Enacting the International/Reproducing Eurocentrism

Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2019

Re-writing international relations: history and theory beyond eurocentrism in Turkey by Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, 128 pp., £24.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781783487844

2018

International relations (IR) scholarship rests on a conception of ‘the international’ based on the experiences of core actors. A burgeoning literature has asked what IR would look like if non-core actors’ conceptions of ‘the international’ were also considered. This article analyzes conceptions of ‘the international’ in Turkey as an example of a non-core context. In doing this, the article develops and offers a new analytical framework which breaks down the components of conceptions of ‘the international’ into three questions: ‘what’, ‘who’, and ‘where’ of world politics – namely, the main dynamics of world politics, the main actors of world politics, and the location where world politics takes place. I utilize this framework to empirically analyze the election manifestos and party programs of the political parties in Turkey, and tease out their conceptions of ‘the international.’ The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for IR scholarship in general.

Review of International Studies, 2021

The study of Eurocentrism has become a hallmark of postcolonial International Relations theories. Of particular concern in this literature has been the resilience of Eurocentrism despite conscious efforts to move towards a post-Eurocentric understanding of world politics. This study argues that while existing works have highlighted many of the reasons why Eurocentrism persists today, it has not been sufficiently identified and conceptualised. In particular, why some policy actors, who have a vested interest in moving beyond Eurocentrism, inadvertently reproduce Eurocentrism? This article proposes to distinguish between different types of inadvertent reproductions. In particular it highlights rhetorical critique, deconstruction, decentring and dehierarchising, as different ways to critique, inadvertently reproduce and partially modify Eurocentrism. To illustrate this situation, this article looks at Turkey's migration policies and documents how Turkish governing elites have openly claimed the need to upend the Eurocentric order, yet have reproduced it in practice.

In this chapter, our aim is to analyze a group of critical academic stances against Eurocentrism by evaluating their adequacy and relevance, together with a discussion on the possibility of a new form of critique. Eurocentrism has been criticized from diverse angles. Yet, many critiques have hardly managed to go beyond what they aimed to do. In other words, the critiques of Eurocentrism generally reproduce discourses of centrism and/or operate from within the axis of East and West. Against Eurocentrism, some counter-positions have been established by replacing the discursive element of " Europe " with another form of centrism based on geography, religion, ethnic identity, or region, such as Afrocentrism, Islamic fundamentalism, or versions of ethnocentrism. It is true that the latter constitutes a less hegemonic and all-encompassing influence compared to Eurocentrism; however, they all rely on a similar " centrist " perspective, and in that way they use the same equation with different variables. In this sense, some of the critiques of Eurocentrism operate within the same " centrist " agenda and thus are equally problematic. Another aspect of these critiques, we believe, is that they fail to reach beyond the terrain occupied by the fundamental East/West binary opposition. It is essential to ask to what extent these critiques and contra-narratives can help us to denaturalize, deconstruct, and to think and act beyond Eurocentrism. In this article we aim to criticize the critiques of Eurocentrism that are based on binary oppositions and the similar " centric " paradigm, and argue for the necessity to construct a new kind of critique. The first point of criticism can be expressed as follows: responding to one centrism with another form of centrism or essentialism with another version of essentialism is not only insufficient but also problematic. The second point of criticism relates to imagining a homogeneous Europe and basing arguments on such ground. Europe can hardly be conceived of as a consistent and homogeneous entity created by a single linear history. On the contrary, the idea of Europe cannot be imagined independent from its internal differences. Moreover, it would again be reductionist to assume the existence of a Europe that has a homogenizing effect on whatever it touches. It is always necessary to take the role of more complex identities and cultural differences into account by thinking beyond

2008

Conventional accounts of Eurocentrism tend not to recognise their own Eurocentricity. Critical theory mitigates this lack of historical reflexivity by disclosing the deep structures of Eurocentrism in the modern tradition of political and social theory and in the forms of modern social relations and social formation. 'Eurocentrism' tends to express negative judgements about the world and its representation from the perspective of civil sociality and its sense of commutative justice, and to point to distorted distributions of modem goods. That perspective is treated here as the ideologeme which provides the conceptual framework of the Eurocentric, 'Modem Imaginary'. This ideologeme it establishes the forms of civil sociality as transhistorical, universals. It also operates as an empirico-transcendent doublet, generating the tradition's contradictory and antinomial categorical structure. The Eurocentric nature of this contradictory structure is disclosed in terms o...

