Risse, Identity Matters, exploring ambivalence of EU foreign policy

Global Policy Volume 3 . Supplement 1 . December 2012
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Identity Matters: Exploring the
Ambivalence of EU Foreign Policy
Thomas Risse
Abstract
One cannot begin to understand EU foreign policy without taking identity politics into account. First, the differential
Europeanization of national identities explains to a large degree why the current European Security and Defence
Policy (ESDP) has not been supranationalized. Second, the gap between the EU’s grandiose rhetoric of being a ‘force
for good’ in the world and its inability to put this foreign policy identity at work into practice, largely results from the
fact that the EU’s construction of a distinct foreign policy identity is inward rather than outward-oriented. Last, but
not least, the EU enlargement discourse, particularly about Turkey, has as much to do with contested self-descriptions
of the EU and what follows for its boundaries than with any security or economic considerations. The article starts
with conceptual remarks on collective identity, followed by three case studies focusing on the lack of
supranationalization of the ESDP, the EU’s foreign policy construction as a civilian power, and the enlargement
discourse, particularly with regard to Turkey. I conclude with some policy recommendations.
Policy Implications
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A ‘coalition of the willing’ should move ahead towards permanent structured cooperation in foreign and defence
matters, irrespective of British objections.
The more the EU pursues a coherent foreign policy with one voice, the more it will recognize that its foreign policy
identity and its ‘vision for the world’ need to be adjusted.
It is more important for European identity creation to pursue a coherent foreign policy than to embark on an identity discourse that cannot be put in practice.
We need more rather than less public controversies about the boundaries of the EU and how these borders reflect
European identity.
‘Economic giant, political dwarf!’ – ‘The EU does not get
its act together’ – ‘The capability–expectation gap is widening’ (on the latter, see Hill, 1993; for a recent criticism
of the EU’s inability to develop a coherent foreign policy,
see Howorth, 2010). These are only a few of the many
indictments of the European Union’s (EU) foreign and
security policy to be found in editorials, but also, occasionally in the scholarly literature. And yet it moves! There
have been more than 1000 common strategies, common
positions and joint actions in common foreign and security policy (CFSP) since 1993 and more than 2000 foreign
policy statements by the EU Council and Presidency
between 1995 and 2008. Since 2003 there have been 25
civilian as well as military ESDP missions, 14 of which are
ongoing. In addition, the EU adopted its own declaratory
foreign policy strategy in 2003 (European Council, 2003,
updated 2008). Finally, the Lisbon Treaty has more or less
completed the foreign and security portfolio of the EU
Global Policy (2012) 3:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12019
including a (sort of) foreign minister and the External
Action Service. The EU now commands the whole range
of institutional capabilities of a cohesive and strong foreign and security policy.
The EU as a foreign policy actor is also increasingly visible in transnational public spheres (Kantner, 2009; Kantner
et al., 2008; Risse, 2010, pp. 131–132). To discern the
visibility of the EU in foreign policy, we carried out a
linguistic analysis of a corpus of more than 100,000 newspapers articles in seven EU member states and the USA
from 1990–2005 focusing on military interventions. The
data show that the EU is mentioned in 10–20 per cent of
the articles on average, which is rather surprising, given
the limited degree of EU competences in military affairs
up to the late 1990s. We can observe some convergence
in newspaper coverage from the late 1990s on, with its
first peak in 1999, that is, during and after the Kosovo war
which also led to important EU decisions with regard to
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Freie Universität Berlin
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establishing the European Security and Defence Policy
(ESDP). The EU’s visibility then increases during the 2001–
2003 period (post-9 ⁄ 11 and Afghanistan and the Iraq war)
before decreasing again to the level of the mid-1990s. All
in all, the data disconfirm the notion that the EU is simply
absent in newspaper coverage on military and security
affairs.
In other words, cooperation on foreign policy matters
is the rule rather than the exception in the EU. The EU
has emerged as a foreign policy actor and is able to pursue coherent foreign policies if it wants to, and if the
conditions are right. Thus, the EU’s agency in foreign
and security policy matters is no longer in question (Sjursen, 2006b; Thomas, 2011). This is the good news.
