The Embedded Outsider: Turkey as a Middle Power and its Relations to Europe
Guests
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Associate Senior Policy Fellow, ECFR; Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe & Director, The Turkey Project, Brookings Institution
Evren Balta, Professor, Comparative Politics & International Politics, Özyeğin University
Galip Dalay, Senior Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa, Europe and Russia & Eurasia Programmes, Chatham House
Mario Krebs, First Counsellor, Head of Political Section, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Ankara
Chaired by
Anthony Dworkin, Senior Policy Fellow, ECFR
Turkey hosted this year’s NATO summit and fields the alliance’s second-largest army, arms Ukraine while trading with Russia, and remains an EU candidate whose accession talks collapsed years ago. Europeans keep asking whether Ankara can be anchored in the West or is drifting away. Both questions assume Turkey must eventually choose a home when in fact it has chosen not to.
Drawing on the forthcoming ECFR paper “An outsider within: The paradox of the Europe-Turkey relationship” authored by Asli Aydıntaşbaş and Evren Balta, this webinar will discuss how Turkey builds autonomy from inside Western structures, where that autonomy serves European interests and where it works against them, and what a strategy of managed interdependence would require of Brussels.
The event is being organized as part of ECFR’s Re:Order project. The Re:Order project is funded by Stiftung Mercator.