II. Conceptualising the Nexus between Geopolitical Othering and EU Enlargement in the New Geopolitical Era

The notions of Europe and E(U)ropean identity are highly contested and abstruse in geographical, cultural and political terms. In this context, thick-critical constructivist International Relations (IR) literature underscores that collective identities and meaningful identity categories, including those pertaining to Europe, discursively take shape in relation to difference. Collective identity formation thereby transpires as a process that defines other identities and marks them as different.Footnote ²⁸ Without practices of “Othering” that distinguish the collective Self from the “Other,” and with the Self viewed in a vacuum, group identities – European identity included – would tend to diffuse. This would hinder political communities from achieving internal coherence regarding the adoption of common policies, also in relation to their external interactions with other significant actors.Footnote ²⁹ Although a vast body of research exists on the close bond between Othering and European identity constructions,Footnote ³⁰ the constructivist IR scholarship remains inconclusive as to what Othering exactly entails in the EU’s relations with external actors and the different modes of Othering.

Varying answers to questions concerning Othering offer different insights into the differentiated understandings of the European integration process. Specifically, they provide clues as to whether the European integration has been predominantly driven by “postmodern” traits, as initially elaborated by Ruggie.Footnote ³¹ Such Othering largely relies on inclusive practices that transform external Others and provide “a vista of alternative horizons” for both the Self and the Other in transnational contexts.Footnote ³² Conversely, a different reading of Othering could pinpoint the EU’s manifestation as a “Westphalian” or “modern” collectivity engaging in security- and threat-centred modes of differentiation from the outside.Footnote ³³ An EU founded on the principle of modern sovereign statehood would tend to favour exclusive territoriality, strong spatial delimitation, and alternative frameworks of non-membership in its relations with its significant Others. Then again, an anti-statist interpretation of the EU’s Otherings may highlight the liminality and hybridity of such practices, situating the EU’s external Others in “liminal partly-Self/partly-Other positions.”Footnote ³⁴ While hybrid conceptualisations of Othering practices tend to offer a more true-to-life reading of EU external action steered by the dual strategy of “the EU-isation of the neighbourhood through approximation of norms and the defence of its rational self-interests,”Footnote ³⁵ the construction of ideal types of Othering helps us identify the shifts and continuities in the EU’s relations with third countries.

In his seminal work “Europe’s Others and the Return of Geopolitics,” Thomas Diez makes a resounding distinction between temporal and geopolitical forms of Othering.Footnote ³⁶ Diez argues that self-reflexive, temporal types of Othering, including those concerning the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC), relate Europe’s Other(s) to Europe’s own (war-torn) past. The self-reflexivity of temporal Othering makes this exclusionary practice more fluid, flexible, and open to change, as it largely perceives Europe’s own past as a threat. It was in this context that various policy actors in the EU justified their support for the accession of the CEEC, “the kidnapped West,” by discursively associating the Eastern enlargement with the EU’s “kinship-based duty” to commit to “a shared destiny” with Eastern Europe.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, although the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Europe’s division by the Iron Curtain prompted the EU to strengthen the normative aspects of its identity constructs through the 1993 Copenhagen criteria for accession, the logic of temporal Othering took precedence over purely normative considerations during the process of Eastern Enlargement.Footnote ³⁸ Existing research highlights the absence of such ethical justifications driven by considerations of temporality and kinship about Turkey’s EU accession.Footnote ³⁹

The other side of the coin concerns the geopolitical type of Othering, depicting the outside (group) as an existential threat to the inside. Diez argues that in the post-Cold War era, there had been a gradual move from temporal modes of Othering to geopolitical practices of Othering, which set solid boundaries between the European Self and the Other(s) based on a triadic approach in which “identity, politics and geography are intimately linked with each other.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Cold War had linked the European identity to the notion of the West. Its end, coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union, “once a good candidate for Europe’s ‘other’,” and the inception of the CEEC’s (somewhat certain) EU bid in the mid-1990s, prompted concerted attempts to redefine the European identity based on primarily cultural–religious and geographical differentiations.Footnote ⁴¹ Alongside the post-Cold War geopolitical environment, the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, as well as the terrorist attacks in 2004 in Madrid and 2005 in London, heightened the discursive “making of a ‘European’ territory that needs to be secured from the threats of illegal immigration, and in particular from the threats of ‘Islamism’.”Footnote ⁴²