At the forefront of the bourgeoning field of International Historical Sociology has been the effort to overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history. This review article reconsiders the issue of Eurocentrism by critically engaging with Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule, which is the most recent and arguably one of the most sophisticated contributions to the anti-Eurocentric turn in International Relations. How the West Came to Rule provides a critique of Eurocentrism through a systematic inquiry into the question of the origin of capitalism. Despite its originality, I argue that the book remains hamstrung by a number of methodological issues, which ultimately undermine the authors’ effort to go beyond the existing literature on Eurocentrism and provide a truly non-hierarchical international historical sociology. A clear specification of these problems, which haunt most anti-Eurocentric approaches to IR, provides us with the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history.

International Relations, 2013

This article introduces a novel conceptual/analytical framework to Europeanization studies. Its main aims are twofold: first, it problematizes the mainstream usage of the term Europeanization, and the notion of change that it has embraced, and second, it develops a fuller account of the impact of European integration on societies. An analytical distinction is drawn between EU-ization as a formal process of alignment with the EU’s body of law and institutions, and Europeanization as a wider sociopolitical and normative context. The impact of Europeanization in a given society is heavily conditioned by the extent and the ways in which Europe is used as a context by domestic actors. To substantiate its arguments, the article focuses on the Turkish case, where Europeanization as a normative–political context has extensively been implicated in its modernization and nation-building processes as well as in recent domestic debates concerning the country’s identity and future orientation.

New Perspectives on Turkey, 2009

The European public debate on Turkey’s EU accession either empha- sizes Turkey’s political (in)competence for EU membership, or marks its cultural difference. Based on the discourse analysis of this debate in the German mass media, this paper questions the dominant European perspective, by placing emphasis on how and where the symbolic borders of an imagined Europe become visible. I will argue that the debate sur- rounding Turkey’s accession to the EU reveals an ambivalent discursive process as it places the construction of the self-definition of Europe at the frontier of its Turkish-Islamic “Other.”

At the forefront of the bourgeoning field of International Historical Sociology has been the effort to overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history. This review article reconsiders the issue of Eurocentrism by critically engaging with Alex Anievas and Kerem Nı̇ şancioğlu's How the West Came to Rule, which is the most recent and arguably one of the most sophisticated contributions to the anti-Eurocentric turn in International Relations. How the West Came to Rule provides a critique of Eurocentrism through a systematic inquiry into the question of the origin of capitalism. Despite its originality, I argue that the book remains hamstrung by a number of methodological issues, which ultimately undermine the authors' effort to go beyond the existing literature on Eurocentrism and provide a truly non-hierarchical international historical sociology. A clear specification of these problems, which haunt most anti-Eurocentric approaches to IR, provides us with the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history.

METU Studies in Development, 2014

During the last thirty years of rescaling/restructuring processes in Turkey, the neoliberal hegemony remained mostly unchallenged and enjoyed an ideological dominance while the peripheral capitalist social relations underwent a process of substantial socio-spatial transformation. However, this reflects an unstable equilibrium between classes, since the production and transformation of the social space is a dynamic and contested process, rather than a simple process of subordination to the neoliberal capitalist socio-spatial conditions. In that context, this study identifies peripheral capitalist spaces -conditioned by the contemporary neoliberal reterritorialisation-as the possible sites of intensifying capitalist tensions ready to be unclogged by an autogestional momentum. This paper defines Turkey as one of the capitalist zones of weakness in which the contradictions of the neoliberal processes of intensification and extension started to generate 'spaces of difference or differential spaces'. The rapid neoliberal re-scaling of Turkey was in fact a process of reproduction of the uneven development of the capitalist space in a different formexport-oriented industrial development-which became the main pillar of the neoliberal hegemonic consensus. The recent increase in the social movements and resistances such as the TEKEL 1 workers' struggle and the Gezi Park resistance should be analysed within this context and therefore should be identified as the possible sites of counter-hegemonic struggle where the weak points of the capitalist state power and neoliberal hegemony can be culminated into a moment of autogestion. It is possible to argue that these social struggles and particularly the TEKEL struggle and Gezi Park resistance demonstrated significant practices of self-management and solidarity by using the public space both as 'the site and stake' of the struggle, and this paper will discuss the potentials and limits of these socio-spatial movements in terms of the autogestional strategy of finding the fertile cracks in the neoliberal hegemony for the creation of the autogestional practices.