Bilge Firat

How do interstate actors negotiate their interests? What do 'common interests' look like from their historically and culturally contingent perspectives? What happens when actors work for their private, professional, public, personal or institutional interests, even when those interests go against their mandate? Honing in on the role of diplomats and lobbyists during negotiations for Turkey's contentious EU membership bid, this book presents intricate, backstage conflicts of power and interests and negotiations of compromises, which drove this candidate country both closer to and farther apart from the EU. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, this first book-length account of Turkish Europeanisation argues that public, private and corporate actors voicing economic, political and bureaucratic interests from all corners of Europe sought access to markets and polities through the Turkish bid instead of facilitating Turkey's EU accession, earning recognition, status and power.

Like all infrastructure, geopolitical infrastructures tell important stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border fossil gas pipelines that are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories are considered geopolitical infrastructures par excellence. Taking to its ethnographic focus the Southern Gas Corridor, a fossil gas transit regime and logistical mega infrastructure recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this article examines the twin processes of the infrastructuralisation of geopolitics and the geopoliticisation of infrastructure in this region. It advocates for a meso-level recalibration of theory-building and ethnographic scope to the roles of the elites, experts, professionals, transnational activists, local stakeholders and the political materiality of the infrastructure in cross-border governance, sovereignty and statecraft by transnational infrastructural means. It argues that, in the Southern Gas Corridor, the construction of the 'geopolitical' as a scale was achieved not in a topdown fashion but by deliberate e orts of its human and non-human agents and actors.

Over the last 3 decades, while ethnography has arguably become a popular and legitimate method to study geopolitics among geographers, anthropologists have increasingly turned towards geopolitics as a popular subject to investigate former and emergent empires as everyday phenom- ena. Yet, their efforts remain rather disjointed. Written by an anthropologist, this review essay aims to put these rather disjointed efforts into a programmatic conversation and think about how one might (re)calibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda. To that end, the essay first takes stock of the existing ethnographic knowledge of geopolitics through a review of selected works by geographers and anthropologists. Then, to help students and scholars of geopolitics from within these cognate disciplines move this engagement forward, the essay concludes by proposing the ‘cultures of geopolitical expertise’ as a productive avenue to recalibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda.

After decade-long negotiations, Turkey joined the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) in 2015. Since then, electricity currents roam freely in an expanded European territory that makes up the world’s largest electricity market. The synchronization of ‘Turkish’ and ‘European’ electricities followed two major blackouts that were instructive in Turkey’s finally joining in the ENTSO-E. Taking cue from the physical blackout of March 2015 that exposed how vulnerable Turkish electricity infrastructure was to oversupply, poor line management, or cyber-attacks, and the political blackout through which the Turkish-European Union (EU) relations are currently undergoing, this article examines the relationship of material and immaterial infrastructures of electricity transmission and trading to the broader questions of power and integration in the wider European region by honing in on the negotiations of power and grid expansion among its elites and experts. Probing low-carbon democratic imaginaries of energy development in Europe, it concludes that lessons learned from these two blackout cases suggest that even if energy infrastructures might substitute for political integration between the centres and peripheries of Europe, contrary to system-builders’ expectations this infrastructural integration may not lead to the emergence of a mutually-electrified common public.

The European Union’s (EU) accession negotiations with Turkey attract a lot of attention from all over Europe to the European Parliament, which serves as a modern agora wherein interests, information, and influence frequently exchange hands. Fine negotiations over what is important to European publics and powerful interests in and outside of the EU are revealed in amendments to sequential drafts of parliamentary reports; these take place through formal and informal communicative channels via lobbying. Complementing ethnographic observations with analysis of EU documents at different stages, I argue that political documents are a means for and contribute largely to bureaucratic politics in both the EU and Turkey, and actors increasingly rely on them to sustain communication between otherwise reluctant parties while maintaining an enduring demand for their expertise. [bureaucratic politics, documents, European Parliament, lobbying, Turkey]

