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Discursive Construction of Exclusion in Turkey And Discursive Construction of Exclusion in Turkey and Naturalization of Syrian Refugees: Analyzing Citizenship through the Lens of Citizens By Pinar Dilan Sonmez Submitted to Central European University Department of Nationalism Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervised by Szabolcs Pogonyi CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2018 Abstract Most scholarship on citizenship concentrates on macro level debates of policies, regulation and structural changes. This approach neglects the significant role of citizenship as national membership on individual understanding of ordinary citizens and their everyday practices. Turkish citizenship up to now has predominantly been analyzed through the status and rights of ethnic and religious minorities in terms of equal citizenship and most of those analyses studied citizenship on macro level through institutions. By 2016, with the announcement of the exceptional citizenship proposal as a plan to naturalize Syrian refugees which met with a strong backlash, the focus of the scholars has shifted in Turkey from minorities to non-citizens –namely, refugees. With this shift, Turkish citizenship has defined and practiced for the first time through outsiders who are non- citizens. Within the frame of this context, this thesis aims to examine the discursive construction of exclusion through citizenship in Turkey and to investigate the citizenship perception of citizens by adopting a people-centered, micro-level approach. By analyzing the party discourses, social media contents and interviews with 10 shopkeepers, this thesis demonstrates that the presence of the refugees has a renationalizing effect on citizenship by coupling it with national identity and it also reveals that citizenship perception of Turkish citizens is based on a combination of weak territorial membership and strong blood-based membership. CEU eTD Collection CEU eTD Collection Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Szabolcs Pogonyi who supervised the entire process of my research for his continuous support and encouragement, and Andras Kovacs for his significant comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank those in the faculty and staff who helped me get through the year. I am grateful to my dear friends Esra Metay Bozkurt and Ozgun Ersin for their encouraging support and friendship. Special thanks must go to my family for their ongoing love and support. And finally Kyriakos Gioftsios without whom this research would not have been completed. CEU eTD Collection i For my father, mother and brother CEU eTD Collection ii Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………...i Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iii List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………....v Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1. A Legal Overview……………………………………………………………………...9 1.1 International Refugee Law and Naturalization ………………………………………10 1.2 ‘Guests’ not Refugees: Turkey’s Asylum System and Legal Position of Syrian Refugees….....................................................................................................................................12 1.3 Turkish Citizenship Regime…………………………………………………….........15 Chapter 2. Unwelcomed Guests: Growing Anti-Refugee Sentiment and Host Concerns....................................................................................................................................…19 2.1 Socio-Economic Concerns…………………………………………………………...21 2.2 Security Concerns……………………………………………………………………26 CEU eTD Collection 2.3 The Demographic and Political Concerns: The Impact of Identities………………...28 Chapter 3. Exceptional Citizenship and Discursive Construction of Exclusion of Refugees…....32 3.1 Political Party Discourses……………….....................................................................34 iii 3.1.1 Republican People’s Party…………………………………….……………35 3.1.2 People’s Democratic Party…………………………………………………38 3.1.3 Nationalist Movement Party…………………………….………………….41 3.2 Antagonistic Anti-refugee Stance Retweeted: #Idontwantsyriansinmycountry……...45 3.2.1 Data Collection……………………………………………………………..47 3.2.2 Findings…………………………………………………………………….48 3.3 Views of Turkish Citizens on Turkish Citizenship……………………… ……...........56 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….……………64 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..