"I Thank Greece for Being Our European Shield": Von Der Leyen Commission's Spatial Imaginations during the Turkish-Greek Border Crisis in March 2020.

• Author: Turkes-Kilic, Selin

This study focuses on the spatal imaginatons of the European Commission's response to the Turkish-Greek border crisis in March 2020. The goal is to unpack the discursive dynamics of space using a critcal geopolitcal perspectve that treats space as a constructed social category. To that end, the Commission's ofcial statements and policies on the crisis are deconstructed in terms of territoriality, securitzaton, and identty. The artcle advances the argument that increased politcal pressure and the infux of refugees from Turkey triggered a refex reserved for naton-states, resultng in the European Union fexing its geopolitcal muscles. In these practces, Turkey has served as the consttutve other of European space by representng the outside, insecure, and distant.

Keywords: Migraton, Critcal Geopolitcs, Pazarkule, Space, Identty

Introduction

Thousands of refugees (1) approached the Greek border seeking to access the European space after Turkish authorities announced (2) on February 27, 2020, that the country's borders with the European Union (EU) would be opened for passage. This was the largest migration flow to Europe since a deal was struck on March 18, 2016, in which Turkey had agreed to control irregular border crossings to Greek islands in exchange for financial and political benefits from the EU. In scenes reminiscent of the 2015 mass irregular migration through Turkey's western borders to the EU, the influx of refugees quickly escalated into a border crisis involving Turkey, Greece, and the EU with geopolitical spatial implications.

Upon entering office in 2019, President Ursula von der Leyen presented her team as a "geopolitical Commission." This was a clear indication of the EU's pivot towards geopolitics, as it sought a more strategic position in a world marked by increasing rivalry and decreasing multilateralism. Although the tenets of a geopolitical EU remained unclear, von der Leyen described her vision as follows: "My Commission will not be afraid to speak the language of confidence. But it will be our way, the European way." (3) This, in turn, signaled the Commission's endeavor for stronger coordination among the member states on the EU's external relations along with a reinforcement of collective identity in foreign policy. Given the Commission's limited role in foreign policy, von der Leyen's proposal for a geopolitical Commission is a puzzling task. At this point, understanding how and in what ways the Commission promotes a geopolitical EU appears to be a worthwhile pursuit. This study aims to contribute to this debate by providing a critical perspective on the Commission's geopolitical imaginations and identities through a deconstruction of its visions of space during the March 2020 crisis at the Turkish-Greek border. It seeks to answer how high-level European Commission executives discursively construct European space in response to the refugee influx into Greece following Turkish President Erdogan's announcement to open the Greek-Turkish border, which Turkey was tasked with protecting from irregular crossings under the 2016 EU-Turkey statement.

The analysis follows the spatial turn in International Relations (IR) and employs a critical geopolitical framework that treats space as relational, dynamic, and socially constructed. The language used by political leaders and officials to construct and represent global affairs, including key locations, players, and strategies, (4) serves as the main source for studying actors' imagined spatial positioning and the shifting boundaries accompanying this positioning (5) by producing power relations, identity, and otherness. I have compiled the document corpus by searching for press releases, statements and speeches, and daily news containing the keywords 'Turkey', 'refugee', and 'Greece' on the official website of the European Commission between February and December 2020. A total of 15 official documents of the von der Leyen Commission during and after the border crisis obtained in this manner are scrutinized to reveal how the European Commission reflects on a spatial imagination for the EU by imposing itself forcefully on border and migration control with the Action Plan of support for Greece and the official statements on the crisis. The article argues that increased political pressure and the influx of refugees from Turkey triggered a reflex reserved for nation-states, resulting in the EU flexing its geopolitical muscles. This process is underpinned by three discursive dynamics: hardening of EU borders coupled with construction of an external threat, identity formation to call for European unity, and positioning of Turkey as a neighbor.