The geopolitical variant of differentiation also became increasingly relevant to European discourses on Turkey and its EU membership. During the Cold War, Turkey’s identity as a Western nation was rarely questioned. Turkey was seen as an essential part of the NATO alliance, which largely defined what it meant to be European. In the new international system of the post-Cold War era, European representations of Turkey underwent continual reshaping within liminal contexts. This dynamic involved a dual approach: on the one hand, there were efforts to integrate Turkey into a broader understanding of European identity based on adherence to universal democratic principles; on the other hand, there were stringent efforts to establish clear boundaries between the EU and Turkey, framing Europe and Asia, as well as the West and Islam, as mutually exclusive social categories.Footnote ⁴³ At the same time, this dual discourse on Turkey’s “Europeanness” began to subside and give way to largely exclusive practices of geopolitical Othering invoking discourses of danger and threat. This trend has been particularly pronounced over the last decade, as it will be illustrated with two case studies. This period is notably characterised by what has been termed “stealth Islamisation” in Turkey – defined as “top-down and incremental changes in social and political life in an increasingly Islamic direction.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Additionally, it marks Turkey’s increasing divergence from EU foreign policy, following a gradual process of Europeanisation in Turkish foreign policy until the early 2010s.Footnote ⁴⁵ This divergence is evident in Turkey’s standing as the candidate country that most notably fails to comply with the High Representative’s statements on the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP). This period also features severe political and societal turmoil in Turkey’s immediate neighbourhood, resulting in important negative externalities for the EU.

Drawing on realpolitik, geopolitical Othering thus engenders a strong nexus between identity and security concerns and attempts to set fixed geographical borders with external Others that are framed as existential threats to the Self that shall not be allowed to trespass Europe’s borders.Footnote ⁴⁶ Geopolitical Otherings instantiated by externalisation of threat (perceptions) tend to be more “more exclusive and antagonistic against out-groups,”Footnote ⁴⁷ making the latter’s inclusion in the inner circle particularly challenging.

At the same time, it is important to emphasise that practices of Othering, including those with a geopolitical dimension, and the construction of European identity do not take place in a vacuum or solely within the discursive space of the Self. They are perpetually influenced and reshaped in an interactive process involving the active agency of the significant Others of the EU. The external agency in Othering pertains to the prevailing representational and discursive debates and practices that give rise to (habitually) alternative articulations of Europe within communities deemed Europe’s significant Others.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the context of geopolitical Othering and EU enlargement, the foreign policy discourses and practices of (potential) candidate countries conflicting with the related statements of the High Representative and other key EU institutions and delineating the EU and its member states as geopolitical rivals and external threats tend to actively contribute to the EU’s discursive construction of robust boundaries with the former. This interactive and dynamic relationship between the EU-centred European Self and the (candidate) Other denotes that certain shifts in the representational and discursive debates, as well as foreign policy practices in candidate countries, which demonstrate a (geo)political rapprochement with the EU and convey a positive view of Europe, hold the potential to foster a “de-othering” rhetoric within EU communities concerning these respective third countries. As such, the concept of geopolitical Othering, while sharing similarities with various variants of securitisation (theory), is notably distinguished from the latter by its specific scope regarding practices of differentiation. While according to the securitisation theory, a wide range of issues (e.g., religion, race, geography, mobility) may be framed as existential threats through speech acts, geopolitical Othering specifically follows an overarching “geopolitical thinking” in the making of representational practices. This geopolitical logic exclusively tackles “objectives or concerns related to territoriality” and includes acts “taken against, or at least decided in consideration of, other powers.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, while securitisation may sometimes encompass practices of geopolitical Othering, it does not always necessarily deal with territorial angst and differentiations.

