Turkey and the European Community: Forging New Identities along Old Lines

In: New perspectives on Turkey: NPT, Band 8, S. 1-14

Abstract

Questions of modernization have been closely related to issues of identity and therefore of internal order and foreign policy in Turkey ever since the nineteenth century. For Ottoman reformers and their successors in the Turkish Republic, modernization, in turn, has meant the fashioning of the polity along European lines or "westernization." This transformation of the land of the infidel from enemy to a societal blueprint to be emulated has brought in its wake serious problems regarding identity and appurtenance. Over a period of a hundred years, the polity has transformed itself from an eastern empire to a modern nation-state seeking inclusion within the institutional and cultural fold of the West. This makes Turkey an interesting case to look at, especially since, in many other countries outside the West, identity has largely been defined in terms of opposition to the West.