But there is also mixed news: Catherine Ashton’s
appointment as EU ‘foreign minister’ documents that the
member states had no intention of increasing the status
of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and
to weaken their own individual foreign policies. The
disagreements among the EU 27 with regard to major
foreign policy issues are also legendary. The 2003 Iraq
invasion showed the existence of an intra-European split
as much as a transatlantic one. The Libyan intervention
in 2011 saw Germany, as the third largest military power
in the EU, abstaining in the UN Security Council despite
the fact that this was a clear case for the responsibility
to protect asked for by the domestic opposition and
supported by regional organizations in the Middle East.1
Concerning the Palestinian quest for statehood in the
UN General Assembly, the EU is, once again, split in the
middle.
Depending on one’s viewpoint, therefore, the glass is
either half empty or half full with respect to a common
European foreign and security policy. But how do we
explain the variation between the EU’s ability to speak
with one voice in some cases, while expressing a cacophony of opinions in others? And what precisely is the variation? I concentrate on three issues:
• the refusal of important member states to supranationalize CSDP, which accounts for the inability of the
EU to speak with one voice in many cases;
• the often-noted gap between the EU’s grandiose rhetoric
as ‘normative’ or ‘civilian power’ or ‘force for good’2 and
its practice of prioritizing geostrategic and security interests over democracy and human rights in many cases
(Börzel and Pamuk, 2012; Youngs, 2004);
• the striking contrast between the EU’s consensus on
Eastern enlargement during the 1990s and the contestation over Turkish EU membership during the 2000s.3
I argue in the following that we need to look at identity politics in each case, albeit different aspects of it.
Before I discuss the three cases, however, I briefly clarify
my understanding of identity politics; in particular, foreign policy identity.
What is identity politics?4
Identity is not only an elusive concept, it is also essentially contested. However, we can probably discern the
following components of collective identities about
which most authors agree:
1. Collective identities – no matter how essentialized
they are (for example, in ethno-nationalist identities) –
are fundamentally social constructions. The identities
of nation-states or Europe are constructed in the discourses of various political and social elites, usually
with references to particular historical memories and
national symbols.
2. Social identities connect individuals to social groups
in the sense of a ‘collective we’ (Abrams and Hogg,
1990; Turner, 1987). In the case of nations, or Europe
for that matter, the ‘we’ refers to imagined communities rather than social groups with face-to-face interactions (Anderson, 1991).
3. Collective identities usually entail two substantive
components. First, they describe what is special about
the respective community. Second, they delineate the
boundaries between us and them, that is, they define
the boundaries of the communities. In some cases,
this leads to negative attitudes towards the ‘out
group’, even though the ‘others’ can also be regarded
in neutral terms.
4. Since individuals usually feel attached to various
social groups and imagined communities they hold
multiple identities. Europe is no exception. European
and national identities are not zero–sum propositions,
but one can strongly identify both with one’s nationstate and with Europe. In fact, this is precisely what
survey data show consistently (see for example, Hooghe and Marks, 2005; Risse, 2010, pp. 37–62).
5. Collective identities can be distinguished along various dimensions (Abdelal et al., 2009), including their
substantive content, the degree of their contestation
and their strength. The stronger the sense of loyalty,
the more behavioral consequences we should expect
(Kantner, 2006).
It follows that foreign policy identities are those parts
of the identity constructions of political entities referring
to their relationships to the outside world. Once again,
they signify what is special about the community and
how one can differentiate it from other communities.
Take ‘civilian power Europe’. It describes the EU as a
force for peace and multilateral cooperation and, at the
same time, denotes that which European foreign policy
is not, namely militarist or nationalist.
Finally, I do not claim that we can explain every single
foreign policy move by a political entity with reference
to its collective identity. However, one would expect that
a political community’s collective identity influences its
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general foreign policy orientation (its ‘grand strategy’, so
to speak; see for example, European Council 2003). Identity politics is likely to influence constitutional decisions
as well as questions of membership, that is, who belongs
to the community and who does not. In the following, I
discuss three cases where identity politics is crucial to
understanding the EU’s foreign policy.
Why there is no supranational ESDP5
In all, 17 of the 27 EU member states have given up core
features of their national economic sovereignty and have
accepted the Euro as a single currency. Moreover, the
current Euro crisis will probably result in more, rather
than less European integration, with regard to financial
and economic policies, at least among the EU 17. In
sharp contrast to European Monetary Union, which has
been fully supranational from the beginning, foreign and
security policy remains the one significant issue in European affairs in which decisions are still made consensually and in an intergovernmental fashion (see overview
in Howorth 2007).6 How is this to be explained and what
has identity to do with it?
