Emotions in the Foreign Policy of Turkey towards the European Union

Project Information

EMOFORTE

Grant agreement ID: 896311

DOI

10.3030/896311

Project closed

EC signature date 11 March 2020

Start date 8 February 2021

End date 7 February 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 172 932,48

EU contribution

€ 172 932,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD DE NAVARRA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMOFORTE (Emotions in the Foreign Policy of Turkey towards the European Union)

Reporting period: 2021-02-08 to 2023-02-07

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The main objective of EMOFORTE (EMOtions in the FOReign Policy of Turkey towards the EU) was to reach a deeper understanding about emotions in Turkish political discourse regarding the EU and thereby, to expand the current knowledge about political, ideological, cultural and psychological factors which drive increasing nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism in Turkey and about their impact on the cooperation between Turkey and the EU in the global and regional issues. With this aim, it analysed both the dominant and dissident foreign policy discourses of Turkish political elites (i.e. politicians, parliamentarians, party officials, and bureaucrats) in terms of emotions materialised in identity discourses and in the narratives about Europe on the basis of an interdisciplinary methodological model comprehensive enough to account for the emotions as a multi-level phenomenon with individual, social, cultural and international dimensions.

With a smooth research process, EMOFORTE has developed a comparative, interdisciplinary method on the basis of a post-structural approach to emotions in discourse analysis and achieved the project milestones together with research findings and outputs which serve to a profound understanding of transformations in Turkish Foreign Policy in relation to Europe by focusing on emotions as discursive elements in contested national identity constructions and representations of Europe.

In order to achieve a profound understanding of transformations in Turkish Foreign Policy in relation to Europe, EMOFORTE focused on emotions as discursive elements in contested national identity constructions and representations of Europe, and developed a comparative, interdisciplinary method on the basis of a post-structural approach to emotions in discourse analysis.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

EMOFORTE's main scientific achievements are as follows:

- an innovative interdisciplinary methodology drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory and the constructivist theories of emotions in psychology for the interpretation of emotions with discourse analysis tools benefiting from the methods offered by corpus linguistics and Big Data approaches to analysing text.

- an open access dataset in the form of an organized corpus of political texts from Turkey covering the period between 2002-2022

- A Turkish Lexicon of Emotions, categorized as distinct emotions, designed and lemmatized for its automatized application in discourse analysis computer programs.

- Research outputs which deepen the current understanding of emotions as significant discursive elements which construct, frame and change the meanings of the discourse and lend it particular force.

- A historical-diachronic emotional mapping which interrogate change in Turkish foreign policy towards Europe with a longitudinal study from 2002-2019.

- An ideological map of emotions with a comparative-synchronic approach to the discourses of Turkish political parties on Foreign Policy at the nexus of national identity and Europe as its significant Other.

- Research outputs which reveal the discursive mechanisms of gendered populist discourses through which Turkish foreign policy practices in relation to Europe are justified morally and emotionally.


Project results have been shared at Zenodo and OpenAIRE with a detailed reference to EU funding. Until the project results are published in the journals and academic books, all preprints and drafts are shared openly with the potential researchers and wider public.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

EMOFORTE's main innovation outputs and contribution to the state of the art:

- EMOFORTE digital outputs which trace the change and continuity in Turkish foreign policy through emotion mapping advance the literature in foreign policy analysis by tracing over a long span of time through emotion discourse analysis.

- EMOFORTE developed a novel interdisciplinary methodological model integrating a variety of tools and methods for diachronic discourse analysis centering on emotions in politics and shared this model as open access for further exploitation

- EMOFORTE produced an ideological map of emotions for the representations of Europe in the discourses of Turkish political parties and gave examples of visualizations of emotions using a comparative-synchronic approach

- EMOFORTE shows how highly affective content of gendered populist discourses interact with fantasmatic re-articulations of national and religious identities in Turkish politics which in return feed the moral arguments for the foreign policy positions.

EMOFORTE’s results contributes to the knowledge regarding the EU’s challenge for improving its external action and international cooperation in order to be a stronger global actor and expands the current knowledge about political, ideological, cultural and psychological factors which drive increasing nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism in Turkey and about their impact on the cooperation between Turkey and the EU in the global and regional issues.

Word Cloud of Emotions