A clash of civilizations? Examining liberal‐democratic values in Turkey and the European Union1

Turkey's proposed entry into the European Union (EU) has been undermined by Europeans’ perceptions of Turkish–European cultural differences, particularly regarding the liberal‐democratic values that the EU promotes (democracy, rule of law, and respect for and appreciation of minority/human rights). Yet, cross‐national research on values has not focused on Turkey, the EU, and these liberal‐democratic values, leaving assumptions of cultural differences and their explanations untested. Through analyses of World and European Values Survey data (1999–2002), this article asks whether people in Turkey have the same values regarding democracy, rule of law (versus religious and authoritarian rule), and minority/human rights as people in EU member and candidate states (as of 2000)? What factors explain these values? I find that people in Turkey support democracy to the same extent as people in EU member and candidate states, but people in Turkey are more supportive of religious and authoritarian rule and are less tolerant of minorities. Although the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis expects liberal values to be ordered according to countries’ religious traditions, with western Christian the most supportive and Islamic the least, only for tolerance of minorities values is this pattern found. Instead, economic development most consistently explains differences between Turkey and EU member and candidate states in support for these values. I conclude with calls for theoretical refinement, particularly of the clash of civilizations thesis, along with suggestions for future research to examine more Muslim and Orthodox countries; I discuss the debate over Turkey's EU entry.     

Mobile pensioners: retirement migrants’ perspectives of EU citizenship and free movement

The European institutions picture EU citizens as important actors in the process of transforming EU citizenship into a “tangible reality”. By knowing and practising EU citizenship rights, EU citizens are supposed to give meaning and depth to the otherwise hollow concept of EU citizenship. What EU citizenship means for mobile citizens themselves and how EU citizens practice and evaluate their rights (“lived citizenship”) is generally not a central theme in reports and studies on EU citizenship. In this article the value of EU citizenship will be discussed by applying a qualitative research approach and by focusing on retired EU citizens’ perspectives and practice of, in particular, free movement. This article applies a comparative approach and includes EU citizens who move or return from the Netherlands to Spain or Turkey after retirement. Four groups of EU citizens move between these countries: Dutch nationals who move to Spain, Spanish nationals who return to Spain, Dutch nationals who move to Turkey and Turkish dual-nationals who return to Turkey after retirement. This article shows that migratory background, country of origin, country of retirement and the way in which EU citizenship is acquired determine retirement migrants’ perspectives and practice of EU citizenship.     

Refugees in Greece: Facing a Multifaceted Labyrinth

The years after 2015 were remarkable for the reception and accommodation schemes of refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The EU‐Turkey common statement of March 2016 and, most of all, the sealing of the Balkan corridor, blocked the flow of refugees towards central Europe through Greece, testing the readiness of the Greek authorities to take action to meet a series of urgent needs (accommodation, nutrition, asylum procedures, health) and social integration processes (education, training, access to labour). Approximately 45,000 refugees are settled in refugee camps or urban settlements all over the country. Those entrapped in the Eastern Aegean islands should be returned to Turkey, which is considered a “safe third country”. The purpose of this article is to shed light on a phenomenon that is ongoing and challenges a series of policies and legal principles both in Greece and the EU.     

Schooling a European Identity: ethno‐cultural exclusion and nationalist resonance within the EU policy of “The European dimension of education”

This article aims to explore how the role of education as an aide in the process of “European” identity formation is being articulated in the European Union's (EU) policy of “The European dimension of education”. After having located the EU's views on education in the context of the neo‐liberal discourse on economic globalization, the article goes on to trace EU discussions of the European dimension of education historically. Subsequently, it deliberates on the understanding of European culture and identity which the European dimension of education endeavours to advance. Here a critique is developed of the policy's ethno‐culturalism, thereby excluding delineation of a collective identity in the EU. Basing itself on a notion of cultural identity which, implicitly, includes only those who fit certain versions of European historical “roots” and cultural “heritage”, the policy, it is argued, impedes a discussion of how a trans‐ethnic identity formation could be created in today's EU. Towards the end of the article, a scrutiny of the European dimension's perception of the so‐called “language diversity” in the EU seeks to illustrate this issue further.     

