Introduction: A Puzzle of Proximity and Passivity For more than two decades, the Republic of Türkiye under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pursued a foreign policy that European officials routinely describe in terms that would trigger immediate sanctions if applied to almost any other neighbouring state. Turkish armed forces occupy thirty six percent of the territory of an EU member state. Turkish survey vessels have drilled in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus, prompting the European Union to adopt a restrictive measures framework in 2019 that has been extended repeatedly with an empty list of designations. Turkish President Erdoğan has threatened Greece with war over the exercise of sovereign rights and has maintained a casus belli against a NATO ally for decades. Turkish drones have reshaped battlefields in Libya, Syria, and Nagorno Karabakh, projecting a vision of neo Ottoman power that Ankara’s own ideologues celebrate as the restoration of Ottoman era glories. Turkish officials have jailed journalists at rates that place the country among the world’s leading incarcerators of media workers, and in March 2025 the government arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the leading opposition candidate for the presidency, on charges widely viewed as political. The Strategic Anchors: Why Türkiye Became Indispensable Any explanation of European passivity must begin with the two levers that Ankara holds over Brussels, levers that European officials themselves identify when they speak candidly. The first is migration. The second is NATO. These are not abstract concerns. They are operational realities that shape the calculus of every European capital. The migration lever is the more visible of the two. The 2016 EU Türkiye statement, often called the refugee deal, established a framework in which Türkiye would prevent irregular migrants from crossing into Greece in exchange for financial support, visa liberalization for Turkish citizens, and the opening of accession chapters. The deal was born of a specific crisis: the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers in Europe in 2015, a moment that destabilized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and reshaped the politics of the entire continent. Merkel spearheaded the negotiations and went out on a limb to seal the agreement, which aimed to keep asylum seekers from entering Europe and helped her fulfil a promise of a marked reduction in arrivals. From the moment of its signature, the deal gave Erdoğan a whip hand. When a German court banned him from addressing a rally of supporters in Cologne via live link in 2016, Ankara responded by threatening to tear up the agreement. When the EU demanded that Türkiye meet seventy two conditions for visa liberalization, including human rights benchmarks and the rewriting of anti terror laws, Ankara refused and the deadline passed. The deal survived because both sides needed it, but the asymmetry of urgency favoured Ankara. Europe needed the flow of migrants stopped. Erdoğan needed the money and the political validation. A decade later, the structure of the relationship remains unchanged. The European Commission stated in 2025 that the EU Türkiye statement remains valid and is the main framework of cooperation with Türkiye in the area of migration. Financial support has continued, with one billion euros allocated for 2024, five hundred seventy million euros planned for 2025, three hundred seventy eight million for 2026, and two hundred three million for 2027. Türkiye continues to host approximately three point one million refugees, including two point nine million Syrians under temporary protection. European parliamentarians routinely express gratitude for this hosting arrangement even as they condemn the authoritarian turn. The gratitude is genuine, and it is also a trap. Every European statement that thanks Türkiye for hosting refugees simultaneously weakens the case for confronting Ankara over Cyprus, over the Eastern Mediterranean, or over the imprisonment of journalists. The logic is understood in every corridor of the Berlaymont: the government that controls the migration tap cannot be treated as a pariah. The NATO lever is equally consequential. Türkiye joined the alliance in 1952 and has never been a peripheral member in any meaningful military sense. It possesses the second largest army in NATO after the United States. Its territory hosts critical infrastructure including the Incirlik air base, where US nuclear weapons are widely believed to be stored, the Kurecik early warning radar system covering the Middle East, the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir, and forward bases at Konya and Istanbul. Türkiye’s geostrategic position gives it unique advantages across all three of the alliance’s core tasks: collective defence, crisis management, and cooperative security. The war in Ukraine and the return of Donald Trump to the White House have intensified European dependence on Turkish military capacity. As one analysis observed, Türkiye now has things that other NATO members in Europe want: a large army, a dynamic defence industry, and a leader with a unique ability to engage Trump. When