Babel of Meanings: Turkey's Syrian Border and its Diverse Articulations

When actors perceive a crisis, they will paint a picture of the situation by highlighting the circumstances that they believe led to this crisis. In this vein, some of the existing (or status quo) structures, norms, rules or relationships can be critically evaluated. In those moments, some actors might interpret the cracks and disruptions that crisis revealed not as the consequences of the crisis at hand but as the direct by-products of the social, economic, political and discursive structures and status quo. Thus, not the crisis but the existing structures are perceived as the main problem. In these cases, these actors might attempt to reconfigure them. This is the moment when an actor gains a political subjecthood and an autonomous agency. First the Arab Spring and then the Syrian civil war were disruptive events for the Turkey`s subjecthood. The former was represented as a long-awaited and delayed crack in the official Turkish narrative, with positive and affirmative connotations. It was cherished event. The later, on the other hand, was initially met with the same affirmation and positivity, but then its meaning was transformed. In this transformation, the meaning of the concept of a ‘border’ changed multiple times. The Turkey-Syria border was first made ‘invisible’: it was open so that people could flee to Turkey and experience the solidarity. Then it became a source of insecurity and chaos. Subsequently, the border became a line dividing ‘good’ people from ‘bad’ ones. Finally, the border turned to an empty notion: it could be crossed, redrawn, and reconfigured. In all these moments, Turkeys political subjectivity increased as Syrian crackdown intensified. The absence of meaning for Syria (and its border) made all meanings possible. In Turkey’s identity construction, the border played an essential role. In different periods of the Syrian civil war, the border with Turkey offered Turkish political agents meanings to shape their identities and justify their actions: it was a safe passage to ‘safety’ via ‘humanitarianism’, it was a frontier used to re-emphasise Turkey’s unity, nationhood, power and integrity, it was a void that only reliable and credible agents should fill. Keeping in mind the importance of dislocations for political subjects and all these changing articulations of the Syrian border, this chapter will examine the role of perceived dislocation in border discourse.