…………66 CEU eTD Collection iv List of Tables Table 1. Sheltered and Unsheltered Syrian Refugees by Temporary Shelter Centers…………….23 Table 2. The Number of Newly Established Companies with Syrian Partners…………………...25 Table 3. Distribution of Syrian Refugees in the Scope of Temporary Protection by Province……31 Table 4. Shopkeepers by Age, Birthplace, Education and Gender………………………………58 CEU eTD Collection v Abbreviations AFAD: The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority AKP: Justice and Development Party CHP: Republican People’s Party DGMM: The Directorate General for Migration Management HDP: People’s Democratic Party ICT: The Information and Communication Technology LFIP: The Law of Foreigners and International Protection MHP: Nationalist Movement Party UNHCR: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees CEU eTD Collection vi Introduction Anti-government protests broke out in Syria in March 2011 and in a short time the conflict escalated to a civil war. With an influx of fleeing the refugees from Syria in April 2011, Turkey opened its borders and welcomed the refugees by taking the opposition side in the Syrian civil war against the Assad regime. According to the Turkish government, a future without Assad in Syria was the only solution and the regime could not last long.1 The crisis was seen by Turkish authorities as a temporary issue which would end soon and the temporary protection regime was shaped by this perception and expectation. 100,000 refugees were accepted as “guests” and settled in newly constructed refugee camps.2 By the end of 2012, there had been more than 170,000 registered refugees in Turkey but the increased violence and emergence of the ISIS forced additional hundreds of thousands people to flee in 2014. By the end of the same year, 55,000 people were seeking asylum in Turkey every month.3 In 2016, there were more than 2.5 million refugees in Turkey and vast majority of the refugees settled outside the camps in cities.4 Since the management of the crisis became more difficult, Turkey first reassessed its asylum regime to develop temporary protection and finally decided to cooperate with NGOs and international organizations including 1 Kemal Kirisci, “Syrian Refugees and Turkey’s Challenges: Going beyond Hospitality,” (Washington: Brookings, 2014): 1. 2Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel, “Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Pathways to Precarity, CEU eTD Collection Differential Inclusion, and Negotiated Citizenship Rights”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, V. 43, N. 1 (2017): 44. 3 Ahmet Icduygu, “Syrian Refugees in Turkey: The Long Road Ahead,” Migration Policy Institute, 2015, 7, accessed May 18, 2018, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/syrian-refugees- turkey-long-road-ahead. 4 “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016,” UNHCR, accessed May 23, 2018, http://www.unhcr.org/5943e8a34.pdf. 1 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which had offered assistance to Turkey as early as 2011 but at the time, its offer had been refused by Turkish government.5 Considering the fact that conditions did not improve in Syria but continued to deteriorate and it was more evident that refugees were unlikely to return to Syria in the near future, longer- term, durable solutions and an efficient way of governance for Turkey, which turned into a country of immigration, were needed. Within this framework, naturalization was brought to the table for discussion as a response to the refugee crisis and its challenges. On 2 July 2016, at a Ramadan dinner in Kilis, a small town near the border with Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would announce that the Ministry of Interior of Turkey was preparing to offer exceptional citizenship to Syrian refugees.6 Even though the attempted coup in July 2016 and the following events in 2017 changed the agenda in the country and the process seemed to slow down, according to the sources of the Ministry of Interior, the citizenship process of a total of 35.000 Syrians was completed and further 15,000 applications were being reviewed by September 2017.7 Since the first day when the proposal of exceptional citizenship was declared till today, many questions have been left unanswered: Who will be naturalized? Talented and skilled Syrians? Children of Syrian refugees who have been born in Turkey? Or will all Syrian refugees be eligible to apply for the citizenship? While a macro level debate focused on these questions to explain the scope, necessity and applicability of the proposal for regulations and policies, immediate reaction of both anti- and pro- 5 Metin Corabatir, “The Evolving Approach to Refugee Protection in Turkey: Assessing Practical and Political Needs,” Migration Policy Institute, 2016, 11, accessed May 18, 2018, CEU eTD Collection https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/TCM-Dev-Corabatir- FINALWEB.pdf. 6 Umut Uras, “Erdogan Plan to Make Syrians Citizens Sparks Online War,” Aljazeera, July 4, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/erdogan-syrians-citizensship-hashtag- 160703190729668.html. 7 “Turkey processing citizenship for 50,000 Syrians,”
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