Turkey and Europe’s Difficult History
Relations between Turkey and the rest of Europe have often been defined by suspicion and mistrust. Do Ottoman-era grievances still hold sway?
‘Six decades of integration cannot be undone, even by a strongman like Erdoğan’
Dimitar Bechev, Author of Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (Yale University Press, 2022)
If Turkey and Europe were Facebook users their relationship would be permanently set on ‘It’s Complicated’. Starting with the late Ottoman Tanzimat reforms (1839-76), the model societies of Western Europe have provided a blueprint for Turkey’s modernisation. From Kemal Ataturk’s republic in the interwar period to the early years under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, when the desire to join the EU guided domestic politics, Turkey has sought to emulate advanced European countries in order to close the gap with what Kemalists called ‘contemporary civilisation’.
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