The construction of railroads, highways, pipelines, tunnels, and bridges is a result of an imagined construction of regions and in return helps solidify such imaginations. Critics of the role of technological advancement in fostering social, economic, political, and cultural integration between centers and peripheries argue that many such projects remain as political dreamscapes instead of serving as successful examples of transregional integration. Nevertheless, new political dreamscapes give way to new client networks from the European peripheries, solidified by real material networks of energy and transport. Currently promoting itself as a bridge and energy hub between Europe and Asia, Turkey champions such infrastructural developmentalism. This article examines how some political dreamscapes of energy-transport infrastructures, which are imagined to connect Eurasia to Europe via Turkey, relate to their actual construction. At a time when hopes for Turkey's political integration with its surrounding regions have waned, I critically interrogate whether economic integration by means of material infrastructures for energy and transport can substitute for political forms of integration.

From 1989, new plans to enlarge the EU caused growing public dis- enchantment with the future of European integration as a viable model of cooperation among states and peoples in Europe. To man- age disenchantment, EU actors designed various policy tools and techniques in their approaches to European peripheries such as Turkey. Among these, they intensified and perfected processes of ped- agogy where EU actors assume that they have unique knowledge of what it means to be ‘European’ and that they must teach accession candidates how to become true Europeans. Based on accounts of EU politicians and officials, past experiences of government officials from former EU candidate states and Turkish officials’ encounters with the EU’s accession pedagogy, this article explores the EU’s enlargement policy as a pedagogical engagement and the responses it elicits among Turkish governmental representatives, in order to test the reconfigurations of power between Europe and the countries on its margins.

At a time when European integration faces many crises, the efficacy of public policies decided in Brussels, and in member state capitals, for managing the everyday lives of average Europeans demands scrutiny. Most attuned to how global uncertainties interact with local realities, anthropologists and ethnographers have paid scant attention to public policies that are created by the EU, by member state gov- ernments and by local authorities, and to the collective, organised, and individual responses they elicit in this part of the world. Our crit- ical faculties and means to test out established relations between global–local, centre–periphery, macro–micro are crucial to see how far the EU’s normative power and European integration as a gover- nance model permeates peoples’ and states’ lives in Europe, broadly defined. Identifying the strengths and shortcomings in the literature, this review essay scrutinises anthropological scholarship on culture, power and policy in a post-Foucaultian Europe.

European integration is based upon the promise to bring prosperity by creating economic and social equilibrium among member states and its regions via integrationist policies jointly managed by states and the institutions of the EU. As one common market initiative for greater economic integration in the wider region, goods circulate without tariff and customs duty barriers in the EU’s common customs area. Turkey, not an EU member, has been in this common market since 1996. The EU-Turkey Customs Union, which promised to bring deeper economic and political integration through eventual Turkish membership, represents Turkey’s aspirations to move from the periphery of Europe into its core. As an anthropological contribution to investigations of advanced European capitalism, this paper examines fundamental conflicts of interest between the EU and Turkey and locates them in their unequal power relations and in the disjuncture of each side’s overall objectives from economic integration. Most importantly, it shows that these interest conflicts have ramifications at the individual bureaucratic level and in daily bureaucratic practice. Dramatic expressions of Turkish state power, which are initially geared toward balancing out power inequities, exacerbate Turkish and EU officials’ failures to maintain at least a facade of mutually sustainable interests. Interpreted by EU officials as Turkish bureaucratic inertia, such disintegration of interests has implications for ongoing economic integration and membership negotiations between the two parties, with Turkish officials experiencing loss of control. The paper calls for a critical political economy that pays due attention to the cultural settings in which the former is embedded.

... inquiry that 'Turkey' became a possible domain to experiment with the scholarly limits and potentials of various understandings of statecraft, nationalism and national identity, and citizenship. This critical elaboration stretched from recasting the meaning and rethinking the power ...