While the EU enlargement process encompasses both the temporal and geopolitical variants of Othering,Footnote ⁵⁰ geopolitical Othering tends to surpass the EU’s temporal differentiations and dominate the enlargement logic, especially in times of severe external shocks. The enlargement policy unambiguously aims to “foster peace and stability in regions close to the EU’s borders.”Footnote ⁵¹ By doing so, the EU’s enlargement doctrine helps the EU construct its ideal self as a secure, stable, peaceful space, effectively delineating solid boundaries with perceived unstable, conflict-ridden, and threatening outsiders.Footnote ⁵² In consequence, geopolitical thinking and practices of geopolitical Othering have long been an essential constituent of EU enlargement politics, both in rhetoric and practice. This has been particularly evident in the EU’s strategic shifts in its enlargement preferences during times of external shocks, which have had immediate negative externalities for the Union. As a case in point, when the 1999 Kosovo war reinforced Turkey’s role as a central actor in enhancing defence cooperation between NATO and the EU, the European Council granted Turkey candidacy despite its severe shortcomings in political and economic terms.Footnote ⁵³

Geopolitical thinking entered EU enlargement policy more progressively in the late 2010s, specifically in relation to the Western Balkans, which have become a hotspot for power rivalries of non-EU countries, including Russia, China and Turkey.Footnote ⁵⁴ While in 2014, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared a five-year halt to EU accession, sparking a visible distancing of Western Balkans’ full membership prospects, his 2017 State of the Union speech indicated a clear U-turn driven by geopolitical concerns: “… if we want more stability in our neighbourhood, then we must also maintain a credible enlargement perspective for the Western Balkans.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Juncker’s geopolitically informed statement ensured High Representative Federica Mogherini’s well-cited portrayal of the Western Balkans as a potential “chessboard” where “the big power game can be played.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In line with such geopolitical concerns, the 2018 Communication from the European Commission stated: “The Western Balkans are part of Europe, geographically surrounded by EU Member States … prospect of EU membership for the Western Balkans is in the Union’s very own political, security and economic interest. It is a geostrategic investment in a stable, strong and united Europe …”Footnote ⁵⁷

The onset of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 fundamentally strengthened the prominence of geopolitics in European identity constructions. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has not only placed “return to Europe” narratives at the epicentre of the three Eastern Partnership countries’ (Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia) dialogue with the EU, which has become “the locus of resistance” for the former against aggression and instability.Footnote ⁵⁸ It has also amplified the EU’s practices of geopolitical Othering of two interconnected varieties of external actors. On one side, the war prompted the reconstruction of a European territory that needs to be fortified against aggressor states and foreign policy competitors that are perceived to threaten the stability and security of the EU and its (wider) neighbourhood. In this context, the December 2023 Council conclusions on enlargement referred to EU widening as “a geo-strategic investment in peace, security, stability and prosperity,” recalling that “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine shows that enlargement also is a strategic priority.”Footnote ⁵⁹ On the other side, the Ukraine crisis also intensified identity constructs of the EU in relation to its order. In the newly established geopolitical setting, European leaders engaged in practices of differentiation, portraying illiberal and authoritarian regimes and their (international) law violations as existential threats that contest the EU’s liberal democratic order.Footnote ⁶⁰ Accordingly, the EU’s geopolitical Otherings have increasingly incorporated the roles and actions of third countries in the international political system and their influence on the liberal international order. As states’ interactions in the international system take place based on a priori set foreign policy choices, Othering based on geopolitical concerns and preferences thus started to attach great importance to external actors’ foreign policy behaviour in the processes through which “rival” (foreign policy) identities are constructed.

Along these lines, an increasingly geopoliticised European identity and the intensification of the EU’s practices of geopolitical Othering amidst the rise of multipolar contestation of the European order are likely to have a profound impact on the EU’s relationships with EU candidates. Specifically, I hypothesise that the geopolitical rivalries of candidate countries with the EU, as well as their foreign policy choices that result in the EU associating them with particular existential threats, are likely to lead to a discursive dissociation of these countries from the EU accession process. In other words, from the perspective of geopolitical Othering, the geopolitical and foreign policy preferences of candidate countries, as well as their level of alignment with the EU’s CFSP, ought to serve as a litmus test for their “European” identity in this geopolitical era. The article illustrates its theoretical reasoning with two case studies on Turkey, attending to the 2015 migration “crisis” and the ensuing EU–Turkey refugee “deal” and the ongoing crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean with a focus on key developments from 2018 to 2020.

