Architectures of Similarity: Fragments, Islands and other Escapes from the Turkey and Europe Framework.

• Author: Najslova, Lucia

Introduction

International Relations (IR) scholarship on Turkey and the European Union (EU) has mostly moved within the framework of difference demarcated by the borders of modern nation states. Narratives about their relations thus rely on containers of political, social or cultural spaces, often so simplified that they seem almost homogenous. This is to an extent a product of the state-centric approach of IR as a field, but even the more recent studies paying attention to non-state actors and transnational phenomena cannot escape the limits of national belongings. It is almost an imperative to use the phrase 'EU and Turkey' and thus reify a dividing line each time one tries to discuss events and processes in their map. The IR debates, though, show an awareness of the multiplicity of divisions--it is one thing to say 'Turkey is not an EU member' and quite another to declare that 'Turkey is not European.' And yet these two statements often go hand-in-hand, with non-Europeanness offered as a justification of non-membership, something really tiring for many long-term students of the relationship. Of course, cracks have been pointed out in such simplified narratives of differentiation. Bahar Rumelili placed liminality (in-betweenness) firmly into the essential vocabulary of research on the relationship. (1) Other authors called for escapes from discussing Turkey as a 'unique' case. (2) And while field-defining texts in critical European studies (3) have established that the ambiguous space we call Europe is constituted by a diversity of actors and viewpoints, many of us still find it hard to conceptualize the spaces beyond the container of the nation state.

Bearing in mind that inter-nationally-conceptualized research frameworks no longer have the patent for explaining the world (4) and that not only border practices but also "desires for territorially bounded entity and identity" have already been established as violent, (5) this paper experiments by looking at Turkey-EU spaces through the worldviews of some of their unofficial protagonists. The door for such a pursuit was opened by recent Anthropocene literature (6) and the work done on island studies. (7) Through literature that view fragments and patches as potentially formative, the Turkey-EU space reveals itself to be perhaps surprisingly more connected than it may seem from the results of diplomatic summits. I propose "architectures of similarity" as a conceptual tool that allows us to grasp some of this connectivity. Few themes are so productive for showing architectures of similarity as mobility. It is precisely movement, crossing the (b)order, whether physically or metaphorically, that destabilizes the essentialized and imprecise framing of Turkey and Europe and helps us see inconsistencies in dominant assumptions of difference.

Working at the intersection of IR and anthropology, I invite the reader to think of Turkey and Europe interactions as patchworks of fragmented encounters. The research leading up to this paper started rather conventionally. In a book project on the politics of belonging, (8) I was hoping to present an argument that would deepen mutual understanding between the 'two sides'. Informed by ethnographic moments, interviews with policy-practitioners and surveys of diplomatic archives, I looked for a way of overcoming the trenches. That would, however, still involve taking for granted that there are two parties that can bridge their communication gaps or at least make sense of each other's cacophonies. It was the post-2015 period, when mobility became a central theme in the diplomatic framework of the relationship as well as the interviews and observations of the positionality of NGO actors and volunteers, that helped me see that the fault lines in the many Turkey-EU spaces do not necessarily run only along the national border. In other words, while my research into the EU-Turkey relationship has been originally guided by a policy-oriented search for "making difference work", I encountered instead fragments of commonality across the imaginary (and material) border. IR of course has already moved beyond studying territorially bounded entities. It has done a lot of work in documenting transnational movements and processes. After all, that is the very subject of EU studies. The present essay is not so much focused on general questions of de-territorialized or fluid political authority. (9) It has a modest goal to show that worldmaking does not need to be locked into oppositionality or mirroring. To that end, it offers fragments from below that form miniature architectures of similarity, literal and metaphorical spaces that tick along the same clock, regardless of their respective territorial regime.

In terms of structure, the paper proceeds as follows: the first section discusses the patchiness of European space and the potential of recent Anthropocene literature to reveal new ways for thinking about it. The second section shows how the habit of taking spaces as perennially fixed (10) limits our understanding of variety of practices in the many Turkey-EU relations. The penultimate section then builds on experience of islands (people, aid workers and volunteers) who question the border regime. Their very existence disturbs the routine explanations of politics within an inter-national framework. Moreover, as Anthropocene scholars have shown, binaries such as same/different, Turkish/European, member/partner, while still guiding the dominant policy frameworks, are receiving new intellectual competitors. I thus conclude with an examination of the possibilities of connectivity in this new era. Focusing on similarity then neither erases nor replaces analytics of difference--it rather offers new vantage points for seeing the many relations in the EU-Turkey cosmos.

Experimenting with Patchworks, Noticing Architectures

Before delving deeper into Euro-Turkish territorial waters, let us spend a few paragraphs in the open seas. The growing complexity of cross-border flows and the emergence of a higher number of significant non-state actors have rendered earlier IR approaches, in which the main protagonists were the states and their organizations, to be simply one way of writing about international politics, not anymore the only proper way. (11) This complexity has also dethroned another staple of IR writing--that of an omniscient narrator speaking to (and about) some imaginary collective 'we'. (12) All-encompassing narratives have become increasingly insufficient tools for explaining world events and relations. This may sound counter-intuitive, as the world is now uniquely connected with air, water and road corridors and various webs of knowledge including the one with the patented trademark. Yet the world does not flow evenly, does not always move in synchronized waves or linear trajectories; instead it happens in patches, or stories, as Anna Tsing and others have argued convincingly. (13) The realization of the fragility of big narratives has led scholars to venture in various directions--from declaring the "death of hope" (14) to closer engagement with non-human elements and infrastructures, such as in the unique digital collection presented by the authors of the Feral Atlas. (15) Regardless of their position on human agency, the newer approaches to studying the inter-national tend to share interest in the micro-workings of temporality and spatiality. Experimenting with complexity thinking might be disorienting and leave many loose ends. It can also provide new vistas.

A keyword that attracts researchers who have noticed this complexity is Anthropocene, a term originally proposed to label a post-Holocene epoch, in which humans became a major geological force. Yet it opens many other discussions beyond those on irreversible environmental damage. The environment has for long enjoyed only a marginal role in IR conferences and publications. (16) When it eventually became a more notable subject, IR still struggled with the question of the boundaries of community. Climate change seemed to be predominantly a crisis that 'we' either can or cannot resolve together--yet environmental degradation enters human space-times with different intensity, and it is often those who have the least power to shape global relations that are the most impacted. (17) The knowledge brought under the Anthropocene keyword then puts into the spotlight the pluriverse of communities and relations. As a recent review of IR thinking on the topic put it: "disagreement prevails over who needs to be secured and by whom". (18) It is perhaps paradoxical that this pluriverse comes to the forefront at a time when a common and united action is requested. The intellectual invitation of the Anthropocene is to grasp this ambivalence. Or, as Bruno Latour put it: "We have problems, but we do don't have the publics that go with them." (19) The Anthropocene discussions are as much about knowledge and capacity and willingness to understand the other as they are about the physical state of the environment. (20) This is precisely what makes the Anthropocene literature a helpful guide in exploring the less walked paths in structuring our knowledge about the Turkey/Europe spaces or worlds.

The Anthropocene invitation has of course wider ramifications for understanding of international (b)orders. It is probably a truism to note that the UN summits addressing environment have so far brought only modest outcomes, and so have those that discuss mobility--a matter both related and similar. Such summits happen as negotiations between states, and the conflict is often reported between individual states, but also groups, such as East/West, South/North, industrialized/developing, or, in terms of migration, "countries of origin" and host countries. And while what states say and do matters, methodological nationalism constrains one to a framework of competitive differentiation, shadowing or echoing...