Foreign policy and identity change: analysing perceptions of Europe among the Turkish public

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263395717729932

Foreign policy is a key area through which state officials' role in the discursive construction of a state's identity becomes possible and visible. From this viewpoint, Turkey presents an interesting case worthy of analysis due to the significant transformation of its foreign policies in the recent decades. This article first reviews the current literature, which points out that the shift in Turkish foreign policy and the souring of Turkey-European Union (EU) relations in the second half of the 2000s not only entailed a policy change but also a change in the crafted identity of the state at the elite level as distanced from Europe. This article then aims to undercover whether this crafted identity at the elite level is also visible across the changing perceptions of Europe among the Turkish public. Hence, it seeks to observe the ways in which public discourse does or does not follow elite discourse on representations of Europe, and, in turn, engages with the conceptual question of whether public constructions of state identity simply follow elite constructions. This is done through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of texts produced by focus group interviews.