Irregular Workers or Ethnic Kin? Post‐1990s Labour Migration from Bulgaria to Turkey

This paper addresses the invisibility of the post‐1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria to Turkey in the literature despite the increasingly significant number of such migrants. I suggest that this invisibility stems partially from a problem of classification that has to do with implicit suppositions about ethnicity and migration. The post‐1990s Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are not specified in accounts of irregular migrant flows directed towards Turkey since they are assumed to belong to the category of ethnic “return” migrants: Because of their ethnic identity as Turkish, all Turkish migrants from Bulgaria tend to get considered as part of the intermittent “return” migration waves from Bulgaria, the most notable and well‐known of these being the fight of more than 300,000 Turks in 1989. However, while the ethnic affiliation of the post‐1990s migrants from Bulgaria renders them invisible as irregular migrants within scholarly migrant typologies, the same ethnic affiliation does not necessarily work to their advantage when it comes to their legal and social reception in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes micro‐level analysis from below, the paper demonstrates that the self designated ethnic affiliation of these migrants, counterpoised against their social marginalization as “the Bulgarian” domestics, heightens the paradoxes of belonging and affects migration strategies. The paper thus underscores the significance of ethnic affiliation as a factor that needs to be adequately taken into account in describing the present and in assessing the future of this particular migratory pattern.     

The Europeanisation of Integration Policies

This article analyses the development of integration policies concerning third country nationals at the level of the European Union (EU). Starting with the discovery of recent policy developments at the European level, including new European directives mainly granting social rights to non‐EU citizens, the paper proceeds to examine the reasons that enabled this shift from the national to the European level of decision making. It concludes that integration policies have been created as a new EU policy field amidst the also fairly new policy field of immigration policies. In light of the theoretical concept of “organisational fields,” the interests and motives of the main actors involved in the emergence of this policy field are analysed. The research combines neo‐functionalist and intergovernmentalist assumptions, and it results in the following conclusions: First, a European integration policy could only be established within the emerging field of immigration policies, which laid the groundwork for member state collaborations in this highly sensitive policy area. Secondly, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, several non‐governmental organisations and most notably the European Commission played an important role in promoting integration policies at the European level. Their engagement is interpreted as a necessary but not as a sufficient condition for the establishment of this policy field. Thirdly, these actors tried to strengthen the status of integration policies by emphasising the linkage between successful integration policies and economic and social cohesion. This semantic strategy, among other discussed reasons, facilitated the member states’ decision at the European summit in Tampere 1999 that all third country nationals shall be granted comparable rights to EU citizens.     

Opposition to enlargement as a symbolic defence of group position: multilevel analyses of attitudes toward candidates' entries in the EU‐25

Despite the sociological and geopolitical significance of EU enlargement and opinion toward it, extant literature is lacking a theory of enlargement opinion and an examination of opinion in the wake of the 2004 enlargement. This paper fills these gaps by developing a symbolic defence of group position model to explain opposition to the entries of candidate states (as of 2005: Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Turkey) and to examine how these explanations differ for post‐Communist EU members. Results of hierarchical multinomial logistic models of Eurobarometer ( European Commission 2005 ) data from the EU‐25 support the notion that the symbolic nature of enlargement shapes the effects of interests, threat, and other factors on opinion depending on candidates' position in a culturally and historically‐rooted hierarchy of ‘European‐ness’. Attitudes toward Turkey's entry are less shaped by material interests than attitudes toward other candidates' entries, which is explained by Turkey's position at the bottom – and post‐Communist countries' position in the middle – of this hierarchy in the post‐Cold War era. Attitudes toward Turkey's entry are rather a function of the perceived threat that it poses to the group position and identity of Europeans, which is defended by the politically knowledgeable. While the lower levels of threat in post‐socialist EU member countries help to account for their lower levels of opposition to candidates' entries, people in these countries to a greater extent use European identity as a way of symbolically distancing themselves from Turkey. Implications are discussed.     

