“Towards a Turkish eu.entity: A semiotic approach to the reading of EUROPA’s Website cyber-representation of a European Turkey”

The European Union has recently acknowledged that the new media must be employed as the most advanced political fight back in the field of communication against the globalization process. As a matter of fact, technological developments have always stirred the architects of the European transnational democracy who succeeded in granting IT a high-flying role in the formation of Europe’s multifaceted identity. The White Paper on European Governance (Commission 2001), in particular, has underlined that “Information and communication technologies have an important role” in facilitating a mutual communication amongst all citizens of Europe. Therefore, an inclusive examination of the meanings of European identity must necessarily take account of the development and current implication of "computer mediated communication" (CMC), "cyber-communities" and "cyber-identities". This paper investigates some semiotic strategies used by the EUROPA website to enlarge, shape and reframe the foundations of a possible European cyber-identity through the use of ‘self-constitutional’ discoursive strategies. The study, in particular, analyses the in progress debates on the perspective EU-membership of Turkey on the background of the accession negotiations started in 2005. A multifunctional analysis to the study of the different signifying codes used in the communicative process enacted by the EUROPA website will be supported by a critical semiotic model which allows an evaluation of the EU policies for the diffusion and promotion of Turkey as a fully-fledged European member state. The focal point of the analysis lies on the concepts of "cultural compatibility" of Turkey, by addressing mainly the aspects of the "political conditionality" of the EU-membership of Turkey through the semiotic analysis of the photo gallery in the Enlargement section.