Diplomacy and lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The private life of politics (Political Ethnography)

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 & power.