International relations theory has a ready-made explanation for the puzzle, of course. Realism (Morgenthau,
1948; Waltz, 1979) tells us that states are unlikely to give
up external sovereignty and the ultimate decision over
war and peace. When the survival of the nation-state is at
stake, as in questions of war and peace, states do not
share or pool sovereignty. There are two problems with
this argument. First, realism itself is indeterminate over
these questions, since one can distinguish a version
emphasizing that states primarily seek autonomy and a
variant that focuses on ‘influence-seeking’ (Baumann et al,
2001). The refusal to extend qualified majority voting
(QMV) to decisions over war and peace is consistent with
a version of realism emphasizing autonomy. But if states
seek to increase their power and influence in international
politics, the unwillingness of some EU member states to
give up external sovereignty in foreign and security affairs
is outright self-defeating. The less Europe speaks with one
voice in world politics, the less EU member states can
exert influence. The European divisions over the Iraq war
in 2003, over Palestine in 2011, or over Libya in 2012 only
serve to highlight the point. Moreover, and whatever the
version of realism one adheres to, balancing is supposed
to be the standard behavior of nation-states. If middle
and small powers start balancing, however, they need to
pool resources and build alliances. In an emerging multipolar world one would then expect the EU to get its act
together in foreign and security affairs in order to build a
counterweight to US power or against the rise of China.
Second, it is wrong that most European states are not
prepared to give up sovereignty in the realm of security
and defence. There is no agreement among EU member
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states that giving up sovereignty in the realm of foreign
and defence affairs is a bad idea. Roughly two-thirds of
the current EU member states – let alone their populations – would be more than willing to supranationalize
external security and national defence. This includes
many of the big member states such as France, Germany,
Spain or Italy. In 2007, 72 per cent of EU citizens favored
a common European foreign and security policy – among
them 84 per cent of the Germans and 52 per cent of the
British (European Commission, 2007, p.148). Thus, realism
seems to apply only to some countries such as the UK
which has opposed majority voting in EU foreign policy
so far.
If we want to account for the puzzle of European foreign and security policy, we must explain the variation
among EU member states on their preparedness to
supranationalize defence affairs. Rationalist or neoliberal
institutionalism at least offers an interest-based account
of interstate cooperation under specific conditions (for
example, Haftendorn et al., 1999, for an application to
transatlantic institutions). In this context, one could posit
that the stronger a country’s military forces, the less it
has to gain from supranational cooperation in defence
affairs. Once again, the argument makes little sense,
since it cannot explain the difference in attitudes
between France and Germany, who have consistently
supported moves toward supranationalizing defence
affairs in the EU, and the UK. The difference in military
power between the big three of the EU is too small to
be able to account for the variation.
The only available empirical study that seeks to
explain the variation concludes that federal states are
more likely to prefer supranational decisions in external
security and defence policies than unitary states (KoenigArchibugi, 2004; see also Hooghe, 2001). Thus, domestic
institutional features would explain differences in attitudes toward supranationalism in security affairs. The
same member states that prefer supranationalism over
intergovernmentalism in general are also prepared to
supranationalize foreign and defence policies. What is
less clear, though, are the causal mechanisms linking territorial structures to preferences for a common European
foreign and defence policy. I suggest that the social constructions and collective understandings that come with
federalism might be relevant. Countries whose elites and
citizens are used to the notion that sovereignty can be
divided and ⁄ or shared between various levels of governance, might also be more prepared to include supranational levels of governance in these understandings.
Germany serves as a case in point. Federalism has
been constitutive for the German state for centuries; the
Federal Republic of Germany is based on cooperative
federalism that involves the sharing of sovereignty
between the central state and the Länder.7 Moreover,
as argued above, German elites have thoroughly
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Europeanized German collective identity after World War
II. No wonder, then, that Germany supported a supranational EU foreign policy from the beginning. German policymakers from the center-left to the center-right were
also never prepared to make a choice between NATO
membership and a European defence policy.
