ABSTRACT
The central concern of this book was the accession of Turkey to the European Union. While obviously not the first book dealing with the topic and surely not the last, it is one of the first attempts to explore this issue not only from the European perspective but specifically from a Central European one. The Central European experience differs to some extent from the pan-European or Western European. The East Central European Countries (ECECs) underwent approximately four decades of non-democratic development after World War II. This experience became manifest in their different value framework, including their higher support for further enlargement of the European Union (EU) than we can find in the older EU member states. This attitude partially stems from their “lost Europeaness” when communism caused Europe to be for a long time identified culturally, politically, and geographically with Western Europe only – the Polish writer Andrej Stasiuk talks even today about “second hand” Europe.
