| This dissertation explores the intricate workings of power and interests in Turkey's bid to accede to the European Union. Anthropological studies of supranationalism and regional integration models accounted for the ways in which the growing regionalism in the world since the 1950s brought about two important developments that have countereffects. On one hand, the imagining of regional communities in today's world brought about a re-imagination of the nations and states that constitute them. On the other hand, even in those more developed models such as the EU, it soon transpired that economic cooperation models may not easily lend themselves to deliberate political integration. Hopes of economic regionalism have thus been hampered by competing national and subnational interests of groups that increasingly defined their interests in European integration as advancing their private interests than about actual progress in integration. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in Brussels among officials, politicians and interest representatives from Turkey and the EU with the help of non-participant and participant observation, interviewing politico-cultural actors, and the analysis of textual policy, this dissertation examines how lobbying for diverse interests, works as a politico-cultural communicative practice in facilitating/hampering the enlargement dynamic of the EU towards Turkey. It demonstrates that EU accession provides a space for politicking among diverse groups of actors such as those bureaucratic, economic and political elites from member states and candidate countries to realize their political, economic and social investments in accession candidates, that are fused into a common European interest. It inquires whether Turkey's EU accession produces necessary conditions for a common European interest to emerge between Turkish and the EU actors and interests. It examines culture, power and politics at the interstices of institutions and people long ignored by anthropologists, thus contributing to the burgeoning scholarship that exposes contentions in European regionalism. |