III. EU-Turkey Cooperation on Irregular Migration: A Key Driver of Turkey’s Discursive Dissociation from EU Enlargement through Geopolitical Othering

The transformation of the Syrian refugee crisis from an external crisis into a European crisis in mid-2015, amidst an unprecedented number of irregular arrivals in frontline Member States, transpired as a key milestone in the EU’s relationship with Turkey. The inability of EU Member States to undertake collaborative actions and ease the top-heavy burden placed on frontline Member States with an EU-wide commitment to relocation led to the externalisation of EU border management to Turkey. Since its initiation in 2016 with the EU–Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016, the EU–Turkey refugee “deal” has remained at the epicentre of the EU–Turkey dialogue on sectoral cooperation. The deal largely sought to “outline the contours of a strategic partnership between the EU and Turkey” to curb irregular migration flows to the EU.Footnote ⁶¹ To this end, it approved the rapid readmission and return to Turkey of all migrants irregularly crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands after 20 March 2016. In exchange for Turkey’s commitment to readmission and enhanced border controls, the Statement envisaged Turkey’s obtainment of a wide range of material incentives. These included a total of six billion EUR of financial aid, the acceleration of Turkey’s dialogues with the EU relating to visa liberalisation and Customs Union modernisation, as well as the EU’s commitment to re-energise Turkey’s accession process.Footnote ⁶²

EU–Turkey cooperation on irregular migration can be labelled as a primarily geopolitical undertaking. The deal intersected politics, geography and identity, envisaging the EU’s geographical externalisation of its migration policies through the containment of migrants from certain geographies outside the EU’s physical geography and, mostly, within the confines of Turkey’s physical territory. The deal has been characterised as a functional and transactional arrangement,Footnote ⁶³ and the EU has habitually reaffirmed its interest in continuing and deepening the migration cooperation with Ankara.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the same time, three contextual factors of the migration crisis and the ensuing deal heightened Turkey’s geopolitical Othering by the EU and thereby instigated the management of EU–Turkey relations beyond the traditional boundaries of the EU’s enlargement policy.

Firstly, the EU–Turkey deal engaged in “geopolitical space-making,” referring to “how geopolitical relationships, strategies, and interests conceptualise, create, shape, or influence spaces.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As a spatial-discursive practice of external re-bordering, it contributed to constructing an a priori-defined yet abstruse geopolitical territory outside the EU borders where the refugee Other can “exist in” without posing a direct threat to the European Self. Existing scholarship has demonstrated that the European political discourse about the large-scale irregular immigration from Syria to the EU in 2015 primarily revolved around maintaining the EU’s internal order and security amidst the portrayed threat posed by the refugee Other.Footnote ⁶⁶ The refugee Other allegedly had the potential of becoming a “Trojan horse of Islamist fundamentalism”Footnote ⁶⁷ within the EU borders. Along these lines, the joint statement emphasised the determination to “end the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU” and envisaged a mechanism for resettlement from Turkey to the EU member states through a “voluntary arrangement” up to an exceedingly depleted limit of 72.000 persons.Footnote ⁶⁸ As such, the deal aimed to contain a specific group of people who are perceived to threaten the stability and security of the EU in a discursively constructed geopolitical territory.

The political construction of an external geopolitical space for the refugee Other, which primarily comprised the Turkish territory, propelled Turkey’s (already existing) geopolitical Othering by the EU. Until the refugee crisis and particularly since the early 1990s, the perceived ambiguities over Turkey’s Europeanness largely relied on its geographical location, in the sense that it was not part of Europe, as well as on its culture and religion.Footnote ⁶⁹ The refugee deal furthered such geopolitical practices of Othering vis-à-vis Turkey by adding a new security-spatial dimension to them. Turkey’s designation as an external geopolitical space for the accommodation of the “unwanted” Syrian refugees has not only transformed the Turkish territory into the largest buffer zone between Europe and the unstable Middle East. It has also culminated in European constructions of the Turkish territory as a perceived existential threat to the security and stability of the European order, engendering discursive justifications for Turkey’s exclusion from the accession in-group and from the visa-free travel regime. As such, while Turkey has been assigned to safeguard the stability and security of the European order with the refugee deal, the same arrangement also accelerated its representation as Europe’s geopolitical Other and its discursive dissociation from European integration as exemplified by the statements below:

