ABSTRACT
Turkey’s aspiration to be integrated into the European state system could be said to have started in the eighteenth century when the Ottoman Turks realized that they had fallen behind the European states in terms of military technology, administrative methods and economic prosperity. Therefore, Turkey’s relations with the prominent European states and organizations since the eighteenth century have been interpreted by the Turkish governing elites in the crudest terms as a journey to reach the goal of what has come to be known as ‘the contemporary level of civilization’ by means of a process of Europeanization/modernization.