The Spatial Turn in IR and Rethinking the European Space

The spatial turn in IR challenges conventionally taken-for-granted concepts of space, borders, and territory. In contrast to conventional IR theories that treat territoriality "as self-evident and unproblematic," critical geopolitical approaches see "space demarcated and constructed for political purposes." (6) The spatial turn's main argument is that space is not a preordained, static, natural category but instead a dynamic web of interactions and interconnections. (7) When recognizing space as a "product of social translation, transformation, and experience," (8) one can consider borders as the result of social and cultural processes that shape territories and their contentious meanings. (9) In this respect, geopolitical space is made through power and constructed through discourse. (10) The critical research agenda then requires the deconstruction of historically embedded results of geopolitical imagination.

With its new forms of areas, regions, and networks, European integration is challenging the traditional Westphalian state, which is assumed to have fixed borders coupled with sovereignty. However, this does not imply that European integration eliminates territorialization. Indeed, the EU is so involved in border control and internal policing that it serves as a vehicle for reterritorialization rather than deterritorialization. (11) The Schengen Agreement, for example, replaces traditional state border controls with EU-style measures such as cross-border police cooperation and mobile surveillance teams. (12) Furthermore, with the establishment of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) (13) in 2004, border and customs management as well as migration administration have become critical tasks for the EU. Von der Leyen presented her "geopolitical Commission" in this context, emphasizing: "We need to strengthen our external borders to allow us to return to a fully functioning Schengen." (14)

As a result, the EU is reconfiguring "hard" territory through border controls and exclusion policies and engaging in a type of spatial production, which is referred to as Fortress Europe. Yet the EU also introduces a more open version of territoriality based on cohesion. The area of values and solidarity aspired to by the EU refers to soft borders with more dynamic territorial implications. The hard and soft border visions of territoriality that unfold in the European integration process imply that territory "is not being erased, but rather re-inscribed in two senses that are in tension." (15)

Territory, as defined by boundaries, is only one dimension of space. At the same time, space is structural in the sense that it is the result of interactions or relationships. (16) Using this approach, the EU's space cannot be narrowed down to its borders but can be conceived of as a domain of its influence to varying degrees. This allows us to see the EU's structural relationship in enlargement and neighborhood policies as constituents of European spatiality. In this manner, the EU's structural space can be visualized as concentric circles, with member states constituting the inner circle (albeit with varying degrees of proximity to the core). Candidate countries would form the second tier of the circle, with the neighborhood policy forming the looser, third tier, given that the enlargement policy, unlike the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), includes membership prospects. Fourth, the third parties who are not part of the EU's enlargement or neighborhood policies would be distributed throughout the outermost circle based on the EU's varying degree of influence over them through bilateral agreements.

Conceptualizing the EU in terms of concentric circles enables us to analytically treat Turkey as a part of European spatiality. Accepted as an official candidate in 1999 and having started accession negotiations in 2005, in the early 2000s Turkey was a country in the second tier of the EU's spatial circles, i.e., the closest category to the member states. However, due to the stalemate in the accession process and the clear divergences in foreign policy preferences, Turkey has moved further away from the core space of the EU, a process acknowledged as de-Europeanization. (17) Analyzing the Commission's construction of a geopolitical space for the EU during the crisis at the Turkish-Greek border enables us to pinpoint its positioning of Turkey in terms of spatial proximity. Because spatial imagining is a practice of inclusion and exclusion reconfiguration, Turkey's spatial positioning in relation to Europe is inextricably linked to the identity dimension.

The Crisis at the Turkish-Greek Border

On March 18, 2016, with the "EU Turkey Statement" parties agreed that irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into the Greek territory would be returned to Turkey as of March 20, and for every Syrian returned to Turkey, another Syrian would be resettled from Turkey to the EU. The EU committed to supporting Turkey financially in the management of the settlement of Syrians with a total of 6 billion Euros through the Facility for Refugees in Turkey (FRT). (18) The deal enabled the EU to externalize the management of the migration crisis and extraterritorialize the "burden"...