Today, logistics as the science and industry of cross-border transportation of mainly industrial products drives “revolutions” from energy to retail. As most world economies continue to accelerate their involvement with economic globalization, logistics continue to take over local economies in many regions around the world. Paradoxically, many states and sovereigns around the world are also looking (back) to logistics infrastructure as a panacea to curb the half-century-long devastating effects of deregulation of trade, finance and services on nation-state-centric political economies. One can observe this move both in countries of North America and Europe, where the post-1950s deterioration of public infrastructures has long been a problem. The Right’s recognition of this deterioration was at least partly responsible for carrying it into power, for example, in the U.S., although the Left has also occasionally touted this kind of infrastructure politics. In places like China, or Turkey, a country with which I am more familiar, economic development based on the infrastructure, transport, and construction sectors is much newer. This move toward infrastructure, though, at the same time may reflect the end of sovereign state authority, at least as we know it, and the beginning of a new kind of statecraft.

On the day of the sixtieth anniversary of the Turkey-EU Association Agreement, Europeanization alla Turca brought together a select group of Turkish and Eurocratic policy workers and interest representatives at the European Parliament. In a roundtable format, participants discussed the parameters of the present intractable case of Turkey’s bid for EU membership by addressing such metaphors and political currencies like 'good faith/bad faith', 'trust/mistrust', 'technical/political' and 'bridge/border' as keywords that reflect the individual and collective psyche or sentiments among bureaucrats and civil society representatives, who have been entrusted with the day-to-day running of the EU-Turkey affairs but have been gradually estranged form one another over the course of membership talks since 2005. At a time when negotiations for membership between the two parties are being revived under the Positive Agenda, a recent initiative of the European Commission in order to move along with the process by bypassing political objections of some EU member states to Turkish accession, this communicative event served as a timely reminder of the indispensability of open and transparent, yet strong dialogue between Turkish and EU actors in their everyday negotiations.

Faced with Cold War geopolitics and geoeconomics in the aftermath of the World War II, greater integration in Europe found embodiment in the coming together of the German steel and French coal industries. Today, Cold War politics is arguably no longer with us, and the project of bringing together peoples and states in Europe is plagued by recurring, interconnected crises of capital accumulation and distribution, political legitimacy, and environmental sustainability. Adding a new challenge to the EU project, political and economic actors in the wider region rediscover the legacy and blueprints of regionalism by means of integrating energy, transport and telecommunications infrastructures—a programmatic idea with material manifestations that surely precede the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the predecessor of the EU. Bringing together anthropologists and ethnographers of energy and infrastructures working on an area broadly conceived from the Iberian Peninsula to the east of the Caspian Sea and from the Sahara Desert to the North Sea, this panel explores the role that energy and related infrastructures play in the " post-carbon " age of advanced integration between Europe and its peripheries, as well as within these regions. Currently undergoing an energy and/or infrastructural turn, anthropologists are at a privileged position to discuss the prospects, or foreclosings, that are offered by old and new European networks of energy and infrastructures. At a time when fossil fuel consumption and climate change present unprecedented challenges for decision-makers, planners, and citizens, we invite scholars and students of energy and infrastructures working on Europe to join us for a rethinking of the current so-called energy transitioning in Europe. We will collectively endeavor to assess whether bridges, canals, tunnels, rail-and motorways , pipelines, fiber optic cables, nuclear and fossil fuel power plants, solar, wind and biofuel farms in operation or under construction continue to have their promissory capacity to bring people, their polities, economies and cultures together and foster cooperation and solidarity, or whether they set them sail apart towards unbridgeable distances in and around this region. Our aim with this panel is to discuss through ethnographic means recent developments in the areas of European energy and infrastructures pertaining to a vast spectrum of practices from service provisioning, to policymaking as they unfold in diverse places at different scales of governance and economy, while also welcoming historical engagements with these topics that may help to shed light on contemporary processes. We are especially interested in ethnographic accounts that discuss counter practices by citizens and collectives of building their alternative energy and infrastructural lives and futures, which may at times be subversive to state-sanctioned energy and infrastructural integration. Those interested in joining us at the 115th AAA Annual Meeting (Nov 16-20, Minneapolis, MN), should please send an abstract to Bilge Firat (bfirat1@binghamton.edu) and Jaume Franquesa (jaume@buffalo.edu) no later than March 27.