Negotiating mobility, debating borders: migration diplomacy in Turkey-EU relations

Abstract

Borders and international mobility have become dominant themes in studies on contemporary global processes, yet relatively little has been said about the various dimensions of their interaction in international relations. This chapter intends to fill the gap by exploring twin issues: the crucial political dimensions attached to international migration and, often overlooked, the serious challenge border crossings pose to the states involved. In other words, the diplomatic and symbolic dimensions of international migration affect inter-state negotiations in the international arena in multiple ways. With the shift in migration issues, such as the securitisation of European Union (EU) borders, from low to high politics as a spillover effect of the EU integration process (Huysman, 2006), it is not surprising that migration and border diplomacy in this context has become a feature of membership negotiations on EU geography. In order to review the negotiation processes and salient debates in EU-Turkey accession talks, we adopt the concept of ‘migration diplomacy’ that refers to the analysis of changing border and asylum policies as an indirect form of foreign policy (Thiollet, 2011: 13) and the notion of EU-isation or Europeanisation defined as ‘processes of construction, diffusion, and institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” and shared beliefs and norms to a European model of governance, caused by forms of cooperation and integration in Europe’ (Bulmer and Radaelli, 2004: 4).