Secondly, the Turkish government’s habitual instrumentalisation of the refugee deal in its dialogue with the EU to further its foreign policy/domestic politics goals has intensified its perception as an unreliable geopolitical partner and a potential security threat to the stability of the Schengen system throughout the deal’s implementation. The asymmetrical interdependence between the EU and Turkey, which tends to favour Turkey in the management of irregular migration to the EU,Footnote ⁷² coupled with the high-level securitisation of asylum and migration within the EU, – characterised by the discursive portrayal of irregular migration as an existential threat to Europe’s survival – has created a favourable environment for Ankara to employ discursive extortion in its foreign policy dealings with the EU.Footnote ⁷³ Existing research convincingly demonstrates that the securitisation and externalisation of the EU’s migration governance expose inherent vulnerabilities.Footnote ⁷⁴ These vulnerabilities can be strategically exploited by external actors engaged in the management of irregular migration, ultimately serving their own interests. In this context, Turkey habitually threatened to withdraw from the deal by opening its borders to allow Syrian refugees to travel to EU countries. As a case in point, as a reaction to the European Parliament’s non-binding resolution of 24 November 2016 to freeze the accession negotiations with Turkey due to normative concerns, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated: “If you go any further, these border gates will also be opened, you should know this.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Likewise, during an extended period of intergovernmental conflict between Turkey and some EU member states like Germany and Netherlands due to the cancellation of AKP-organized extraterritorial rallies in the run-up to the 2017 constitutional referendum, then Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu signalled a direct link between Turkey’s cooperation with the EU on the management of irregular migration and the pursuit of domestic interests through discursive extortion: “If you want, we could open the way for 15,000 refugees that we don’t send each month and blow the mind (of Europe).”Footnote ⁷⁶

Turkey’s periodic declarations regarding the potential for unilateral withdrawal from the deal were put into actual practice with the temporary opening of its borders with Greece in February 2020. The move came at a time when Turkey’s military operation “Peace Spring,” launched on 9 October 2019 in northern Syria, met with strong discursive criticism of EU institutions and member states.Footnote ⁷⁷ The temporary opening of the Turkish borders with Greece followed President Erdoğan’s discursive threat in October 2019 to release millions of refugees into Europe if the European leaders labelled the military operation as an occupation.Footnote ⁷⁸ Turkey’s unilateral and temporary withdrawal from the deal, coupled with the influx of thousands of Syrian refugees at the Greek border, highlighted Ankara’s conspicuous agency in exacerbating geopolitical tensions with the EU. This situation underscored Turkey’s ability to exploit the EU’s security vulnerabilities, further cementing Turkey’s portrayal as a geopolitical Other by the EU.Footnote ⁷⁹

Turkey’s actions propelled EU politicians’ reliance on realpolitik- and threat-centred modes of differentiation of the European Self from the Turkish Other. As a case in point, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called Turkey’s temporary withdrawal from the deal an “organised attack on Europe.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, Commission President von der Leyen’s statements at a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in March 2020 following Ankara’s provisional opening of its borders indicated the EU’s discursive attempts to set fixed geographical borders with Turkey: “We have come here today to send a very clear statement of European solidarity and support to Greece. Our first priority is making sure that order is maintained at the Greek external border, which is also a European border.”Footnote ⁸¹ Von der Leyen’s statement strictly positioned Turkey beyond European territoriality and consequently outside the internal dimension of European integration, i.e., accession. The European Commission’s immediate mobilisation of Frontex instruments and its tightening of border controls after Turkey opened its Western borders also reinforced the constructs of European spatial identity in relation to Turkey’s and its territory’s categorisation as a threat to Europe’s well-being.Footnote ⁸²

Thirdly, and related to the above-addressed two contextual factors, Turkey’s central role in the maintenance of the geopolitical outer space constructed by the deal, which primarily comprised the Turkish territory, led to its discursive categorisation as a third country and a (conflictual) partner in official EU documents. After the deal, the conclusions of the European Council summits, which set the EU agenda and direction in all important matters, including enlargement and external action, tackled Turkey mostly under the headings “migration” and/or “external relations” and not under “enlargement.”Footnote ⁸³ In these European Council conclusions, the EU reiterated “its commitment to the EU–Turkey statement and underline[d] the importance of a full and non-discriminatory implementation of all aspects”Footnote ⁸⁴ ; underlined that “additional efforts [by Turkey] are needed to fully implement the EU–Turkey Statement, prevent new crossings from Turkey and bring the flows to a halt”Footnote ⁸⁵ ; and called on Turkey to “ensure the full and non-discriminatory implementation of the EU–Turkey Statement of 2016, including vis-à-vis the Republic of Cyprus.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The growing trend among key EU institutions towards discursively designating Turkey as a third country and a neighbour instead of an accession candidate was also true for the European Commission, which became particularly palpable during the Greek–Turkish border crisis in February/March 2020.Footnote ⁸⁷