In contrast, France has been a centralized state for
centuries so that it does not easily fit the bill linking the
territorial division of powers to a propensity to accept
supranational solutions in defence affairs. It was not until
the Anglo–French St Malo agreement of 1998 that the
French government recognized that a common European foreign and security policy could not be promoted
as an alternative to NATO but that it had to accept the
German sowohl als auch (‘as well as’) in order to reach
progress in EU foreign policy. The issue at stake for
France was not supranationalism but the relationship
between NATO and ESDP. This issue has finally been
solved when France under President Sarkozy re-entered
NATO’s military structure in 2009. I suggest that France’s
ambivalence with regard to a truly supranational European defence policy has more to do with the halfhearted Europeanization of French elite identities than
with the institutional structures of the French state.
St Malo also marked the beginning of a British turnaround towards ESDP, which was then enshrined in the
1999 Helsinki agreements of the European Council. In
1998 the British government with Prime Minister Tony
Blair had gradually come to accept the notion that NATO
and the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ were not
endangered by closer European defence cooperation.
But the British government constantly objected to any
move toward supranationalism in EU foreign and security policy, blocking agreement in the Constitutional Convention, the subsequent Intergovernmental Conference,
and in the negotiations leading up to the 2007 Treaty of
Lisbon. It is hard to interpret this stubborn British position without taking sovereignty considerations into
account. The British arguments against supranational
decision-making in EU foreign and defence policy closely
resemble those against the Euro. But in this case, and in
contrast to the single currency issue, Britain exerts an
effective veto power. While the Euro is viable with or
without the British Pound, a common EU defence policy
requires British participation as the country with one of
the largest and best trained armed forces in Europe.
In sum, it is very hard to explain the variation in member states’ preferences on supranationalizing CSDP without references to the different Europeanization of elite
identities. Note that the identity politics relevant here is
not a European foreign policy identity but the variations
in the Europeanization of national identities.
My argument is underscored by the move of five EU
member states (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and
Poland) tasking Catherine Ashton to
examine all institutional and legal options available to member states, including permanent
structured co-operation, to develop critical
CSDP capabilities, notably a permanent planning and conduct capability.8
In other words, we might well see a core group of EU
member states moving ahead towards a truly common
security and defence policy, thereby using the newly
available options for closer cooperation of the Lisbon
Treaty. While such a common ESDP will probably
exclude Great Britain, particularly in light of recent
events over the Euro crisis, it would strongly enhance
the EU’s ability to speak with one voice in foreign policy.
Why there is a gap between EU foreign policy
words and deeds
The first case concerns national identities and their different kinds of Europeanization. But the relationship
between identity and foreign policy does not end here.
Many EU member states that have long supported QMV
in foreign and security policy are also those pushing for
mostly multilateral and cooperative foreign and security
policies. They do not prefer a militarized European foreign and defence policy, but Europe as a ‘civilian power’
(see Duchêne, 1972 for the original concept; Maull,
1990). While a ‘civilian power’ does not refuse to use military force under exceptional circumstances, it emphasizes cooperative security policy, multilateralism, and the
rule of (international) law. This is precisely the foreign
and security policy identity which the EU tries to build
from the 1990s on, even though it only had the whole
range of instruments available in the early 2000s (Anderson, 2008; Börzel and Risse, 2009; Howorth, 2007).
There is nothing peculiar about the EU promoting a
particular identity in its external relations. Every great
power in the history of international relations has tried to
promote a certain set of values in its foreign affairs –
from the Roman to the British empire, from the Soviet
Union, which tried to promote Communism on a global
scale, to the USA, which countered with its own vision of
global democracy and capitalism.9 The more interesting
point is that the EU has started behaving like any other
great power in this regard, even though its agency in foreign affairs has long been disputed (Hill, 1993; Sjursen,
2006a). This agency is no longer in question, not even in
the public spheres (Kantner et al., 2008).
With regard to its foreign policy identity, ‘the discourse of the EU as a normative power constructs a particular self of the EU’ (Diez, 2005, p. 614). Stephanie
Anderson (2008) went a step further and argued that
creating a distinct foreign policy identity is the whole
point of the EU’s efforts in external affairs. This foreign
policy identity represents the outward-looking version of
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the EU’s modern and enlightenment identity, emphasizing the rule of (international) law, multilateral and peaceful conflict resolution, as well as the promotion of
human rights, democracy and a social market economy.
