ABSTRACT
Over four million people from Turkey live in Europe today. They mainly immigrated for economic reasons, arriving en masse from the beginning of the 1960s, generally following bilateral agreements between Turkey and European countries, primarily Germany. Their dispersion throughout the various western European countries sets them apart from other post colonial immigration movements. In fact, unlike North Africans and people of the Indian peninsula whose routes, drawn by the history of decolonization, led to France and Great Britain respectively, migrants from Turkey represent the European space as ‘undifferentiated’, even if a very large majority of them live in Germany, a country which remains the prime reference for Turkish immigration and that refers to its Turkish immigration as the Tiirkenproblem. For Turkey, they are a new social category: the Turks abroad. Navigating along various family, business and associational networks, they establish a link between the private and public space, as well as between economic and political space within Europe and between Turkey and Europe. They are hence invested with new roles.