IV. The 2018–2020 Eastern Mediterranean Crisis: A Critical Milestone in Turkey’s EU Accession Negotiations and its Geopolitical Othering

The Eastern Mediterranean has been historically prone to various interstate conflicts on border issues, in which Turkey has been part. The first one involves the long-standing disagreement between Greece and Turkey over maritime borders, the limits of national airspaces, and some islands or islets in the Aegean with undetermined ownership by international agreements. The two countries even came close to the brink of war on numerous occasions from the mid-1950s to the late 1990s. The rapprochement between Greece and Turkey, driven by the confirmation of Turkey’s EU candidacy at the 1999 Helsinki European Council and the ensuing Europeanisation of Turkish foreign policy,Footnote ⁸⁸ contributed to the partial sidelining of territorial issues in Greek–Turkish relations until recently.

The second conflict centres on the island of Cyprus, which has been divided since the 1974 coup d’état and Turkey’s ensuing military intervention. This division has resulted in a Turkish-administered region known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only recognised by Turkey and the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, hereafter referred to as “Cyprus.” Turkey’s intervention, coupled with the accession of Greece and Cyprus to the EU in 1981 and 2004, respectively, engendered a triangular relationship between the EU, Turkey and Greece/Cyprus steered by the geopolitics of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. On one side, as EU members, Greece and Cyprus have become effective veto players in Turkey’s EU accession process. Cases in point include the Greek veto on the dispersal of EU financial aid to Turkey in the 1980s within the framework of the 1963 Association Agreement and the ongoing unilateral veto of Cyprus on the opening of six chapters in Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU.Footnote ⁸⁹ On the other side, with Greece and Cyprus becoming its members, the EU automatically became a party to the conflict, in which it felt obliged to remain committed to safeguarding its member states’ territorial interests and borders. As such, the EU has perceived the geopolitical instability in the region and Turkey’s disputes with Greece and Cyprus as a substantial threat to European security and stability. Since good neighbourly relations and peaceful settlement of border issues are also integral parts of the EU’s acquis and, thereby, the accession negotiations, the European Commission has frequently reported on Turkey’s policies regarding territorial issues in the Aegean Sea and the Cyprus conflict in its annual country reports on Turkey.

The third cluster of more recent disputes and Turkey’s actions in Cyprus’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), what came to be known as the “Eastern Mediterranean Crisis,” further complicated Turkey’s existing conflicts in the region with EU member states while also intensifying the EU’s discursive boundary-drawing practices portraying Turkey as the geopolitical Other. The Eastern Mediterranean Crisis unfolded in 2018 following the discovery of various natural gas fields off the coasts of Cyprus, Egypt, and Israel from 2009 onwards. The geographic location of the respective gas reserves, coupled with their high monetisation costs, reinvigorated the geopolitical cooperation between various countries located in the Eastern Mediterranean, whilst Turkey remained excluded from these joint efforts.Footnote ⁹⁰ Concerted actions of the Eastern Mediterranean states specifically aimed at the demarcation of bilateral/minilateral EEZs, which provide sovereign states with exclusive rights concerning the exploration and exploitation of cross-border marine resources. The discovery of the gas fields also made the region a high-priority area for EU foreign and security policy and a litmus test for the goal of “EU strategic autonomy,” given the EU’s intensifying need to reduce its dependence on external actors in manifold issue areas, including the security of energy supply.Footnote ⁹¹ The geopolitical importance of the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields for European energy independence progressively increased given the EU’s ever-growing geopolitical competition with Russia over its eastern neighbourhood since the instigation of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and more recently, since its transformation into a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

As such, the ongoing disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and EU members Greece and Cyprus embody a twofold geopolitical connotation for the EU: the security and sovereignty of EU borders and the strengthening of European (strategic) autonomy vis-à-vis external geopolitical-illiberal challengers like Russia.

