Alternative Futures of 'Europe as an Empire' and 'Europe as a Project' and Turkey-EU Relations

The European Union (EU) – Turkey relations have been going through a period of crisis since the opening of the accession negotiations with Turkey on 3 October 2005. Although the relations have always evolved in the form of ups and downs, the current status of the relations as well as their future bears a lot of ambiguity since both the EU and Turkey have been experiencing serious domestic problems. This paper aims at analyzing first the current status of the European Union (EU)-Turkey relations as well as the possible scenarios for the future while the EU is faced with alternative futures mainly between two main geopolitical imaginations of its Self. Looking through the theoretical lenses of “critical geopolitics”, the article first introduces the analytical tools; such as national/supranational myths, geopolitical identities, geopolitical codes and geopolitical imaginations as they contribute to our understanding of how geopolitical identities might eventually be translated into EU’s enlargement preferences and policies in general and towards Turkey in particular. Secondly, the paper aims to conduct a discourse analysis between the years of 2005-2018 of those institutional actors within the EU (the Commission, the Council and the Parliament ) which represent two contrasting as well as competing geopolitical imaginations of the EU, namely . “Europe as an Empire” or “Europe as a Project”. These geopolitical imaginations are important as they consequently effect the EU’s policies of enlargement in general and towards Turkey in particular. Lastly, the paper demonstrates how the EU’s competing and contrasting geopolitical imaginations of Turkey through the analysis of the discourses of its main institutions, can serve as alternative scenarios of enlargement to include or exclude the latter.