European Union as a Security Actor in The Eastern Mediterranean

Maritime boundary disputes, Arab-Israel conflicts, Cyprus problem are decades old affairs in Eastern Mediterranean region. Due to the unsettlement of these issues, a great amount of literature has been accumulated on these topics. However, the discovery of offshore gas resources and post-Arab spring environment in the region have increased both the strategic importance of the area and substantially changed existing power structures and added new crisis to the region which requires different approaches due to the fundamental rationalities of the current issues like refugee crisis since 2010. Although there is flux of studies about newly emerged regional issues, this study will focus on the EU as a complex body which has recently developed further security capabilities and is the most institutionalized and dominant actor of the European Security complex. At first instance, all bodies of the EU produce specific knowledge on the Eastern Mediterranean Conflict particularly emphasizing the maritime dispute and drilling activities of Türkiye, Cyprus and Greece; ignoring all other aspects of the region. Moreover, this process of the EU’s engagement to the Eastern Mediterranean dispute triggers the securitization of the issue in a specific way. Thus, the EU reconstructs itself as both an actor and agent, along with all the policies in an issue called “Eastern Mediterranean dispute” with securitization mechanisms. The EU further develops different discourses and policies for coordinating, managing and regulating the conflict within the limits of its complex power structures. Deconstructing the EU’s conceptualization of the Eastern Mediterranean Dispute and its security agency, using the Copenhagen School’s conceptual framework and critical discourse analysis tools, this study is expected to provide new ways of understanding for common foreign and security policies of the EU going beyond the debates of intergovernmentalism, state centered power structures and zero sum games regarding the EU’s engagement to the Eastern Mediterranean conflict.