European Student Think Tank

Myth II: The socio-economic his­tory of Tur­key is totally dis­con­nec­ted from Europe!

There could be many reas­ons to voice such a claim but the two most strik­ing are as such; you are either com­pletely unin­formed about the Turkish-European social-economic-political his­tory or you know this claim is not true but you think the Europeans are so naïve that they would buy it and even see this as a reason why Tur­key should not be a part of the EU.

Pro­ponents of such argu­ments are act­ing as if the Turks appeared on earth in the last dec­ade. They seem to think that never in the his­tory the Turks and the nations of Medi­ter­ranean and “con­tin­ental” Europe mingled, traded, lived together and fought each other. Through war, com­merce, inter-marriage, archi­tec­tural design, the inter­ming­ling of cuisine, and myriad other ways, this ‘zone of civil­iz­a­tion’ has shared a com­mon des­tiny with Turks for over a thou­sand years.[1] Just by look­ing at the his­tory and inter­na­tional rela­tions lit­er­at­ure pro­duced on Turkish/Ottoman and European polit­ical, eco­nomic and social rela­tions you can tell that these two entit­ies are far from being dis­con­nec­ted. On the con­trary they have been shap­ing and re-shaping each other’s iden­tity for centuries.    

Let’s jump to the last cen­tury espe­cially after World War II. It has been 60 years since the French For­eign Min­is­ter Robert Schu­man presen­ted a plan for deeper cooper­a­tion in Europe on May 1950. On this day, which later on star­ted to be cel­eb­rated as Europe Day, the found­a­tion was laid for the European Coal and Steel Com­munity (ECSC) and, a few years later, the European Eco­nomic Com­munity (EEC).Turkey made its first move towards the European fam­ily in 1959 with its applic­a­tion to the EEC. Since then formal and informal, polit­ical, social, cul­tural and eco­nomic rela­tions con­tin­ued unabated and evolved from basic inter-state inter­ac­tion to deep multi-level cooper­a­tion con­sist­ing of gov­ern­mental as well as non-governmental and soci­etal act­ors. In the past 60 years the mag­nitude of eco­nomic rela­tions has increased tre­mend­ously, and the mobil­ity of goods has been ensured with cus­toms union arrange­ments which have had an immense pos­it­ive impact on com­merce for both sides of the deal. The cooper­a­tion among the Turk­ish and European gov­ern­ments are multi-faceted and take place on mul­tiple plat­forms; UN, NATO, OSCE, OECD just being a few of them. In addi­tion to these, more import­antly, social, cul­tural and edu­ca­tional inter­ac­tion has been bring­ing the sides ever closer. So when someone claims that the socio-economic his­tory of Tur­key and Europe are dis­con­nec­ted from each other, one needs to come up with his­tor­ical and con­tem­por­ary evid­ence to back this claim. Oth­er­wise it’s much ado about nothing. 

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[1] Selim Deringil, “The Turks and Europe: The Argu­ment from His­tory‟, Middle Eastern Studies,Vol. 43 No. 5, 2007, pp. 709-23.

Related posts:

1. The Myths about Tur­key: Part I
   April 1st, 2011
2. The Myths about Tur­key: Part IV
   April 9th, 2011
3. The Myths about Tur­key: Part III
   April 5th, 2011
4. Rethink­ing the EU’s future: Two play­ers of a game, Tur­key and the EU
   March 14th, 2012
5. Turkey-EU Rela­tions at Crit­ical Cross­road
   Octo­ber 17th, 2012