Turkey’s proactive contestation of EU sanctions against Russia: European normative order vs. geopolitical realities

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical discussion of third-country access to normative contestation within the European normative order. It empirically examines the external contestation of the EU’s recent sanctions policy directed towards Russia by Turkey, a candidate state, and elaborates on the context in which Turkey contested and renegotiated the normative validity of the EU’s sanction policy. The study empirically suggests that Turkey, while behaviourally practising non-compliance, accessed the European normative order and negotiated the normativity of its non-alignment. In the making of this proactive contestation, the normativity of the country’s positions and the invalidity of the sanctions policy have been widely negotiated in domestic politics by the political elites. Eventually, Turkey, against the EU’s expectations from a candidate state, turned the normative monologue on the sanctions into a multilogue of legitimate normative differences on the validity claims of a united action.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• Russia-Ukraine war
• Turkey
• sanctions
• contestation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The comprehensive historical record of the relationship between Türkiye and the EU cannot be fully articulated in this article, given its limited length and scope; for the extensive historical record of the bilateral relationship, see Nas and Özer (2016); Reiners and Turhan (2021).

2. A private Turkish defence company specializing in unmanned aerial vehicles, known for its close relations with President Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party.

3. One must note that all arms trade has to be confirmed by the Turkish Ministry of National Defence (Official Gazette 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant.

Notes on contributors

Kadri Kaan Renda

Kadri Kaan Renda is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Hacettepe University, Ankara. Renda holds a PhD in European and International Studies from Kings College London. He received his master’s degree in European Studies from the University of Essex. He has been giving lectures on Turkish foreign policy, the European Union, and Research Methods at Hacettepe University. His research interests are Turkish foreign policy, the common foreign and security policy of the EU, and security studies.

Ali Onur Özçelik

Ali Onur Özçelik is an associate professor and a full-time lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Eskisehir Osmangazi University. He gained his PhD in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. His research interests involve the politics of non-state actors, transnational social movements, diplomacy for non-state actors and states with limited recognition, and the EU’s Neighbourhood Policy. He is a co-editor of two books: ‘The World Community and Arab Spring,’ published by Palgrave, and ‘EU Conditionality in Turkey: When Does It Work? When Does It Fail?,’ published by Rowman & Littlefield. He has also been working as a researcher for the Jean Monnet Networking Project called Linking to Europe at the Periphery (LEAP).

Hüsrev Tabak

Hüsrev Tabak is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University in Rize, Turkey. His research focuses on norm reception/diffusion, transnationalism, methodological cosmopolitanism, and ethnopolitics. Some of his recent work has appeared in the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Global Society, Peace Review, and Uluslararası İlişkiler/International Relations.