The Paradoxes of Turkey's Role Model Status in the Debate on Its Accession to the European Union (EU): A Critical View of the Power of Representation

This dissertation analyzes the paradoxes of Turkey's role model status and how it offers an orientalist representation of this Muslim country influencing its membership application to the European Union. Through a postcolonial analysis of the various internal and external power relations associated with being a role model, it offers an examination of the changes in the Turkish Republic's discourses of secularism, modernization and westernization as important parts of this discussion as well as the development of the transformative discourses of political Islamic movements.;Longitudinal historical analysis is utilized to examine the emergence of the Turkish Republic's identity, and the concepts of secularism and westernization, which constituted the basis of its role model status and its desire to become European. Critical discourse analysis is also used to trace the evolution of the history of the republic focusing on the changes in the internal and external power relations that shaped its definition of itself and its foreign policy. The dissertation traces and uses the history of Turkey's quest first for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU) as a case study of the unequal power relations among key national, regional and international actors. Special attention was also offered of the transformative discourse of and the role played by the Justice and Development Party, which challenged the Orientalist representations of Turkish society and its international relations. The representations of the Muslim `other' are analyzed in detail, especially with respect to the emergence of Justice and Development Party as a dominant Islamic political actor and how its role in pushing Turkish membership in the EU had major implications for the democratization of Turkey.;Research findings suggest that the Justice and Development Party experience redefined the problematic power relations between the Occident and the Orient with which Turkey continued to be identified. It also challenged the system of power relations that tied both together by changing the representations and the definition of the relations between East and West.;In the light of the recent developments in the Middle East contextualized as the Arab Spring, Turkey has presented itself as a model to others, but it has also witnessed its own protests against the so called increasing authoritarian tendencies of the Justice and Development Party leadership. What this indicated is that Turkey needed to continue to work on building a sound democratic system that accommodates the demands of the minority in addition to the majority.