This paper will examine how, once a “High Porte” extending the “Silk Road” from Asia through Europe, Turkey could now be seen as an interface of the EU’s relations with the Arab world, aiming to analyze to what extent these two global actors are competing or complementary powers in a region balancing between revolution and evolution.
Therefore, my contention is that, the failure of the EU’s policies in the Mediterranean being based on the implementation gap between rhetoric and policy and its perceptions in the partner countries, the cooperation between EU and Turkey is progressively improving first, the dialogue between EU and the partner states concerning the common security challenges and second, the receptivity of the European norm-diffusion, breaking the cultural barriers and misperceptions.
