Description
Book SynopsisHow 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? 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.
Trade Review"Firat has been hanging with the Eurocrats, the diplomats and the lobbyists of Brussels and comes back with a story that throws new light on their actual everyday give and take. The book offers that rare thing: new knowledge."
Iver B. Neumann, author of At Home with the Diplomats
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Table of ContentsList of figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I: Inside the private life of politics
1 The elephant in the room
2 Fieldwork among the no(ta)bles
Part II: Framing EU membership
3 The accession pedagogy
Part III: Arts of diplomacy and lobbying in the EU institutions
4 Enlargement, twice a week
5 Dramas of statecraft, mistrust and the politics of non-membership
6 Political documents and bureaucratic entrepreneurs
Conclusion: lessons from an anti-case
References
Index
