Emotions in the Foreign Policy of Turkey towards the European Union

Within the last 20-years, Turkish Foreign Policy in relation to Europe has undergone two major transformations in almost opposite directions: first a rapid rapprochement (2002-2007) and then a steep deterioration (2008-2019).

EMOFORTE aims to achieve a profound understanding of the political and social conditions which made these policy transformations possible by studying both the dominant and dissident foreign policy discourses of Turkish political elites (i.e. the politicians, parliamentarians, party officials, and bureaucrats) in terms of emotions materialised in identity discourses and in the narratives of Europe.

EMOFORTE will compare the periods of rapprochement and deterioration by focusing on emotions as discursive elements significant for contesting and changing national identity constructions and narratives of Europe as the Other of Turkish national identity.

It will include an ideological dimension to its comparative approach by studying similarities and differences in the rhetorical uses of emotions in the foreign policy discourses of the actors concerned from a wide ideological spectrum (far right to far left).

With the help of this two-dimensional comparative method, it will also contribute to academic research on the current phenomenon of rising populism in Europe by working on the emotional component of populist discourses in Turkish politics.

EMOFORTE will be conducted at University of Navarra (Spain), with secondments at Lund University (Sweden) and University of Essex (UK).

Through trainings and close mentoring of the supervisors, it will equip the researcher with enhanced knowledge in emotion studies and with new skills in the new interdisciplinary methodological approaches and applications concerning the Big Data in social sciences, corpus linguistics, corpus-based discourse analysis and post-structural discourse analysis and, thereby, it will open up new career prospects in her subject-area of international relations.