Abstract
The recent history of Turkey is characterised by major changes in public discourse and public opinion, related to the changing position of Turkey on the world stage. Changing attitudes toward European Union appear to be a marker of this transformation. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the perception of Europe and the world in the eyes of Turkish undergraduate students through a secondary analysis of a worldwide survey carried out in 2009-2010 by the FP7 EuroBroadmap project. The paper proposes first to test the hypothesis of a polarisation of Turkish representation by the European Union against the alternative hypothesis of a dual vision of Europe related to the ambiguity of Turkey’s situation. This part concludes that western and south European countries (like Italy, France, Britain and Spain), were still very positively viewed by Turkish students in 2009 and constitute a structuring pole of their worldwide representations. But the paper also examines variations in these average mental maps according to individual parameters. This second analysis reveals huge internal variations, according to place, gender and field of study and confirms that visions of the world held by students in this country are neither trivial nor consensual.
Highlights
: 1. Discussion of the hypothesis of a polarisation of Turkish representation by the European Union against the alternative hypothesis of a dual vision of Europe related to the ambiguity of Turkey’s situation
12 To answer the question: “How Turkey perceives itself in the world”, we first develop a classic geographical dialectic by searching for the places that polarise Turkish representations
15 Coming back to our question about the polarisation of Turkish representations, selfreliance of the Turkish point of view, could be seen in the representation of a weak attractiveness of a hypothetical European pole This loss of influence of Europe could have two different manifestations:
Summary
10 In other words, considering Turkey as an emerging power is not self-evident, especially regarding its general economic and geostrategic position in history. 51 According to this point, a first interpretation suggests that the location of Erzurum in the Turkish context may explain some elements of its specific representations, especially compared to the students of Istanbul, who significantly more often mention western countries as places where they would like to live. As a consequence of being more attracted by new regional powers and as people informed about new configurations in the world, these old centres may seem less attractive for them and at the same time, those students are more able to develop a kind of critical geopolitical approach By perceiving these old global powers less positively they may be describing an anti-imperialist geography from the Turkish point of view (see above), in connection with the way of teaching history and geography, for a group of individuals who are mostly going to become teachers in secondary schools. This particular situation of students in geography may cause them to develop a kind of “looking-glass rejection” of Europe (Yerasimos, Ibid.), seen in their mentions of Eastern or Asian countries, producing an oriented vision of the world
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