The Citizenship Gap in European Societies: Conceptualizing,Measuring and Comparing ‘Migration Neutrality’ across the EU

Equality in life‐chances of nationals and immigrants is a sensitive issue on which there is more debate than systematic evidence. To evaluate this condition across European societies, the concept of integration as “migration neutrality” is introduced. “Migration neutrality” is defined as the irrelevance of national citizenship as a predictor of key social attainments. Odds ratios are used to measure the relative risk of non‐national as compared with national citizens in the attainment of relevant resources. While this indicator cannot control for compositional differences in the populations at stake, it represents a straightforward benchmark that can be used in different domains to describe and compare foreign citizens’ position relative to nationals. In this article, we calculate it across EU member states through Eurostat data. In particular, the focus is on migration neutrality in the risk of social exclusion. Country variations are found to be hardly amenable to established classifications of integration types. Moreover, the relationship between “migration neutrality” levels and pro‐immigrant policies (as measured by the Mipex index) is found to be weak, suggesting that these policies do not consistently target the reduction of the gap between nationals and non nationals.     

Promoting sustainable development through civil society: A case study of the EU’s NSA/LA thematic programme in Kyrgyzstan

The article focuses on the contribution of the European Union (EU) in promoting sustainable development through the involvement of civil society in partner countries. More specifically, it analyses the main features and outcomes of the projects implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs) in Kyrgyzstan under the EU thematic programme Non‐State Actors and Local Authorities in Development (NSA/LA). Despite its importance—this is the only EU programme providing direct support to non‐state actors and local authorities engaged in poverty reduction—to date, there has been very little research on the functioning of this instrument on the ground. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature by examining the EU’s contribution to sustainable development through a case study on Kyrgyzstan. The study is based on primary data: 10 semi‐structured interviews conducted with the EU‐funded organizations implementing the NSA/LA programme. The NSA/LA projects were analysed by considering two major fields of engagement of non‐state actors in the development process: as service providers and as advocates (Banks & Hulme, 2012). Overall, the organizations awarded EU support were not only focused on fulfilling short‐term needs but also sought to introduce new ways of dealing with poverty and inequality, positioning themselves between the “Big‐D” and the “little‐d” approaches to development (Bebbington, Hickey, & Mitlin, 2008). Nonetheless, the EU‐funded projects were too limited and fragmented to be able to sustain long‐term structural change. Therefore, the EU should place new emphasis on creating synergies between new and old structures at the grassroots level and establishing mechanisms and bodies that could merge and co‐ordinate their efforts. In addition, the calls for proposals could highlight the need to share the lessons learnt by “obliging” the beneficiaries to act as multipliers and to pass on their positive experience to neighbouring communities. Finally, the EU could stimulate the funded organizations to experiment with innovative mechanisms of involvement in the policy‐making process, by making this aspect a mandatory requirement of the projects implemented with its support.     

Connecting entrepreneurship with policy experimentation? The EU framework for social innovation

This article investigates how “social innovation” made its way onto the European Union (EU) agenda and how this notion has been creatively used to advance distinct policy goals. It does so by analysing the resources the EU provided to promote social innovation over the period 2006–2014. Three main conclusions arise. First, between 2006 and 2010 the label social innovation was rarely used, although several EU instruments and processes supported it. Second, throughout 2009–2010, the European Commission’s Bureau of European Policy Advisers played a key agenda setting role in flagging social innovation on the eve of the Europe 2020 Strategy. Consequently, and third, since 2010 social innovation has been explicitly mainstreamed into the EUs new growth strategy. This phase is characterized by a stronger emphasis on “social entrepreneurship” and “social experimentation”. As a result, social innovation has become an important tool in the European Semester’s focus on the reform of the welfare state.     

