The Copenhagen Syndrome in Turkish foreign policy
by
EYÜP ERSOY*

 I call it the Copenhagen Syndrome since it was most obviously associated with the phrase the “Copenhagen Criteria,” which was once in vogue in the official and popular foreign policy discourses in Turkey.

It should be emphasized here that I do not question Turkey’s relations with the EU nor its membership thereto but am attempting to diagnose an idiosyncratic mindset of Turkish foreign policy that, as the mainstream arbiter of Turkish foreign policy discourse and practice in the recent past, has produced a general, pervasive and equally perverted understanding of foreign policy.

The Copenhagen Syndrome is symptomatic of a foreign policy mindset characterized by a chronic interplay of fear and desire. There is the fear of losing an unrealized and idealized existential condition assumed to be incarnated by the EU, of encirclement by repulsive, untrustworthy and frequently hostile internal and external actors and circumstances assumed antithetical to this existential condition, and of losing touch with this existential condition. The desire is a myopic and obsessive desire for sustaining a relationship with the embodiment of this existential condition, no matter how this presumed embodiment may be subordinative, prejudicial and erratic in its relations with Turkey. The salient outcome of this chronic interplay of fear and desire is the consequential loss of the will to define Turkey, realizing Turkey’s existential condition and conducting Turkish foreign policy on originally Turkish terms.

An excessive and exclusive interest

The Copenhagen Syndrome has not exhibited much interest in the particularities of the relevant accession criteria or the intricacies in their implementation since they are obviously contingent constructions of the EU as an international organization. Instead, it has exhibited an excessive and exclusive interest in their presumed ideals, in a platonic sense, that are assumed to constitute reality -- l’ésprit of Europe as the ideal mode and space of secure, affluent and meaningful existence. As a result, Turkish foreign policy is construed as an instrument in the campaign to reach that existence, and thus the Copenhagen Syndrome up until recently has not only (mis)guided Turkey’s relations with the EU but conditioned overall Turkish foreign policy in general.

Not necessarily being rational, based on sensible deliberations and calculations, this peculiar rationalization of foreign policy is dependent on certain geopolitical, ideational and temporal premises that are most illuminatingly manifested in the discursive practices of the Copenhagen Syndrome. The prevalent metaphor, that is, the EU Train (Avrupa Treni), which used to be commonly invoked in official and non-official foreign policy discourses alike, is indicative of these premises. According to this metaphorical expression, Turkey, both as a state and as a nation, is situated on the geopolitical periphery of the EU since it is distanced from the core and has to approximate it; Turkey is a backward pursuer of a superior civilization since the train is assumed to represent the highest political, economic and social order in the world; and Turkey is historically behind the EU since there is a temporal distance that Turkey has to pass through rapidly and “catch up” to the train before it is too “late.”

The Copenhagen Syndrome represents an irrational, obsessive-compulsive foreign policy mentality with several symptoms such as an obsession to impulsively perform all political, economic and legal acts demanded on the path to the Promised Land with an associated sense of ressentiment as at times these acts, assumed to not be self-centric but sacrificial, were not welcomed with providence. Another symptom is an embedded aversion to conducting diplomacy, and even business, in regions, and with peoples thereof, assumed to represent all the perils and vices of being a non-Western country and people. Yet another one is a suppressed anxiety that has sporadically manifested itself in vindictive discursive attitudes towards the Turkish public which is alleged to be culpable for the obstacles that would not have been encountered in Turkey’s European vocation, once it was taken as a conspicuous fact, if it would have been more willing to become less traditional, conservative and religious.

Of note, one strange semiotic expression of the Copenhagen Syndrome is the blue bar on the left side of the license plates in Turkey, which does not have the 12 stars that mark their counterparts in the EU. Whether officially mandated or not, these star-less blue bars seem to represent the conviction that Turkey is a part of Europe, albeit partially.

This idiosyncratic foreign policy mindset used to operate on a material background that seems to have stimulated its symptoms in foreign policy discourse and practice. This material context was characterized by a chaotic political system, chronic economic problems and acute anxiety crises about the future of the country. Amidst flying constitutions exchanged between high-level politicians, inflation rates flying higher than the moon and hopes about a sustainable future flying away, the ultimate objective of the Copenhagen Syndrome was to realize that idealized existential condition, and to seek refuge therein. This quest has taken place in an overly obsessive love-hate relationship with the embodiment of this existential condition in order to escape once and for all a Demirelian state of nature, with its two ordering principles of instability and insecurity, with Turkey’s eventual membership in the EU. However, in its sanguine attempt for a social construction of a certain reality, the Copenhagen Syndrome has eventually culminated in a social perversion of an uncertain reality.

As a corollary, it was not surprising that each and every sentence of the Copenhagen Syndrome used to start with AB (Avrupa Birliği [European Union]), stop there and never pass to C or D or E or any other possibility and potentiality of meaningful thought, action and existence in Turkish foreign policy.

This certain foreign policy creed has three intertwined missions: its modernizing mission of transforming Turkey’s politics through, for example, imprudent and incessant imitations without diligent consideration of the nature and the characteristics of samples imitated; its developing mission of integrating Turkey’s economy to the advanced, industrial Western Europe in utter disregard, for example, of reciprocity and countermeasures against adverse consequences of structural economic change; and its civilizing mission of identity transplantation through foreign policy. Nonetheless, this certain foreign policy creed has been of no avail to find a secure, affluent and meaningful existence in the fictional EU nor in the factual EU. This symptomatic foreign policy mindset is now being superseded by a novel foreign policy mentality, which has ironically realized to a large extent the dreams of the Copenhagen Syndrome by, for example, extracting a specific date from the EU on Dec. 17, 2004, for the start of accession negotiations, not in a Habermasian “ideal speech situation” though.

My remedy to treat most of the syndromes in Turkish foreign policy thinking, including the vanishing Copenhagen Syndrome, is simple, and I intend to discuss it in detail in another op-ed article. Suffice it to say here that the axis of Turkish foreign policy ought to be reinterpreted not in horizontal, geographical terms but in vertical, historical terms. Analogous to the Earth revolving on its axis constituted by two poles, south and north, Turkish foreign policy ought to be construed as it revolves on its axis constituted by two poles, Turkey’s past and Turkey’s future.