Feeling Imagined Spaces: Emotional Geographies in the EU-Turkey Relations.

• Author: Karamik, Irem

Introduction

Boundaries are spatial imaginations to which communities attribute sentimental meaning and which they regulate through mechanisms of border control. Since 2010, with the increase in interstate and intrastate conflicts and extraordinary circumstances such as global pandemics and migration flows, the necessity to identify boundaries has increased, which in turn has caused states to reimagine the mechanisms of regulating borders and movement across borders. (1) In the case of European Union (EU) -Turkey relations, both actors entered into such new considerations in their partnership due to the massive migration influx triggered by instabilities, especially in Syria and Afghanistan. As a result, the academic literature has taken up such issues from various angles concerning spatiality. However, less attention has been paid to the emotions embedded within the spatiality in EU-Turkey relations. For this reason, this paper attempts to shed light on the creation of emotional geographies, especially in the form of hot places, throughout the extensive relationship between the EU and Turkey.

The concept of "emotional geographies" is a relatively new addendum to the literature on spatiality. (2) Overall, the interlink between emotions and International Relations has been an increasingly important subject since the early 2000s, often referred to as "the emotional turn in IR". (3) Following the work of Crawford, emotions started to seep into the realm of IR, while they had been a key issue in psychology for a long time. (4) With later works building on Crawford's study, leaders, their emotions, and how they trigger and represent collective emotions became a matter of importance in the discipline. In the last decade, with the works of Koschut and his colleagues, the study of emotions became more methodologically reflected, in particular elaborating an "emotion discourse analysis". (5)

From the perspective of collective emotions, which are taken as a reference point in this study, as Zembylas and Ahmed argue, emotions are a highly significant part of how people create communities and relate to one another. (6) (7) Moreover, Zembylas discusses how people's encounters with each other construct certain boundaries both cognitively and physically. (8) Space is an open area that is yet to be defined and the place is a defined version. Place is a part of a space with a given meaning, identity and characteristics. In the article, we reveal how spaces are turned into places through feelings attributed to them. These spaces can be constructed through emotions like joy, pride, pleasure, and admiration as a result of a victory, or they can be a result of fear, anger, humiliation, hatred, and anxiety in the form of collective trauma. In the latter case, Volkan refers to these places as "hot places" in which emotional luggage from a collective trauma is transferred to a physical space. (9) It is one of the main aims of this paper to explore and deepen this concept and discuss exemplary cases within EU-Turkey relations.

This article argues that emotions are salient factors in the imagination of spaces. Consequently, among other emotions, we focus specifically on trauma-related, negative, and collective emotions and argue that "hot places" define the related spatial imaginations of a community. To study the hot places in EU-Turkey relations, this paper is organized in accordance with the differing relations during the Cold War (1959-1989), the post-Cold War (1989-2011), and the Syrian Civil War and the Readmission Agreement (2011-2021). To represent each period, the hot places of Kreuzberg (Germany), Cyprus, and Syria are selected as case studies. This analysis contributes to the literature on EU-Turkey relations by proposing a new perspective that bridges the literature on trauma, emotions, and spatial imaginations. In addition, we contribute to the literature on emotions in IR through highlighting how bilateral relations such as EU-Turkey relations are affected by emotionally imagined spaces.

The Concept of Emotional Geographies

The two key issues for this article are emotional geographies and the concept of hot places. The study of spatial imaginations follows the footsteps of social constructivism and critical security studies, which are rooted in the early 1990s. Based on the spatial imaginations literature, emotional geographies studies started to develop, especially since the early 2010s.

With the rise of social constructivist approaches, mainstream International Relations theories and understandings about geopolitics, migration, and borders started to evolve. Gaddis and Ruggie are leading scholars who contributed to the development of spatiality in the field, and thus contributed to this evolution. (10) (11) Gaddis applied spatiality to post-Cold War global politics and human behavior, whereas Ruggie coined the term "spatial extension" when discussing territoriality. In addition, Adler built on Anderson's "imagined communities" in his concept of "cognitive regions". (12) Thus, in contrast to mainstream understandings of territoriality and space, their linkage to identities, constructions, and cognitive perceptions started to be prioritized.

