Abstract
I was born and raised 45 minutes outside of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, and as a teenager growing up in a rather typical northern European suburb I knew that “Turk” was a bad word. You could say it about anyone who was, or seemed like he could be, an immigrant, and he was supposed to take offense. What I did not know was that the use of the word “Turk” as a pejorative—a function that I would eventually come to view with a great amount of unease—has a history in the traditionally Christian parts of Europe that reaches back several centuries. This book looks closer at this troubled history with a view to better understand our present. In so doing, it adopts the position that in order to transcend prejudice and deeply rooted stereotypes, one first has to identify them and stare at them unflinchingly, which is an unpleasant experience both because it involves the reproduction of some quite repulsive fictions and because it amounts to looking at oneself in the mirror under a rather unflattering light.
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Notes
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh University Press, 1960)
John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
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Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517), (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969)
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Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2003)
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Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957)
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William Wallace, “Where Does Europe End? Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion,” in Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union, ed. Jan Zielonka (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Carl H. Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea, 1914–1932 (Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 4.
P. J. Burke, “The Self: Measurement Requirements from an Interactionist Perspective” (1977).
Peter J. Burke and Donald C. Reitzes, “The Link between Identity and Role Performance,” Social Psychology Quarterly 44, 2 (1981).
George J. McCall and J. L. Simmons, Identities and Interactions: An Examination of Human Associations in Everyday Life, (New York: The Free Press, 1978)
Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole, 1979).
For example, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, First Anchor Books Edition ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1989; reprint, 1989)
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1973);
Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969).
It is partly inspired by cognitive linguistics: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley, “Blending Basics,” Cognitive Linguistics 11, no. 3/4 (2000).
My view of the performative functions of language and dis¬course is derived more from work in the pragmatic traditions of lin¬guistics, however: Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (London: Sage, 1997).
For example, Margaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23, (1994);
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975); White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987).
This framework also bears some resemblance to Kenneth Burke’s “dra-matistic” pentad of “grammatical” elements, which he argues is present in all symbolic action. The pentad consists of the following elements: act (what is being done?), scene (where is it being done?), agent (who is doing it?), agency (how are they doing it?), and purpose (why are they doing it?). Burke’s dramatist theory of symbolic action is useful and partly overlaps with the approach developed here, but there is a differ¬ence in emphasis: his focus is on action whereas I am concerned with the construction of collective identity. I also try to avoid placing as heavy an emphasis on the intention of the agent of a certain act as Burke does, since this brings up the difficult issue of trying to establish what he/she really meant by the act. My focus is instead on the semantic struc¬tures and extra-linguistic context that imbue any symbolic act with its meaning, regardless of the author’s intentions. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945).
Hayward R. Alker introduced me to this joint work in artificial intelli¬gence (AI) and computational natural language comprehension, written by a psychologist and a computational linguist. Few IR scholars know of this canonical albeit now somewhat dated work on AI, but its formal¬ized model of human symbolic interaction provided the inspiration for many of the ideas outlined in this article.
Peter J. Burke, “The Self: Measurement Requirements from an Interactionist Perspective” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, September 5, 1977)
McCall and Simmons, Identities and Interactions; Sheldon Stryker, Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version (Menlo Park, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1980).
Ibid, Peter J. Burke and Donald C. Reitzes, “The Link between Identity and Role Performance,” Social Psychology Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1981): 83–92; McCall and Simmons, Identities and Interactions; Stryker, Symbolic Interactionism, 132.
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, ed. Steve Smith, Cambridge Studies in International Relations, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 215.
Orhan Kilercioglu, “Should we insist on EU membership?,” Turkish Daily News, January 5, 2001.
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 115.
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 14.
One of the assumptions guiding Hayward Alker’s analysis of the plot structure of Toynbee’s Jesus story is precisely the rejection of this distinction: “Descriptive story elements should be readable as imitable and modifiable recipes for human behavior,” see Alker’s essay “Toynbee’s Jesus: Computational Hermeneutics and the Continuing Presence of Classical Mediterranean Civilization,” in Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies, ed. Hayward R. Alker, Cambridge Studies in International Relations, ed. Steve Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 40.
See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); White, The Content of the Form; White, Metahistory.
Daniel Deudney, “Ground Identity: Nature, Place, and Space in Nationalism,” in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, Critical Perspectives on World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1997), 130.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
See e.g. the collection of essays in James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997).
Lewis A. Coser, ed., Maurice Halbwachs on Collective Memory, The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) 51. (Coser, 1992, 119).
Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 18–19.
John M. Hobson, “What’s at Stake in ‘Bringing Historical Sociology Back into International Relations?’ Transcending ‘Chronofetishism’ and ‘Tempocentrism’ in International Relations,” in Historical Sociology of International Relations, ed. Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, “Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences,” in Bcsia Studies in International Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
The methodology is described in greater detail in Paul T. Levin, “From ‘Saracen Scourge’ to ‘Terrible Turk’: Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Images of the ‘Other’ in the Narrative Construction of ‘Europe’” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2007).
Some of the main influences on the textual analysis were Ruth Wodak, “The Discourse-Historical Approach,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001);
Jennifer Milliken, “The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods,” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (1999);
Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies, ed. Steve Smith, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural,”; Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955).
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© 2011 Paul T. Levin
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Levin, P.T. (2011). Introduction and Theoretical Framework. In: Turkey and the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119574_1
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