The 2003 ‘European Security Strategy’, the first EU
attempt to develop a comprehensive foreign and security policy strategy, was full of references linking what is
constitutive of modern and democratic Europe to its
vision for international affairs. It started by celebrating
the EU’s role in establishing an enduring peace in
Europe, as a result of which its members ‘are committed
to dealing peacefully with disputes and to cooperating
through common institutions’ (European Council 2003,
p. 1). The document extensively dealt with the post-Cold
War and post-9 ⁄ 11 security threats emphasizing that
‘none of the new threats is purely military; nor can any
be tackled by purely military means’ (European Council,
2003, p. 7). The strategy then promoted an ‘international
order based on effective multilateralism’ (European
Council, 2003, p. 9) committing the EU to supporting
multilateralism and the United Nations as well as furthering human rights, the rule of law and democracy in its
external affairs. In this regard, the document intentionally distanced itself from the Bush Administration’s tendencies toward unilateralism and preventive warfare.
But the EU’s attempt to consciously develop its own
foreign policy identity is not confined to a declaratory
strategy alone. By about 2000, the EU’s foreign and security policy had at its disposal the entire set of instruments necessary for the promotion of democracy and
human rights as well as for post-conflict peace and postconflict state-building (Börzel and Risse, 2009; Magen
et al., 2009). Human rights conditionality, for example,
has been integrated in all but a few of its association as
well as partnership agreements with countries around
the world. The European Neighbourhood Policy towards
the Southern Caucasus, Central Asia and the Mediterranean includes a set of instruments to promote democracy and good governance. Ironically, when the EU
member states were bitterly divided over their stance
toward the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the first robust EU
peacekeeping mission started.
However, it is one thing to suggest that the EU
actively constructs a particular foreign policy identity. It
is quite different to claim that the emerging EU foreign
policy can be explained by the EU’s collective identity. A
whole body of literature criticizes the hypocritical nature
of EU foreign policies, which often prioritizes geostrategic and security interests over human rights and democracy concerns (for example, Bicchi, 2006; Pace, 2007;
Youngs, 2004). Moreover, multilateralism might be the
foreign policy identity of the weak who do not command the necessary economic and military resources to
develop a more forceful foreign policy (Kagan, 2003; see
also Hyde-Price, 2006).
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Thus, the question boils down to (i) whether the EU’s
foreign policy identity as a civilian power is a matter of
choice or of necessity and (ii) how we can account for
the gap between the EU’s words and deeds. As to the
first point, the lack of QMV in foreign and defence affairs
might lead to decisions based on the lowest common
denominator, leaving the EU with no other choice than
to behave as a civilian power. However, while the EU’s
military might is no match for the USA, its combined
defence expenditure of ca. 200 billion Euro is second
only to the USA and exceeds the military expenditures
of, say, Russia or China. The individual member states,
Great Britain, France and Germany are the second, fourth
and sixth, respectively, with regard to defence spending
worldwide (Stockholm Peace Research, 2008, Appendix
5A). The EU contains two nuclear powers, France and
Great Britain. Finally, the EU’s combined GDP constitutes
the greatest economic power in the world, which would
certainly command the economic resources to become a
formidable military power. These data suggest that the
EU’s self-proclaimed civilian power identity is indeed a
matter of choice rather than necessity.
As to the second question, how can we account for
the gap between EU self-description as a ‘force for good’
and its deeds, which are often inconsistent with its proclaimed values of promoting human rights, democracy
and the rule of law? I would argue that this gap can be
explained if we take the EU’s self-proclaimed foreign policy goals as a ‘civilian or normative power’, not as a prescription for a grand strategy but as a more reflexive
attempt at conscious identity creation in foreign policy.
As Stephanie Anderson argued (2008), this effort is
mainly meant for internal consumption. Given that Europe and the EU lack a strong supranational identity, the
EU’s foreign policy identity can be seen as an attempt to
externalize its core values of democracy, human rights
and the rule of law. It is part and parcel of the effort at
identity creation rather than a prescription for foreign
and security policy.
As a result, a mismatch – or, better, decoupling – of
words and deeds can be expected. Moreover, a foreign
policy identity prioritizing liberal and cosmopolitan values over everything else is likely to fail in the real world.
I do not mean to suggest a ‘norms versus interest’
account, which is problematic on theoretical grounds.