Flexicurity: A New Paradigm for the Analysis of Labor Markets and Policies Challenging the Trade‐Off Between Flexibility and Security

The aim of the article is to discuss the concept of flexicurity presented as a new paradigm for analyzing modern labor markets (analytical perspective) and as a metaphor for policies striving for a better balance between flexibility and security (normative perspective). The purpose is to clarify these analytical and normative meanings of the flexicurity concept from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Flexicurity has been a policy strategy since 2005/2006 endorsed by the European Commission and put on top of the political agenda for the European Employment Strategy and EU 2020, the 10‐year strategy of the EU. We briefly sketch the tenets of the flexicurity approach by discussing the main issues in the European academic and policy debate. We subsequently present empirical evidence based on the definition of dynamic outcome indicators for assessing the performance of 26 countries in the EU in balancing flexibility and security. The findings challenge the conventionally presumed trade‐off between flexibility and security.     

The epistemic dimension of European integration

This paper departs from the assumption that European integration – in addition to the dimensions of political institutions, markets, and European Union (EU) law – also comprises an epistemic dimension. This dimension contains the concepts and meanings that tell us what an integrated Europe “is,” how it works, and how we could evaluate it. Against this background, the paper develops an account to discuss the role of EU studies in the broader process of European integration. Its particular focus is on how EU studies co-produce conceptual discourses and representations of the EU together with EU politics. Moreover, these concepts and representations inform institutions that link those academic communities to the EU and make the development of EU studies a partial dimension of European integration.     

Trans‐Local Communities in the Age of Transnationalism: Bosnians in Diaspora

Today, Bosnians represent one of the newly emerging and the most widely dispersed diasporic communities from the Balkans. There are large communities of Bosnians living in almost every European country, as well as throughout North America and Australia. Most were displaced during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war, in which 2.2 million people were forced to leave their homes, 1.6 million of whom looked for refuge abroad. In contrast with, and in response to, the enforced displacement, many members of the Bosnian diaspora have retained strong family and other “informal” social ties with both Bosnians in other countries and those still living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH, or Bosnia). Such ties – focused on preservation of cultural memory and performance of distinct local identities – form the basis of the global network of the Bosnian diaspora and its link with the original home (land). In this paper, I briefly outline the links and networks that constitute diaspora, and then go on to explore the extent to which recent scholarly literature is able to “capture” the uniqueness and complexity of the Bosnian diasporic communities in Australia, the United States (U.S.) and Europe. Finally, I attempt to define the concept of “trans‐localism” and how it is (per)formed, and suggest that the predominantly “transnational” conceptual framework within the migration studies needs to be expanded to include “trans‐local” diasporic identity formation among displaced Bosnians and similar diaspora groups.     

Intra‐diaspora Knowledge Transfer and ‘New’ Italian Migration

The Italian Australia diaspora is a heterogeneous mix of regional, class and generational identities. This article identifies and considers the influence of four recent Italian‐Australian cohorts on the processes of Italian‐Australian cultural formation. Of particular interest is the most recent wave of migrants (post‐2000), whose arrival is prompted by the European economic crisis and facilitated by Australia's skilled migration programme. We argue that this cohort is a new form of “elite” skilled migration comprised of people who are independent of, yet reliant on, the community infrastructure and social standing that previous waves of Italian migrants have established. We consider the relationship between these cohorts as a process of “intra‐diaspora” knowledge transfer and show how diasporas play a fundamental role in the skilled migration project. These dynamics challenge assumptions that skilled migrant integration is “frictionless”. Rather, their arrival simultaneously generates diaspora renewal as well as tensions around identity and community resources.     

Europe’s Migration Agreements with Migrant‐Sending Countries in the Global South: A Critical Review

The past two decades have seen the steady emergence of various bilateral and multilateral migration agreements between Europe and migrant‐sending countries in the global South. This article provides a critical assessment of the way the EU – and individual countries such as Spain, France and Italy – have played active roles in reshaping old and developing new strategies for keeping migration under control while opening up new opportunities for “regular” migration. It also discusses the extent to which migration agreements help migrant‐sending countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to optimize the link between migration and development. Based on an analysis of the contents of the migration agreements and their implementation, it has become obvious that there is still a long way to go to achieve “fair multilateralism” and create “win‐win” situations between the EU and the poorer migrant‐sending countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.     

Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether even toddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18‐month‐old infants learnt a simple game‐like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non‐normative control, marked the same action as idiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non‐normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second‐personal normative expectations about their partner's behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group‐minded and abstract social norms.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

Forced Displacement in Turkey: Pushing the Limits of the ECHR System

This article presents research findings on regional human rights tribunals and forced displacement. It assesses the response of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) system to “village destructions” and “village returns” complaints lodged against Turkey and originating from the conflict between State security forces and the PKK (Partiya Karkar?n Kurdistan). Within academic literature the role of the ECHR in Turkey tends to be reduced to discussion of a handful of substantive decisions. This article argues that there is much to be gained from closer examination of the (changing) dynamics of the ECHR in Turkey and the regulation of displacement. Two innovations can be observed from this case‐study: a special level of ‘protective’ access and a proactive approach to fact‐finding. The Turkish cases indicate a need for further investigation of the role of fact‐finding in cases of displacement and the development of context‐specific rules on sustainable returns processes.     

Returnees' Perspectives on Their Re‐migration Processes

The return of refugees and migrants back to their country of origin is an important topic on the agenda of Western European governments, as return is considered as the most “durable solution” for the “refugee problem”, and as an instrument with which to tackle “illegal” migration. However, these migration policies generally lack a clear evidence base, as little studies have focused on returnees' current living situations and on their perspectives on the re‐migration process. In this paper we therefore try to listen to returnees' voices, through in‐depth interviews with four Nepalese migrants both before (in Belgium) and after (in Nepal) their return, and with 16 returnees after their return to Nepal. The interviews show how most returnees start with a disadvantageous “point of departure” to realize a “successful” return: mostly, they do not really depart “voluntarily”, and they only have limited possibilities for preparing their return and setting realistic expectations. But also, back in the “home country”, most returnees judge their current economic, social and political living situation as bad, meeting little of the expectations that they set before they returned. The participants consider the support they received through the NGOs' return programmes as minimal, because they are mostly limited to a small amount of financial support, and thus of little significance in these returnees' efforts to rebuild their lives in their “home” country. If return programmes want to make a difference in returnees' lives, they should have two extensive components in the “home” and the “host” country, incorporating in both components an integral approach, including economic, political, social and psychological aspects. Viewing these findings, it is not surprising that most interviewees eventually evaluate their return as unsuccessful, and many returnees consider re‐emigration, all of which clearly questions the current basis of worldwide migration policies.     

Hakk or Right: A Veblenian Narration of the Differences between the Justice Notions in Western Europe and Turkey

Using Veblen's status emulation theory in the background, but essentially engaged in theoretical debates on the transition to capitalism and modernity, this paper attempts to provide a comparative account of different forms of domination in Western European feudal society and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, an individualistic representation of reality gained prevalence in social conflicts in Western Europe, precisely because forms of exploitation associated with European serfdom were far more severe and un‐tempered than was true for the Ottoman Empire. Due to being short of a legitimate claim to genuine nobility, Western European feudal aristocracy was driven into an insatiable hunger for luxury and waste. In the absence of a powerful central authority, members of this class “turned inward” for their ever‐increasing exploits and waged war against their servants, living and working under their private jurisdictions. The peasants, both free and serf, not only revolted repeatedly, but also ran into the cities to have “fairly secure property rights” so that they would be “the lord” or “dominus” of their own lives and morality. Out of this, a new justice notion had grown, that of natural rights law, which equated all human individuals within one single concern, that of “the right to self‐preservation,” eventually dragging the whole social fabric into heightened self‐centeredness. The Ottoman ruling class could not turn inward and wage an open class war against its servants. This was the land of peace, dar‐al Islam. All people, Muslim and non‐Muslim lived, or were supposed to live, in peace and harmony under the supreme order of Hakk. The transition to an individualistic justice notion along the lines of natural rights law was on the whole clogged in Turkey.