Von Der Leyen’s Quip About Turkiye Exposed The Artificiality Of Its Partnership With The EU

Turkiye’s partnership with what became the EU was only due to US machinations after World War II.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sparked a scandal in EU-Turkish ties after telling the media in late April that “We must succeed in completing the European continent so that it is not influenced by Russia, Türkiye, or China.” The conflation of Turkiye, a fellow NATO member and EU candidate country, with the EU’s Russian rival and increasingly perceived Chinese one suggested that Brussels perceives it the same way. Her quip exposed the artificiality of their decades-long partnership.

Although at times entering into opportunistic temporary partnerships with the European Great Powers, Turkiye’s Ottoman predecessor state has historically been Europe’s primary rival, more so than the Russian Empire was misportrayed as by the Brits since the Ottomans were civilizationally dissimilar. They also conquered the Balkans up to Vienna and occupied part of Europe for over half a millennium. Turkiye’s partnership with what became the EU was only due to US machinations after World War II.

The perceived need to contain the USSR led to the creation of NATO in 1949, three years after which Greece and Turkiye joined as a means of helping Greece and Europe as a whole overcome their historical rivalry with Turkiye, including through the fostering of a European-Turkish partnership in general. One form that this took was the massive import of Turkish guest workers by the erstwhile West Germany, the dual core of the EU’s European Economic Community predecessor together with France.

Migration, economic ties, and military cooperation continued in the decades since, but it quickly became clear that civilizational dissimilarities between Europe and Turkiye preordained that the latter’s application to join what later became the EU would be indefinitely postponed on various pretexts. Closer trade and military ties are fine, but giving Turkiye voting rights over European affairs isn’t, let alone visa-free travel for what are now its nearly 90 million people (slightly more than Germany itself).

The aforesaid assessment was already the case during the liberal-globalist heyday of the 1990s and 2000s till the 2015 Migrant Crisis and especially Trump’s election in 2016 led to a revival of conservative-nationalist sentiment across Europe that’s since grown after the latest phase of the Ukrainian Conflict. Trump’s return coupled with that protracted conflict’s severe socio-economic consequences for average Europeans turbocharged such sentiment and heralded the beginning of the civilization-state era.

This refers to those polities that left lasting socio-political legacies on others over the centuries, and Europe as a whole is most definitely one of them, though it also has some distinct civilizations therein. Accordingly, the civilization-state era is witnessing the reconsolidation of these spheres like what von der Leyen envisages as regards her self-declared quest to “complete the European continent” and even their growth such as the newly accelerated expansion of “Neo-Ottoman” Turkiye’s influence in Central Asia.

This doesn’t mean that civilizations are destined to clash, but nor does it mean that they’re destined to converge like what some assumed would happen when Turkiye applied to join the EU’s predecessor. Rather, the reality of civilizational distinctiveness is beginning to dawn on all, but those two in particular will always have a special relationship for geographic reasons, historical ones, and their respective roles in actively containing their shared historical Russian rival at their shared US senior partner’s behest.