Rather, I argue that any major foreign policy actor such
as the EU needs to balance security, economic and other
material needs with the promotion of core values. A foreign policy identity that does not take into account the
fact that states as well as supranational entities such as
the EU need to worry about potential security threats or
about economic issues in a globalized world is likely to
fail in practice.10 Take the Middle East: for all its rhetoric
about the promotion of democracy and human rights,
the EU foreign policy behavior prioritized stability over
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other values, which meant stabilizing autocratic rulers
and applying double standards (Van Hüllen, 2010;
Youngs and Wittes, 2009). The Arab spring took the EU
as much by surprise as anybody else and the EU is now
scrambling to regain credibility in the Middle East.
In sum, this second case is one in which a specific EU
foreign policy identity has been created as an extension
of the EU’s self-description as a force of enlightenment,
human rights and democracy towards the outside world.
The primary purpose of this foreign policy identity, however, is directly inwardly as a means to strengthen the
EU’s sense of community. As a result, this grandiose foreign policy identity inevitably clashes with the reality of
EU foreign policy on the ground and the need in any
foreign policy action to balance various (legitimate)
goals, such as security, economic interests and human
rights.
Identity clashes: why the EU is ambivalent on
Turkish membership
My third case relates to a crucial component of any
imagined community’s self-identity, namely, boundary
construction. A community such as the EU needs to
delineate who is in and who is out. These issues become
relevant with regard to EU enlargement.11 I suggest that
one cannot even begin to understand EU enlargement
without taking identity politics into account. European
identities explain to a large degree the relatively smooth
processes of Eastern enlargement, since there it was
inconceivable to challenge the notion that Central Eastern Europe (CEE) belongs to modern Europe, as represented by the EU. In sharp contrast, Turkish EU
membership has remained contested from the very
beginning – and identity concerns explain a large part of
this controversy.
With regard to Eastern enlargement, the EU and its
representatives used the community discourse from the
beginning to legitimize the CEE countries’ request to
enter the union. The dominant discourse in Europe confirmed that CEE belonged to the community as ‘part of
us’ so that it became very difficult for enlargement
opponents to raise objections. The enlargement discourse constructed Europe and the EU as a community
of liberal values and market economies, as a result of
which the democratizing Central Eastern Europeans
acquired an almost natural right to join the EU (Fierke
and Wiener, 1999; Neumann, 2001; see also Schimmelfennig, 2003). The 1993 European Council explicitly
offered an accession perspective to CEE, provided that
they met certain conditions; which again express the
self-description of the EU as community of democracies:
the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ enshrining the values of modern and enlightened Europe (human rights, democracy,
rule of law and a market economy).
As a result, it took the EU less than 15 years after the
end of the Cold War to accept CEE as member states. In
contrast, the history of Turkish–EU relations is one of
slow motion. As early as 1963 Turkey signed an Association Agreement that acknowledged the final goal of
membership. More than two decades later, Turkey
applied for EC ⁄ EU membership in 1987. In 1999 the
European Council accepted Turkish membership candidacy. It took another 5 years until the 2004 European
Council acknowledged that Turkey fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria and that membership negotiations should
begin in October 2005. Major EU member states such as
Germany under Chancellor Merkel and France under former President Sarkozy have opposed full Turkish membership, favoring a privileged partnership instead.
The cumbersome and open-ended history of Turkish–
EU relations demonstrates the deep ambiguity with
which both the EU and Turkey have approached the
membership issue over the years. Both Turkey and the
EU in their respective discourses have constructed Turkey as a ‘metaphor between Europe and Asia’, as Nur
Bilge Criss has put it (2007). Depending where Turkey is
discursively situated in this metaphor, it is either in Europe and, thus, eligible for EU membership, or out. As a
result, the contemporary debates about Turkish EU
membership is simultaneously about who Europe and
the Europeans are, that is, European identity, as it is
about who Turkey and the Turkish are, that is, Turkish
identity.
The discourses about Turkish membership in major EU
member states show a profound ambivalence about
whether or not Turkey belongs to Europe. The debate
about Turkish membership is a discussion about the
European borders. Where does Europe end and who, as
a result, has a legitimate claim to EU membership? The
debate about Turkey involves different conceptions of
European identity. To begin with, there is the modern,
inclusive and liberal vision of Europe that found its most
significant expression in the Copenhagen criteria.
Accordingly, Turkey is seen as a part of Europe as long
as it respects the liberal agenda and complies with its
norms. As Olli Rehn put it in 2004:
A Turkey where the rule of law is firmly rooted
in its society and state will prove that, contrary
to prejudices, European values can successfully
coexist with a predominantly Muslim population. Such a Turkey will be a most valuable
crossroads between civilisations (quoted in
Lundgren, 2006, p. 137).
