‘Making the Margins of Europe’: Marginalization, Europeanization and Islam in the contest for Public Space.

Abstract

This article intervenes into the debate around European identity, political Islam, and Turkey’s potential accession to the European Union through treating Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” as a bordering discourse. The article argues that the ‘clash thesis’ highlights uncertainty around cultural change in Europe as well as a tension within European Integration itself between the Nation as State and the Nation as political and cultural identity. Discourses which position specific groups as being unEuropean, or less European can be linked to the shifting meaning of Europe in light of political and economic integration and its affects on the Nation as titular owner of the State. The article argues that the debate around the compatibility of Islam and Europe and therefore, also the debate around Turkey’s accession to the European Union must be situated within the context of boundary formations driven by im/migration to Europe and within Europe and the rise in public visibility and assertiveness by second and third generation Islamic communities, thereby moving the debate beyond the Self /Other dichotomy upon which the ‘clash thesis’ functions by understanding the boundaries of Europe as negotiable and culturally situated within a publicly mediated discourse about ‘Europe’.