Talking Past while Needing One Another: The Complex and Ambiguous Relationship between the EU and Türkiye

The Republic of Türkiye was one hundred years old by October 29, 2023. This also means 100 years of the Turkish Republic’s foreign policy and diplomacy, 100 years of engagement with Europe, and an ambiguous relationship between the EU and Türkiye. In this paper, we argue that the relationship has always been characterised by competing forces of alignment and distancing from both sides. Thus, instead of glorifying EU-Türkiye relations or deploring their demise, in this study, we want to point to the ambiguities of the relationship around five themes in which both cooperation, harmonisation and conflict, divergence occur the most: identity, integration, economy, society, and security. We believe that these are both the main forces behind and affected by Türkiye’s 100-year-old Europeanization process. In conclusion, we attempt to clarify that specific historical junctures and circumstances have benefitted different sides in their struggles against each other, and the result is a complex web of entanglements and ruptures that defies reductionist characterisations as “pro-“ or “anti-European” in the past and today as well. Yet, we explain that Türkiye and Europe are entangled too deeply to completely break apart and too diverse to be attached to a clearly delineated joint future.