The more the EU is constructed as a community
embracing human rights and the rule of law, the more
Turkey is at least eligible to become a member, even
though its use of torture and its treatment of the
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Kurdish minority are still criticized. Supporters of Turkish
EU membership also allude to Europe’s historical heritage to which ‘Istanbul, the old Constantinople, [belongs
as] a cradle of our civilization’ (Denis MacShane, 2004,
quoted in Madeker, 2008, p. 136). This identity construction connects to the idea of Turkey as a bridge between
East and West, the Orient and the Occident, as well as
between Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and Islam
(from East Rome to Byzantium and Constantinople to
Istanbul). Identity frames that include Turkey as part of
the European self are represented in the public discourse
by center-left politicians and by Turkish speakers. The
vision of a modern and liberal European identity constructing a democratic Turkey as belonging to Europe
also dominated debates in the European Parliament
(Giannakopoulos and Maras, 2005), and in the British
media (Wimmel 2006). In Germany, however, inclusive
identity frames with regard to Turkey are minority positions (Madeker, 2008, p. 139; Wimmel, 2006).
In contrast, an exclusionary counter-discourse developed in the French and German media constructing Turkey outside Europe and, thus, not eligible for
membership (Von Oppeln, 2005). As Madeker’s quantitative and qualitative media analysis documents for the
German public sphere, the construction of an exclusionary European identity according to which Turkey constitutes the ‘Other’ of Europe, developed in the
conservative press but quickly dominated the discourse.
Of course, this construction is not new: Turkey as the
Other of European identity has a very long history going
back to the Ottoman Empire and its struggles with
‘Christian’ Europe (Icener, 2007, ch. 5).
Opponents of Turkish EU membership use geographical, cultural, historical and religious references to construct Turkey as outside Europe. As to geography, Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President and President of the European Constitutional Convention, argued
in articles published across Europe that only 5 per cent
of the Turkish territory and only 7 per cent of its population live in a ‘European enclave’, while the remaining
parts are located in Asia and Anatolia (Giscard d’Estaing,
2004). Such a primordial identity construction constructs
a ‘natural’ European border along the Bosporus, which is
then used to exclude Turkey from Europe.
The allegedly natural boundary also serves as a cultural and historical boundary sealing Turkey off from a
modern Europe of enlightenment and liberalism. As
Giscard d’Estaing put it:
The European Convention sought a clearer definition of the foundations of this entity, which
include the cultural contributions of ancient
Greece and Rome, the religious heritage pervading European life, the creative enthusiasms of
the Renaissance, the philosophy of the Age of
Global Policy (2012) 3:Suppl.1
the Enlightenment and the contributions of the
rational and scientific thought. Turkey shares
none of these (Giscard d’Estaing, 2004).12
The statement is remarkable in so far as it uses the
historical heritage of a modern European identity as an
exclusionary device. It is hard to see why Romania and
Bulgaria as new members, as well as the western Balkans
with its accession perspective, share this decidedly West
European heritage, while Turkey does not. While Giscard
did not use Christianity as a demarcation line to exclude
Turkey from the EU, others did:
Islam which has been built in Turkey on the
ruins of a Roman–Christian civilization is completely unsuitable to revive the soul of Europe
(Die Welt, 10 September 2004, quoted in
Madeker, 2008, p. 144).
The discourse on Turkish EU membership pitches two
European identity constructions against each other in
transnational public spheres. The first concerns the modern, inclusionary and liberal Europe that is open to new
members, including Turkey, as long as they comply with
the Copenhagen criteria of democracy, human rights
and the rule of law. A second and exclusionary identity
discourse amalgamates geographical, cultural, historical
and religious constructions to keep Turkey out once and
for all. In its most sophisticated version it even uses the
modern and liberal European identity in a primordial
way so that others who do not share the history leading
to this identity can never participate in it. This exclusionary Europe represents a noteworthy kind of nationalist,
but nevertheless Europeanized, identity construction. It is
Europeanized because it pertains to a supranational
entity, the EU. It is nationalist at the same time, since it
uses the exclusionary building blocks of 19th century
nationalism to reconstruct them on the European level.
