To Be or Not to Be European, That is the Question

Turkey, as the dominant other of Europe (Neumann, 1999, p.39), has been experiencing contradictions in its relations with Europe throughout the history, especially after the beginning of the new millennium. Walking in the streets under EU and Turkish flags waving together and visiting Europe one day without a visa has been a dream for every Turkish citizen since more than twenty years. However, along with this dream fading away, a governmental narrative aiming to create a neo-Ottoman society rather than a European one is starkly on the rise. A day of an average student who takes additional religion classes besides Ottoman language courses at school and then goes home to watch his/her favorite soap opera about the wars between glorious Muslim Turks and infidel Europeans, sounds like an ordinary day of a Turkish student for the last five years. But for policy makers and international relations researchers, there is so much to discover in this daily routine. This paper aims to analyze the relations between the EU and Turkey by examining the shift in Turkey’s collective identity from European to a neo-Ottoman identity with current government’s hegemonic project. This project can easily be seen in Turkey’s most famous popular culture products; soap operas. After a brief history of Turkey’s Europeanization, two soap operas, The Magnificent Century (2011) and Resurrection: Ertuğrul (2014), will be analyzed in terms of their content, the image of Turks and Europeans they reflect, and responses from Turkish government officials to the series in order to understand their efficiency in Turkish identity construction. Moreover, a possibility of a counter Orientalism which presents the othering process of Turks against Westerners in the opposite way of Said’s Orientalism (1979), by framing Europe as weak, infidel and cruel will be discussed in the paper.