. Please register and reserve a ticket via the address below:

rt-eu-panel-kingscollege-feb15.eventbrite.co.uk

Abstracts of the Talks

Panelist: Dr. Diğdem Soyaltın, Post-doc fellow, Stockholm University

Public Sector Reforms to Fight Corruption in Turkey: Why Is Not a Failure Case of Europeanisation?

A massive public corruption scandal came to light in December 2013 in Turkey. A number of high-ranking politicians, business leaders and sons of political ministers were arrested and accused of bribery and profiting from illegal construction projects. This doesn’t come a surprise to scholars who already identified the anti-corruption policy as a failure case of Europeanization and more generally of external governance promotion since externally induced formal changes remained to a large extent decoupled from behavioural practices and hardly resulted in better governance. This paper will show that external anti-corruption efforts can promote institutional change and help countries to close the gap between formal changes and behavioural practices when several patterns of domestic conditions are present. The overall argument is illustrated by comparing varying levels of institutional change in the public sector of Turkey with regard to the civil administrative system, public finance management system and public procurement system.

Panelist: Dr. George Kyris, Lecturer in International and European Politics, University of Birmingham

The Europeanisation of Turkey’s Foreign Policy and the Cyprus issue

Drawing on debates on Europeanisation and empirical material such as interviews with EU and local elites, this work examines how the prospects of EU accession have influenced Turkey’s policy towards the Cyprus dispute after 2004. The argument advanced is that, although initially Turkey’s EU aspirations led to a flexible position of Ankara, the ability of the EU to trigger a constructive stance of Turkey vis a vis the dispute has been gradually weakened. This is mostly because of new developments, not least the 2004 EU accession of Cyprus as a divided island or Greek Cypriot efforts for gas exploration in the Mediterranean, that have led to more inflexible Turkish positions towards the Cyprus dispute. In this context, providing clear(er) accession prospects is the ‘gordian knot’ that the EU will have to address in order to influence the country’s foreign policy towards more flexible position on the dispute.

Panelist: Dr. Didem Buhari-Gülmez, LSEE Visiting Fellow and Dr. S. Barış Gülmez, Teaching Fellow, Warwick University
“Praying for Europe: The Turkish Mosque as a Space of Europeanization”

This work-in-progress paper suggests that the Turkish Mosque is more than a place of worship that is exclusively situated in the private (outside the public) and religious (outside the political) spheres. Instead, the Mosque is a space that is constitutive of identity, attitudes and interests because it involves not only education and social engineering, but also political struggles, and nation-building. There is need to correct two misleading tendencies about the place and the role of the Turkish Mosque in Turkey’s Europeanization process: (1) that the Mosque is against the idea of Europe and hinders Europeanization, and (2) that the Mosque is immune to the effects of Europeanization and globalization. A shift of emphasis from ‘sender-receiver Europeanization’ to ‘ritualized Europeanization’ allows to rethink the binary logic and the imagined boundaries between religious and political, private and public, or Islamic and European. The Turkish case highlights the complex and dialectical nature of the interactions between Islam and Europeanization in Turkey, which involves both contestation and co-constitution.

Short Biographies of the Chair and Speakers

Dr. Diğdem Soyaltın: Diğdem Soyaltın (Ph.D., Freie Universitaet Berlin) is a postdoctoral fellow at Institute of Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. In her doctoral dissertation she worked on the role of international anti-corruption regimes including the EU, on implementation of public sector reforms to fight against corruption in Turkey. Her research articles appeared in Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies and Turkish Studies. Soyaltin’s also has a co-authored forthcoming book chapter on comparing Europeanization processes in Turkey and Central and Eastern European countries and has co-authored a book chapter on the limits of Europeanization in explaining domestic change in Turkey. During her doctoral studies she worked a research fellow at the Research College on Transformative Power of Europe (KFG) in Berlin. She is regularly reviewing articles for Turkish Studies and currently working as an editor for Center for Policy Analysis and Research on Turkey in London. Her main research interests are Europeanization and domestic change, comparative policy analysis, public policy and governance, Turkish politics and more specific policies of fight against corruption.

Dr. George Kyris: Dr. George Kyris is Lecturer in International and European Politics at the University of Birmingham. Previously, he has been a Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick, a Research Fellow at the LSE and has also taught at the University of Manchester. His main research focus is the international role of the EU, conflict resolution and unrecognised states. More recently, he has also been interested in the politics of the Eurozone crisis, political parties and euroscepticism. His regional interests lie in Southeast Europe, especially Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Dr Kyris’ latest publications includes his forthcoming book ‘The Europeanisation of Contested States: The EU in northern Cyprus’ and articles for the Journal of Common Market Studies and Comparative European Politics.

Dr. Didem Buhari-Gülmez: Didem Buhari-Gülmez, (Ph/D. Politics London) is a TUBITAK post-doctoral research fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science, European Institute, LSE Research on Southeast Europe (LSEE). Previously, she was an Early Career research fellow at Oxford Brookes University.  She has published on Europeanization, globalization, Turkish politics and society including, “Europeanization of Foreign Policy and World Culture: Turkey’s Cyprus policy”, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 12(1), 81-95, 2012; “Ombudsmanship and Turkey’s Europeanization in ‘World Society’”, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 19(4), 475-487, 2011 [reprinted by Routledge in 2013]; and the book European Multiplicity (co-edited with Chris Rumford, CSP 2014). Her forthcoming article “The European Union as a ‘heuristic device’: Ritualized Europeanization in Turkey” will appear at Comparative European Politics. She is currently co-editing the book Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity (Ashgate) and the special issue “Europe and World Society” (Journal of Contemporary European Studies). She is founding co-editor of ChangingTurkey.comsince 2009.

Dr. Seçkin Barış Gülmez: Seçkin Barış Gülmez (Ph.D. Politics London) is a teaching fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University. He received my PhD from Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in October 2014. Previously, he obtained BSc (2002) and MSc (2006) degrees in International Relations at the Middle East Technical University, completed a postgraduate certificate programme in Contemporary European Studies at the University of Birmingham in 2008, and obtained an MSc degree at RHUL as a Chevening scholar of the British Council. He has published on Euroscepticism and Turkish Politics, including “The EU Policy of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: A New Wine in an Old Wine Cellar”, Turkish Studies 14(2), 311-328, 2013; “Rising euroscepticism in Turkish politics: The cases of the AKP and the CHP”, Acta Politica 48(3), 326–344, 2013. He is founding co-editor of ChangingTurkey.com since 2009.

Gamon McLellan is Senior Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He is also former BBC World Service Journalist and Analyst. He came professionally involved with Turkey in the mid-seventies, when he edited a political and economic weekly news magazine in Ankara.  In 1979, he joined the BBC to run the Turkish Service, where he was editorially responsible for the Service providing uncensored news to audiences in Turkey following the 1980 military coup.  In 1988, he became involved in the management of BBC broadcasting to Central Europe, before he was appointed in 1992 Head of the BBC Arabic Service, the BBC’s largest foreign language broadcasting operation.   His time in the Arabic Service saw the launch of the award-winning bbcarabic.com news website and the expansion of BBC Arabic to become a 24-hour broadcast news service.  This work culminated in directing the output during the 2003 Iraq war.  Since 2006 he has been teaching a postgraduate course on modern Turkey in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

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