Turkish alignment with the West is not limited to strategic and diplomatic considerations. It is the outward expression of a profound internal change extending over a century-and-a-half of Turkish history, and resulted from a determined and sustained attempt to endow the Turkish people with those freedoms, economic, political, and intellectual, which represent the best that our Western societies have to offer.1
As an economically developing country spanning two continents and having a history grounded in both the West and the East, Turkey represents a dramatic case of a “torn” country,2 possessing several types of political and social cleavages. Borrowing terminology and insights from the seminal work on social cleavages of Lipset and Rokkan, Şerif Mardin argued over three decades ago that political life in Turkey was defined by the differences between a more modern, centralizing, secularized, and Western-oriented “center” and a poorer, more traditional and Islamic “periphery.”3 Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish center has frequently fought against what it views as the backward, traditional ways of Ottoman Anatolia and has sought to Westernize Turkey. Turkey’s drive to join the European Union (EU) can be seen through this lens as the “culmination of a perennial quest for participation in European political and social space.”4