CONCEPTIONS OF THE EU AND ATTITUDES TO TURKEY'S ACCESSION IN FRENCH AND BRITISH DISCOURSE

Abstract

In recent years, France has opposed full EU membership for Turkey while Britain has been one of the staunchest supporters of Turkey's EU accession bid. This paper argues that this can be explained by fundamentally different conceptions of the EU in the two countries, based in turn on differences in national conceptions of state and nation. The paper thus analyses recent French and British discourse on the EU and, particularly, on Turkey's accession bid, according to Sjursen's (2007) framework of three idealised visions of the EU. These are firstly, the EU as a problem-solving entity, secundly as a values-based community based on a common cultural identity and finally as a post-national union underscored by 'universal' rights such as democracy and human rights

Keywords

• European Union, membership, cultural identity, Turkey

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