ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter is rather different from those that have gone before. It focuses less on the nature and position of the Alevi communities in Europe, which have been explored in the earlier chapters, and more on the position of the Alevi as minority communities in contemporary Europe countries and the European Union. The European diaspora of the Alevi community offers a particular lens with which to examine how policies construct conceptions of the migrant and the minority, and their citizenship in terms of identity, rights and status (Joppke 2010). The Alevi are in Turkey an indigenous minority, long established and possessing theoretically full rights as Turkish citizens. However, their existence as a community within Turkey represents – for some Turks – a challenge to the hegemony of a Turkish culture in which Turkish, Sunni Islam and Ottoman identities are seen as completely and necessarily interwoven. Outside Turkey, the Alevi community is similarly made invisible or marginalised: they are often subsumed within the category of ‘Turkish’ by the host community, and granted rights and status in the light of their formal Turkish citizenship. Within the European Union there are competing constructions of what citizenship status means, and how it is acquired; emerging constructions of what kind of rights might be available in the European Union; and competing and changing notions of what terms such as ‘integration’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘assimilation’ mean, in particular varying conceptions of the position of indigenous and non-indigenous populations. The situation of the Alevis in these European Union countries thus offers a particularly illuminating canvas on which to examine these ideas.
