The Border is not the End - The geostrategies of the European Council, the European Commission and the European Parliament towards the Turkish border

Abstract

When it comes to Turkey, facts show that sometimes the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament have preferred other forms of cooperation along with accession. These have entailed different approaches towards the border’s management. This thesis aims to study what these different approaches are. In fulfilling this aim, William Walters’ geostrategical framework (2004) lays the theoretical foundations for this research. In his framework, each way of organising the border corresponds to the application of a certain geostrategy. Each geostrategy touches upon the border’s spatiality, its temporality, the type of function that it is supposed to achieve, and the perception that the EU institutions have of the “inside” (i.e., themselves) and the “outside” (i.e., in this case Turkey). The method of directed content analysis is applied over a selection of documents issued by the three analysed institutions to see what their geostrategical preferences are. The coding frame is constructed deductively, deriving from Walters’ framework. The chosen timeframe of analysis is 2004-2015. Results show that all of these institutions privileged Turkey’s candidacy status over any other forms of cooperations. However, other ways of approaching the border’s management are also present. Nonetheless, there are not dramatic variations in their preferences when the results are compared between institutions, nor between periods of time. Walters’ framework is also inductively developed, as the existence of one new geostrategy is found.