The Map as apparatus: Ontological entanglements and the simulacrum of Europeanization in Turkey

This article develops the concept of the Map to theorize how apparatuses in global politics can precede, shape, and ultimately replace the political realities they claim to represent. Drawing on Borges’ allegory of “the map that precedes the territory” in Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, I conceptualize the Map as a material–discursive apparatus that organizes subjects, institutions, and meanings before political practice itself. Integrating this with Laura Zanotti’s framework of ontological entanglements, the article builds a theoretical bridge between apparatus theory and simulation: apparatuses and simulacra converge as boundary-making practices that produce political reality rather than merely representing it. To demonstrate this dynamic, the article examines Turkey’s EU candidacy (2002–2025). The Copenhagen Criteria operated as a Map: designed to foster democratization, the apparatus became entangled with domestic political apparatuses and was re-coded by the Erdoğan administration. Rather than consolidating pluralistic democracy, EU conditionality generated a procedural simulacrum of democratization—hyper-visible, compensatory, and emptied of substantive content—thereby enabling Turkey’s shift toward electoral autocracy. By theorizing Europeanization as the Map, the article advances debates on apparatuses, simulation, and legitimacy in international political theory, showing how universal models can produce the very deformations they seek to remedy.