Türkiye in the European Cultural Space

The image of Europe as a cultural space is discursively constructed through the representation of Türkiye which has a place in a multireligious and multicultural Europe, and the representation of Türkiye as a non-European threat to the European cultural space. On the one hand, under the representation of Türkiye which has a place in a multireligious and multicultural Europe, Europe is discursively constructed as multireligious and multicultural, which sustains a space for Türkiye on the condition that it applies European values and principles equated with the Copenhagen criteria. On the other hand, the multicultural policies are rejected within the representation of Türkiye as a non-European threat to the European cultural space, while the images of Türkiye as a cultural threat with its Islamization agenda and Türkiye as a cultural other with gender inequalities, honor killings, LGBT exclusion, and nationalists are also analyzed under this representation. In both representations, some discourses in which the MEPs from the same group or country are divided are detected and uncovered in this chapter, as well as a convergence and a divergence compared to the findings of the period 1997–2007.