ABSTRACT
European Commissioners have long described enlargement as the EU's most successful foreign and security policy. This chapter outlines the EU's enlargement policy and how it operates through the analogy with pastoral power. It introduces the perennially liminal case of Turkey, the ‘black sheep’ of the European herd. The chapter extends the pastoral analogy to demonstrate the interests and identities that are served and produced through the constructive ambiguity surrounding Turkey's final European ‘vocation’. Offering a critical reading of the EU's enlargement policy, rethinking it through an analogy with pastoral power, is not simply trying to offer yet another way of conceputalising the EU as an actor (civilian, ethical, normative, and now pastoral too!). Rather, it seeks to provide a specific reading of a particular foreign policy – enlargement – in order to highlight the ambivalence of that policy: As freeing and constraining, transforming and constituting, involving choice and submission.
