European Student Think Tank

“Tur­key is not in Europe”. If you have ever found your­self in a dis­cus­sion on the future of the EU enlarge­ment and the Turk­ish case, I bet you have heard this over and over again. I did hear this a lot from the Turko-skeptics and every time I ask them the simplest yet most com­plic­ated ques­tion: which Europe are we talk­ing about?

Iran and Tur­key are get­ting closer than ever and enjoy­ing a unique growth in trade and energy cooper­a­tion. Nation­als of the two coun­tries are enjoy­ing visa free travel and there are plans to use Turkish/Iranian cur­ren­cies for trade instead of US dol­lars. Does this mean an ideo­lo­gical con­ver­gence of the two? Are they becom­ing the same des­pite their sharp reli­gious (Sunni vs. Shi’a) and polit­ical (sec­u­lar vs. Islamic) differences?

Are Turks and “Europeans” vir­tu­ally dis­con­nec­ted from each other polit­ic­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally and socially? Claim­ing a dis­con­nec­tion is a pop­u­lar phe­nom­ena shared by many of the crit­ics of Turk­ish mem­ber­ship to the EU. It is fas­cin­at­ing that the myth of dis­con­nec­tion is still around even though there is no his­tor­ical or con­tem­por­ary evid­ence to sup­port it.

A coun­try with a 70+ mil­lion mostly Muslim pop­u­la­tion is at the door­steps of the EU: the Turks! What do we know about them and how much of what we know actu­ally reflects real­ity? It is not time to talk about who they are but about who they are not. Let’s ana­lyze some of the European myths about “the other” start­ing with the “Tro­jan Horse” analogy.