DEVLET ÇIKARLARI MI? İNSAN HAKLARI MI? TÜRKİYE VE YUNANİSTAN BASININDA DÜZENSİZ GÖÇLE MÜCADELE TARTIŞMALARI
NATIONAL INTERESTS OR HUMAN RIGHTS? PRESS DISCUSSIONS ON THE FIGHT AGAINST IRREGULAR IMMIGRATION IN TURKEY AND GREECE

Summary/Abstract: On 18 March 2016 Turkey and the European Union (EU) agreed upon cooperation to stop irregular immigration from Turkey to the EU states via Greece. The agreement has two main dimensions: on the one hand it serves the national interests of the parties, but on the other hand it can be problematic in terms of human rights. This paper aims to provide answers to whether the national interest or the human rights dimension of the agreement prevailed the discussions in Turkey and Greece. For this purpose, within the theoretical framework of Habermas’s Communicative Action, the arguments are analyzed under two categories; if the arguments are justifying and/or criticizing the agreement by referring to the national interests then they are categorized as utility-based but if they are referring to the human-rights dimension then they are categorized as right-based. The analysis suggests that in Turkey and Greece, interest-based validity claims dominate the arguments supporting or criticizing the agreement in press vis-a-vis rights-based validity claims. Based on Habermas’s conceptualization of justifications, the paper argues that the 18 March Agreement is dominantly evaluated from the perspective of national interests in Turkey and Greece.

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