The territorial issues in the Eastern Mediterranean had been heating up for some time, evolving into a complex geopolitical rivalry involving several EU Member States and Turkey in February 2018. In his context, the Turkish navy intervened to avert drilling activities by Cyprus-commissioned ENI, an Italian company, arguing that the offshore drilling disregarded Turkish Cypriot rights.Footnote ⁹² The extended standoff resulting from the Turkish intervention caused ENI to discontinue its drilling operations and move the vessel to a different country.Footnote ⁹³ As the incident occurred in Cyprus’ internationally recognised waters, the March 2018 European Council conclusions condemned Turkey’s assertive actions, underlining full solidarity with Cyprus and calling on Turkey to “respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Likewise, European Council President Donald Tusk called on Turkey to “avoid threats or actions against any EU member and instead commit to good neighbourly relations, peaceful dispute settlement and respect for territorial sovereignty.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Turkey’s confrontational actions in the Eastern Mediterranean also deepened its divergence from EU foreign policy. Its alignment with EU statements regarding foreign and security policy decreased from 44% in 2016 to 16% in 2018.Footnote ⁹⁶ The already intensifying geopolitical Othering of Turkey by the EU since the initiation of the refugee deal was thus further heightened with Turkey’s naval operations in the Eastern Mediterranean in that it strengthened the European representations and perceptions of Turkey as a threat to the security and sovereignty of the European Self.

Geopolitical Othering – enlargement nexus became unambiguously discernible in June 2018 when the Council conclusions on enlargement and stabilisation requested Turkey to respect the sovereignty of EU Member States and put a halt to key aspects of EU–Turkey affairs:

Turkey has been moving further away from the European Union. Turkey’s accession negotiations have therefore effectively come to a standstill and no further chapters can be considered for opening or closing and no further work towards the modernisation of the EU–Turkey Customs Union is foreseen.Footnote ⁹⁷

June 2018 Council conclusions transpired as a key milestone in EU–Turkey relations. They caused the de facto halt of Turkey’s EU accession process on predominantly geopolitical grounds and provided the EU with a precise reference point for future assessments of this relationship. In this regard, they have served as a central driver of other forms of cooperation and integration with Turkey as a key third country, not as a prospective member of the Union. The EU’s unwillingness to resort to similar restrictive measures in the months and years following the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, despite severe democratic regression,Footnote ⁹⁸ denotes the rising importance of geopolitical reflections and interests over normative concerns for the EU in formulating its enlargement doctrine. Overall, the ongoing crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean has further complicated the existing geopolitical conflicts and intensified the clash of national sovereignty interests between Turkey and two EU member states, Greece and Cyprus. As a result, the advancement of Turkey’s EU accession process has become nearly impossible within the two intergovernmental EU institutions responsible for enlargement, the European Council and the Council of the EU, where each Member State has veto power.

The growing trend toward Turkey’s depiction as a hostile neighbour by the EU continued in 2019 amid its persistent drilling activities in the Eastern Mediterranean. As a case in point, the Turkish seismic research vessel “Barbaros,” escorted by naval vessels, launched new drilling activities in 2019 within Cyprus’ internationally recognised EEZ, which Ankara does not acknowledge. Likewise, Ankara sent another drilling ship, “Yavuz,” to the Eastern Mediterranean in June 2019, arguing that “the Greek Cypriot administration does not have a right to take decisions on its own or even have a say in any matter concerning the whole island.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Turkey’s offshore naval operations confronting the EU’s territorial and geopolitical interests specifically came at a time when the AKP government tactically drew on a “strategic autonomy discourse” in foreign policy to “consolidate its power [at home] and build cross-class support on the basis of an assertive populist nationalism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Turkey’s contestatory practices toward Europe – by means of discourse and practice – as reflected in its expansionist and militarist foreign policymaking in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond (e.g., Libya, Syria and Iraq) did not just stem from its quest to protect its national interests from growing uncertainties in its immediate neighbourhood.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Geopolitical contestation of the EU through foreign policy activism also pursued regime survival amidst intensifying economic and political turbulence at home.Footnote ¹⁰² As such, Ankara’s domestic-driven quest for strategic autonomy and foreign policy activism was closely linked to a “strong anti-western geopolitical identity” that largely portrayed the West as its geopolitical Other.Footnote ¹⁰³ The crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean is thus illustrative of reciprocal processes of geopolitical Othering both by Turkey and the EU.

