Basak Alpan

Middle East Technical University | METU · Department of Political Science and Public Administration

Following the AKP’s victory in the 2002 general elections, ‘conservative democracy’ has emerged as a trademark in Turkish politics, focusing on cosmopolitanism and European integration. In the late 2000s, the party’s favourite notion was ‘advanced democracy’, this time underlining Turkey’s leadership claim in the region and displaying a more critic...

This paper focuses on the significance of the discourses and the notion of ‘hegemony’ to understand the process of Europeanization within the Turkish political landscape. By applying the poststructuralist theoretical framework of Laclau and Mouffe to the analysis of the shifting discourses on ‘Europe’ in Turkey after 1999, the paper identifies the...

Revolution was, once upon a time, a probability and a very beautiful one. " Murat Uyurkulak starts his novel Tol with this striking sentence, which tells the story of a long train journey made by two " defeated and exhausted " characters, once victims of the sweeping rage of the State and the brutal side of Turkey's recent history. In the summer of...

This chapter lays out the conclusions of the research as carried out by the authors of the volume in Türkiye, Kosovo, Romania, Georgia, Albania and North Macedonia and argues that the “centre-periphery” dimension needs to taken into account in evaluating the perception of European integration by the public, and the young population in particular. A...

This chapter sets the conceptual and theoretical scene for the broader focus of this volume, which aims to explore the perceptions attached to the EU integration by the young population in its “periphery”. In line with the research questions of the LEAP (“Linking to Europe at the Periphery”) Jean Monnet Network, which aims to explore how the EU int...

Since the beginning of the 2000s, extensive academic research has echoed one popular opinion, ‘Turkey is back to the Balkans’. These studies have been scrutinizing the complicated role of Turkey in the Balkans, usually drawing upon the use of soft power by the former. This impact in the region remained intact during the 2010s, although the overall...

This article is about the main framework and the rationale of the special issue, which deals with Turkey’s increasing ethno-religious, pragmatic and complicated involvement and activism in the Balkans since 2002, under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP). The main focus of the Issue is how the intersectionality betw...

Europeanization is deservedly one of the most popular yet most volatile buzzwords for Turkish politics and EU–Turkey relations. This chapter takes stock of the Europeanization literature and examines the EU–Turkey relationship by referring to particular mechanisms and variants of Europeanization. The main argument is that Europeanization is a versa...

The May 2019 EP elections once again highlighted the current cultural backlash throughout Europe against progressive values such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, which impacts on the ‘future of Europe’ debate, raising important questions for the evolution of Turkey-EU relations. Even though Turkey is no longer a hot topic in EU political pa...

“Europe” has been the most popular yet most volatile buzzword in Turkish politics for decades. It gained a particular momentum with the 1963 Ankara Agreement and then in 1999 during and after the Helsinki European Council when Turkey was officially accepted as an EU candidate. As a part of the pre-accession strategy, the Turkish government engaged...

In the evening of 15 July 2016, Turkey was shaken to its pieces by an unexpected yet abortive coup attempt. Just like the previous ones, this recent attempt to stage a coup had a substantial impact on various social and cultural realms including football. By developing a holistic approach to the notion of hegemonic masculinity (a concept coined by...

Britanya’nın Avrupa Birliği'nden (AB) çıkma kararı (Brexit) sonrası Türkiye'nin AB ile ilişkileri de akademik olarak merak edilen konulardan biri haline geldi. Ada'dan gelen, hiç kimsenin beklemediği bu referandum sonucu aslında birçok yönüyle Türkiye için ilginç senaryolara da gebe bir sürecin başlangıcı olarak görüldü. Türkiye'nin AB üyelik sürec...

z Avrupa bütünleşmesinin ulusal, bölgesel ya da küresel gündemimizi derinden etkilediği bir bağlamda, geçmişte kaldığını sandığımız 'aidiyet' ve 'kimlik' gibi kavramlar, siyasi gündemi oldukça meşgul eden konu başlıkları olarak tekrar karşımıza çıkmıştır. Bu süreç, özellikle 1980'li ve 1990'lı yıllardan başlayarak yoğun göç dalgalarıyla karmaşıklaş...

If there is one thing that academia has learnt from football, it is that football indeed emerged as a significant marker of identity. As the chapter by Szogs in this volume convincingly demonstrates, football, due to its fundamental design of binary oppositions, continuously invites the spectator — even if his/her ‘own’ team is not involved — to ta...

Trying to understand European integration and enlargement without reference to the concept of Europeanization is at best an incomplete process and at worst a fruitless one, especially as there is a growing literature on Europeanization since the 1990s. It is, broadly speaking, a term that is employed to label or describe a process of transformation...