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Unlike traditionally nationalistic, cultural, and ethnic approaches to the discussions over European identity, this paper makes use of Henri Tajfel's Social Identity Theory, and more specifically social identity, in order to have a more coherent and theoretically healthier approach to the concept. Borrowing from Tajfel, it is asserted that even without sharing a common culture, a common history, or a common set of traditions, values and aspirations, Europeans might form ingroups which may temporarily make them able to construct a social identity. Such is simple enough to indulge social comparisons with other social ingroups, making them outgroups, and some of them Other-ed. An historical perspective over Europeanization might establish a valuable field of observation regarding whether a possible European social identity, instead of an immanent one, might be detected since European political integration began in the 1970s.

Despite the growing literature that adapts the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to the analysis of the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) increasing authoritarian politics in Turkey, this article draws attention to the theoretical pitfalls of this tendency and argues that these studies mostly fall into the trap of mistaking the consolidation of populist power with the establishment of sovereignty. Utilising the AKP's biopolitical agenda over Syrian refugees fleeing to Turkey as a case study, we attempt to realize a theoretical twist and offer to read Agamben backwards; that is to say, instead of starting with the assumption that the AKP has established sovereignty in the country, we question whether the party is indeed able to perform a consistent type of biopolitics over the Syrian refugees that would suggest the existence of such sovereignty in the first place. Consequently, our analysis reveals that it is not an Agambenian 'state of exception' established by the AKP leadership in Turkey that makes recent Turkish politics look more authoritarian than ever; instead, what we witness is a continuation of a strong state tradition inherited from Turkey's founding Kemalist era that still determines the boundaries of state-society relations in the country.

This study argues that the understanding of politics that prevails in contemporary Turkey resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s perspective on Turkish politics of the 1930s. Adapting Laclau’s antagonistic politics to the analysis of contemporary Turkey produces a critical counter-narrative that reveals in effect a continuation of an authoritarian tradition, between the socio-political discourses of the 1930s CHP and the present AKP. Accordingly, discourses of both political movements are fundamentally inspired by the same logic of difference, one that reduces the role of the construction of equivalential chains among different pre-existing political demands to a pragmatist game of hegemony. Their authoritarianisms, however, differ from one another in terms of the symbolic frameworks within which each respective regime is sustained. Whereas the early CHP represented French-inspired, Jacobin-like, nationalist approach to democracy, the AKP has established US-paralleling, neoliberal and neo-conservative governmentality, which was made public in the party’s New Turkey Manifesto in 2014.