Considering Turkey’s contestatory foreign policy practices in the Eastern Mediterranean, key EU institutions adopted a broad array of coercive measures with significant ramifications for Turkey’s place in the European integration project. Referring to Turkey as a “key partner” instead of an accession candidate, the Council conclusions of 18 June 2019 stated that Turkey “must avoid threats and actions that damage good neighbourly relations, normalise its relations with the Republic of Cyprus and respect the sovereignty of all EU Member States over their territorial sea and airspace as well as all their sovereign rights.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The EU’s calls on the Turkish government to respect the sovereignty of its Member States “mimics sovereign state reflexes of maintaining territoriality in times of crisis” leading to the discursive construction of hard borders for Europe given distinct threat perceptions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Regional geopolitical conflicts’ contribution to the creation of hard(er) borders between the EU and Turkey was particularly reflected in the ensuing Council conclusions of 15 July 2019 “to suspend negotiations on the Comprehensive Air Transport Agreement and … not to hold the Association Council and further meetings of the EU–Turkey high-level dialogues for the time being” while also endorsing “the Commission’s proposal to reduce the pre-accession assistance to Turkey for 2020.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The suspension of the EU–Turkey thematic high-level dialogues predominantly affected EU–Turkey cooperation at the sectoral level. However, the Association Council is part of the 1963 Association Agreement between the EU and Turkey and is the most important institutional body in EU–Turkey relations, which regularly assesses the relationship by attending to “the integration goals” stated in the Association Agreement.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As such, the suspension of the Association Council has assuredly moved Turkey away from the European integration project.

During late 2019 and 2020, the persistence of Turkey’s disputed naval activities, coupled with its signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Libya over maritime boundaries, fortified the existing nexus between Turkey’s geopolitical Othering and its discursive dissociation from EU enlargement debates. The MoU of November 2019 aggravated Turkish representations by the EU as a security threat and a geopolitical competitor in the EU’s immediate neighbourhood. The December 2019 European Council conclusions referred to the MoU as infringing “upon the sovereign rights of third States,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ whereas the Council of the EU stated that Turkey’s actions posed “a threat to the interests and security of the Union.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this context, the Council endorsed targeted restrictive measures enabling the possibility of applying a travel ban and asset freeze to persons or entities responsible for or participating in drilling activities.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For the first time in its history, the EU adopted a sanctions package against an official candidate country,Footnote ¹¹¹ highlighting Turkey’s amplified alienation from the European integration process due to its increased geopolitical differentiation from the EU.

Geopolitical construction practices about Turkey heightened in mid-2020 when Greece and Turkey came to the brink of war after Turkey sent its seismic research vessel, Oruç Reis, accompanied by warships, to disputed waters. Following Turkey’s actions, France, a key Member State with regional aspirations, also became a party to the regional dispute by sending its warships and fighter jets to the Eastern Mediterranean. French President Emmanuel Macron stated that “Europe” needed to have “a more united and clear voice” on Turkey, which was “no longer a partner.” Macron’s statement also pinpointed intensified attempts to construct the European identity through a geopolitical differentiation from the Turkish “Other”: “We Europeans must be clear and firm with …. the government of President Erdogan which today has had unacceptable actions.”Footnote ¹¹²

Since October 2020, tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean have fairly eased, and the EU endorsed a positive agenda in EU–Turkey relations, contingent on Turkey’s constructive foreign policy behaviour in the region.Footnote ¹¹³ The EU’s partial rapprochement with Turkey was the result of a concrete change observed in Turkey’s foreign policy behaviour, which was reflected in various actions such as Turkey’s lifting of its objections to a new round of talks sponsored by the United Nations on the future of Cyprus and its withdrawal of the Oruç Reis vessel from the Eastern Mediterranean in September 2020. Yet, as of July 2025, the EU continues to enforce its restrictive measures against Turkey, initially adopted in 2019, along with its 2018 decision to suspend Turkey’s EU accession negotiations. As such, the 2018 geopolitical decision of the Council still provides the EU with a precise reference point for future assessments of EU–Turkey relations.