The Europeanization of MÜSİAD: Political opportunism, Economic Europeanization, Islamic Euroscepticism

Abstract

This article examines MÜSİAD’s economic and political Europeanization from 1994 to 2008. Europeanization is demonstrated to be an interactive process generating changes in a domestic actor’s policy preferences, styles, resources, and discourses. MÜSİAD’s Europeanization is then shown to be part of a social learning process resulting from its members’ exposure to European business practices and culture. Furthermore, Turkey’s EU accession process led to a creative adoption of European norms and their reinterpretation with regard to the association’s concerns about religious issues, giving birth to an Islamic rhetoric expressing criticism of the EU and challenging the Turkish secular regime’s policies towards religiously conservative demands. However, this Islamic Euroscepticism not only jeopardizes MÜSİAD’s support for Turkey’s complete compliance with secular universal norms but also reproduces the clash of civilizations thesis that Turkey’s accession project to the EU initially aimed to obliterate.

Keywords

• europeanization
• euroscepticism
• islamic movement
• political opportunism
• alliance of civilizations