Liminality and Perpetuation of Conflicts: Turkish-Greek Relations in the Context of Community-Building by the EU

Abstract

While the `security communities' literature has underscored the positive implications of collective identity for sustained peace and cooperation within the communities, it has overlooked the possible security implications of the discourses and practices of differentiation necessarily entailed in the construction of collective identity. Building on the case of Turkish-Greek relations, I argue that through these discourses and practices of differentiation, community-building can create and sustain discursive conditions conducive to conflict perpetuation, especially with and among states situated in liminal positions with respect to the community. Analyzing official and media discourse in Turkey and Greece between 1995 and 1999, I demonstrate, how by situating Turkey and Greece in different and also liminal/precarious positions with respect to `Europe', the community-building discourse of the EU reinforced and legitimized in the two states representations of their identities as different from and also as threatening to each other.