Transcript

The idea for this interview is to demonstrate how the ideas above link to the issues of EU’s borders and territory.

The idea that EU citizenship is enacted by non-EU citizens who live outside of the EU, is fascinating but also puzzling. If non-citizens exact EU citizenship in Turkey, why at all call it European citizenship? Why don’t we call it Turkish citizenship?

This is a very interesting question, and in some senses one might call some of the claims of Kurds in Turkey in terms of Turkish citizenship. However, what is most interesting about research carried out by the scholars on the Enact project is that it shows how citizenship exceeds national boundaries. The national frame of reference does not suffice to understand people’s claims to rights, because they happen at several overlapping levels. For example, Kurds in Turkey actually work on Turkish citizenship by making appeals to European norms, and in this regard one cannot understand their claims simply in terms of the ‘relationship’ between individual and the state. This is also important when it comes to questions of European citizenship, because it shows that Europe and its institutions are more than those of the European Union. The Council of Europe, for example, enables Turkish citizens bring their claims within the framework of Human Rights and exercise what we call a ‘European citizenship’. The Council of Europe is not a European Union institution, but it still plays an important role here in the constitution of European citizenship by those who enact citizenship through claiming rights at the European level.

Let me clarify this – if Kurdish citizens or women’s NGOs in Turkey already participate in the debate on EU citizenship why is there such a controversy if Turkey should or not join the EU? Are we looking at this situation from a different perspective when we focus on acts of citizenship?

It is important to distinguish here between the European Union and Europe, and also to distinguish between institutionalised and critical enactments of European citizenship. The negotiation between Turkey and the EU regarding accession is an institutionalised process that largely occurs through state actors. However, the claiming of rights by Turkish citizens can bring to bear a more disruptive dimension to European citizenship that rejects the confinement of Europe to the Member States of European Union, while also troubling the assumption that accession will simply foster the inclusion of Turkish citizens. As the wider research across the Enact project demonstrates, even within the European Union significant contestations occur regarding the limitations of EU citizenship (the mobilizations of Roma and sex workers, for example, entail a challenge to such limitations). In this regard, an analysis focusing on acts of citizenship is not simply about the participation of actors whose status is already settled within a pre-existing political sphere. Rather it is about the very re-constitution of politics and citizenship through struggles that trouble existing maps of Europe.