Usages of Europe in Turkish Foreign Policy towards the Middle East

Abstract

Europeanization of foreign policy is often studied from the perspective of the impact of European Union (EU) membership on national foreign policies. What go largely unnoticed are the numerous usages of the EU in presenting, justifying and implementing foreign policy at home and abroad. This paper addresses this lacuna in the literature by exploring how Turkish foreign policy actors have construed and used the EU to justify and explain Turkey's foreign policy towards the Middle East in the domestic and the Middle Eastern context. We draw upon a sociological approach to Europeanization and argue that the usages of the EU in the construction of Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East vary according to the context.