As argued above and in contrast to the case of Eastern
enlargement, European identities vis-à-vis Turkey remain
fundamentally unsettled and deeply contested. It might
be precisely the lack of clarity and the contested nature
of identities and interests in this case which explain why
the EU and Turkey have been struggling over the membership issue for the past decades and why the accession talks have been rather cumbersome so far. If this
argument holds true the prospects of Turkey joining the
union any time soon are rather remote – apart from all
the other institutional and political obstacles.
(Policy) conclusions
I have argued in this article that one cannot begin to
understand EU foreign policy without taking identity politics into account. First, the differential Europeanization
ª 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
93
Thomas Risse
94
of national identities explains to a large degree why the
current ESDP has not been supranationalized. Second,
the gap between the EU’s grandiose rhetoric of itself as
a force for good in the world, on the one hand, and its
inability to put this foreign policy identity at work in its
practice, on the other hand, largely results from the fact
that the EU’s construction of a distinct foreign policy
identity is inward-oriented rather than outward-oriented.
Last, but not least, the EU enlargement discourse with
regard to particularly Turkey has at least as much to do
with contested self-descriptions of the EU and what follows for its boundaries than with any security or economic considerations. My analysis leads to the following
policy recommendations:
• A ‘coalition of the willing’ in the EU should now move
ahead towards permanent structured cooperation in
foreign policy and defence matters, as foreseen in the
Lisbon Treaty. Such a move will exclude Great Britain,
which is a pity, given the British military capabilities.
But it is unavoidable in order to close the expectations–capabilities gap of EU foreign policy for good.
• The more the EU pursues a coherent foreign policy
with one voice, the more it will recognize that its foreign policy identity and ‘vision for the world’ needs to
be adjusted. While the EU should not give up its goals
of making the world a more peaceful place and of
promoting human rights and democracy, it must realize that foreign policy is about reconciling conflicting
goals. In the end, it is more important for European
identity creation to pursue a coherent foreign policy
than to embark on an identity rhetoric that cannot be
put in practice.
• European elites need to realize that enlargement decisions inevitably involve identity politics. We need more
rather than less open and public controversies about
the boundaries of the EU and how these borders
reflect European identity. Silencing identity discourses
will achieve the opposite of what is intended, since it
will make future enlargement decisions more rather
than less difficult.
Notes
A draft of this article was presented at the 2011 Dahrendorf Symposium in Berlin, 8–10 November 2011. I thank my co-panelists as well
as two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.
1. I should say at the outset that this analysis offers no good explanation for Germany’s voting behavior in the UN Security Council.
It is inconsistent with both Germany’s approach to CSDP and
with German support for the ‘responsibility to protect’.
2. Diez 2005; Duchêne 1972; Manners 2002; Sjursen 2006b.
3. Strictly speaking, EU enlargement does not really concern the
EU’s external affairs. However, I discuss these matters here,
since the foreign policy consequences of enlargement decisions
are obvious.
4. See Risse 2010, ch. 1, for the following.
5. See Risse 2010, 191–196, for the following.
6. Note that this pertains mostly to military and defence issues.
EU foreign affairs in the areas of environmental policies, human
rights and development aid, not to mention external trade, are
mostly subject to supranational decision-making, including
QMV.
7. This is the crucial difference from US federalism, which is based
on a clear separation of powers between the US states and the
federal level. As a result, we would not expect the USA to give
up sovereignty to supranational bodies as easily.
8. See http: ⁄ ⁄ euobserver.com ⁄ 13 ⁄ 113569 (Sept. 11, 2011).
9. It is, therefore, misleading to call the EU a normative power,
given that promoting norms is not what distinguishes the EU
from other powers in world history (on this concept see Manners 2002, 2006).
10. In fact, the 2003 ESS does try to strike a balance between
diverse values and foreign policy goals. Its main problem is that
the EU never made a serious attempt to implement it.
11. The following summarizes Risse 2010, chapter 9.
12. For similar quotes see Madeker 2008, 142–148; also Schäfer and
Zschache 2008; Wimmel 2006.
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Author Information
Thomas Risse is Professor of international politics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He co-directs the Research Center ‘‘Governance
in Areas of Limited Statehood’’ and the Research College ‘‘Transformative Power of Europe,’’ both funded by the German Research
Foundation. He is the author of A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres (Ithaca NY: Cornell University
Press, 2010).
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