Such divergences from mainstream understandings also took place in critical security studies and critical geopolitics. Walker, to illustrate, critically examined the boundaries of "modern political imagination" and how global politics was constructed around "insideoutside" relationships. (13) Focusing on geopolitics, Albert and Brock suggested alternative ways of linking postmodernity and spatiality. (14) Following this line of thinking, Tuathail contributed a seminal piece on geopolitics and postmodernity, in which he argued that the conventional wisdom that perceived the world made up of "spatial blocks" was no longer valid. (15) He referred to Agnew and Corbridge to highlight how "spatial practices" and "representations of space" should be differentiated. (16) Building on such conceptual frameworks, Tuathail offered the concept of "postmodern geopolitics" to suggest how global, glocal, and flexible current geopolitical imaginations are.

Emotional Geographies

The term "emotional geographies" was first used by Hargreaves, a leading scholar in the field of education, with the following definition:

"the spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in" human interactions and relationships that help create, configure and color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our world and each other." (17) According to Hargreaves, emotional geographies had been underemphasized in International Relations and Political Science. Ahmed studied the "cultural politics of emotion" in a similar fashion to observe how people form attachments to certain spatial creations and places. (18) As an additional point, Davidson et al. argue that emotional geographies must take into account people's "emotional involvements" with other people and places. (19) Bridged with the "modernity" literature, Ahmed's references to people's attachment relates to the concepts of "detachment" and "deterritorialization", which are embedded in Bauman's "liquid modernity". (20) Thus, people's mobilities are studied in tandem with several concepts, especially spatiality, territory, attachment, and modernity.

As in the cases of Kreuzberg, Cyprus, and Syria, people migrate from one place to another and create new attachments, both to the place and the people living there. People's emotional involvements change as they migrate between different places, from Turkey to Europe, which creates a process of attachment-detachment and deterritorialization. Encapsulated in Bauman's (1999) liquid modernity, the migration processes involved in these cases reveal how they are closely associated with emotions. (21)

As Smith et al. argue, the concept of emotional geographies is needed in geographical thinking because it provides a sense of how people re-write and reproduce different geographies. (22) Such reproduction occurs in the field of migration. For instance, a seminal work by Boccagni and Baldassar argues that the most common emotion in migration is ambivalence between the homeland and the host country. (23) An earlier seminal work by Svasek outlines how emotions are complex in terms of migratory processes. (24) For instance, the author argues that an unfriendly environment may trigger emotions of belonging, whereas a positive environment may increase migrants' bonding with new people in the host country. As Boccagni and Baldassar state, the migratory movement works as a vigorous catalyst in the emotional state for both the receiving countries' citizens and the refugees/asylum seekers. (25) Physical movement is not independent of emotional movement: they are co-constitutive. Hugo reports that negative attitudes and any emotions of threat and exclusion may be cognitively based on misperceptions or misinterpretations. (26) Sakiz highlights the lack of a common sphere for communication and interaction between the newcomers and the original settlers to ameliorate misperceptions and prejudice since refugees are forced to live with other refugees in spatially confined territories. (27) From an overall point of view, today, spaces have become a much more complex issue bringing together multiple disciplines. However, regarding these concepts, not much attention has been given to emotions and especially trauma-related attributions.

The concept of Hot Places

We argue that in each of our analytical phases, a specific hot place as an emotional geography is negatively reminiscent of EU-Turkey relations, loaded with emotions, and transferred into a physical space. (28) Firstly, We opt for employing the concept of hot places to deepen and engraft this concept into the broader literature of emotional geographies. Secondly, these selected cases do not embed any emotions that result from mundane events but...