Erdoğan hosted the NATO summit in Ankara in 2026, he did so as a leader whose resources are considered fundamental to the alliance’s future, while his increasingly autocratic government was treated as a concern for another time. The NATO lever operates through a mechanism that is subtle but pervasive. European defence planners know that the alliance’s southern flank cannot be secured without Türkiye. They know that Turkish drones, Turkish artillery shells, and Turkish naval assets are integral to any credible deterrence posture in the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. They also know that Ankara has demonstrated a willingness to use its NATO membership as leverage. When Sweden and Finland sought to join the alliance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ankara delayed ratification until it had extracted commitments on the PKK and, from the United States, approval of a major F 16 sale. The message was unmistakable: Türkiye will capitalize on its position in NATO as much as it upholds the alliance. European governments absorbed that message and adjusted their behaviour accordingly. Criticism of Turkish domestic repression became quieter. Questions about Cyprus became less frequent. The strategic anchor held, and the normative agenda drifted. Economic Integration Without Political Conditionality The third pillar of European acquiescence is economic. The EU Türkiye customs union, which entered into force on 31 December 1995, has created a relationship of deep integration without corresponding political leverage. Bilateral trade reached a record high of over two hundred seventeen billion euros in 2025, with Türkiye ranking as the EU’s fifth largest trade partner and accounting for four point two percent of total EU goods trade. The EU is Türkiye’s largest goods import and export partner by a significant margin: in 2025, some forty two point seven percent of Türkiye’s exported goods were destined for the EU, while thirty five point three percent of its imported goods originated from the union. Total trade in services between the two sides amounted to almost forty two billion euros in 2024. These figures describe a relationship of mutual dependence, but the dependence is asymmetrical in a way that advantages Ankara’s political autonomy. The European Council on Foreign Relations has captured the paradox with precision: no partner has been able to match Europe’s market, investment stock, and dense supply chains, and Ankara’s economic autonomy therefore has limits. Türkiye can diversify eastwards, but the capital, technology, and markets on which much of its industry depends remain Western. That dependence is sharpened by chronic macroeconomic fragility, including high inflation, a weak lira, and reliance on external financing, which has repeatedly forced Ankara to seek Gulf and Western capital. Yet this dependence has not translated into political compliance. Through the customs union, Türkiye aligns with relevant EU regulations but has no say in making them. The agreement is outdated, excluding services, digital commerce, public procurement, agriculture, and climate regulation. The European Commission proposed negotiations to modernize it in 2016, but the European Council has yet to approve a mandate. The result is a relationship that captures a contradiction in Turkish foreign policy: Ankara seeks privileged access to the EU economy while demanding political distance from Brussels, and much of its industrial power, export capacity, and ability to attract investment still depends on its position at the edge of Europe. For European governments, the economic relationship creates a constituency for restraint. German industry, Italian manufacturers, Spanish exporters, and Dutch logistics firms all have material interests in maintaining open trade with Türkiye. The customs union is not simply a technical arrangement. It is a political settlement that has generated profits, jobs, and supply chain efficiencies across the continent. Any serious attempt to use economic leverage against Ankara would impose costs on European firms and consumers, and those costs would be concentrated in specific sectors and specific regions. The political economy of the relationship therefore favours continuity. When the European Parliament calls for the modernization of the customs union, it invariably adds the caveat that modernization must be based on strict conditionality regarding human rights and fundamental freedoms. But the caveat has not been operationalized. The mandate remains unapproved. The conditionality remains a rhetorical aspiration rather than a binding framework. The arms trade illustrates the same pattern in a more direct form. Germany approved the delivery of forty Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Türkiye in 2025, reversing an earlier block that had been imposed over the arrest of an opposition leader. Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly welcomed Türkiye’s decision to procure the jets. The approval was justified in the language of alliance solidarity and defence industrial cooperation. The fact that the recipient government had imprisoned the mayor of Istanbul and was actively prosecuting journalists and political opponents did not prevent the sale. The logic of strategic partnership overrode the logic of human rights conditionality, and the sale proceeded. The Migration Deal as a Mechanism of Impunity The migration deal deserves separate treatment because it is the clearest example of how a humanitarian emergency was converted into a structure of impunity. The deal was not simply an agreement about borders. It was a political bargain that traded European financial support and political validation for Turkish border control, and in doing so it legitimized the Turkish government’s claim to be a indispensable partner rather than a problematic neighbour. The European Parliament’s own debate records show that from the beginning, the deal was accompanied by requests for additional funds, visa liberalization, and the opening of accession chapters. Ankara learned that it could extract concessions by threatening to open the migration tap, and it has repeated the threat whenever European criticism has become too loud. The consequences of this structure are visible in the way European officials speak about Türkiye. When EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas travelled to Ankara in July 2026, she praised Türkiye as a key partner on security, migration, and energy and noted that the country is making a significant contribution to protecting NATO’s eastern flank. She did not mention the ban on protests or the rounding up of dissidents that had occurred days earlier. The silence was not accidental. It was the predictable outcome of a relationship in which migration cooperation is treated as a higher order priority than democratic governance. As one Greek Cypriot official put it, Brussels stays quiet because Ankara holds two levers over Europe: an illegal migration tap that it can open or shut at will, and a seat on NATO’s southern flank which nobody wants to lose. The official described this silence as cowardice in a diplomat’s suit. The description is harsh, but it captures the structural logic accurately. European governments have decided that the costs of confronting Ankara over migration are higher than the costs of tolerating its domestic repression and its regional adventurism. The migration deal has also had a secondary effect that is less often discussed. It has created a class of European officials and institutions whose professional mandate is to manage the relationship with Türkiye, and whose career incentives favour the continuation of the deal over its disruption. The deal has generated budgets, programmes, monitoring mechanisms, and a vocabulary of partnership that shapes how European officials think about Ankara. Once a relationship acquires this institutional density, it becomes resistant to change. The path of least resistance is always to renew the framework, extend the funding, and postpone the confrontation. Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean as Acceptable Costs The most morally consequential dimension of European passivity concerns Cyprus. The Republic of Cyprus is the only EU member state whose territory is militarily occupied by a foreign entity, and that foreign entity is Türkiye. Turkish forces invaded the island in 1974 and have never left. Thirty six percent of Cyprus sits behind Turkish tanks and a puppet administration that no country on earth recognizes other than Türkiye. Ankara has spent decades shipping in settlers to alter the demographics of the north, stripping Greek Cypriot families of property they still legally own, and holding Varosha as a bargaining chip. The European Parliament’s debates routinely note that the Erdoğan regime maintains an illegal military presence in Cyprus and multiplies provocations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet the accession negotiations with Türkiye have been at a standstill since 2018, and no further chapters can be considered for opening or closing. The standstill has not been converted into a formal suspension. Türkiye remains a candidate country. It continues to receive pre accession funding. It participates in EU programmes like Erasmus and Horizon Europe. The European response to the Cyprus occupation illustrates the priority ordering that governs EU Türkiye relations. The occupation is acknowledged. It is condemned in resolutions and debates. It is not met with consequences that would impose meaningful costs on Ankara. The reason is not that European officials lack legal tools. The reason is that the tools are considered too costly to use. A serious confrontation over Cyprus would jeopardize the migration deal, complicate NATO cooperation, and disrupt trade. It would also require European governments to accept a period of instability in the Eastern Mediterranean that they are not prepared to manage. The occupation therefore becomes an acceptable cost of managing Erdoğan’s temper, as the Greek Cypriot official quoted earlier put it. The phrase is revealing. It suggests that European policy is not based on a judgment that the occupation is legitimate. It is based on a judgment that the occupation is tolerable, given the alternatives. The Eastern Mediterranean dimension of the relationship follows the same logic. Türkiye’s unauthorized drilling activities prompted the EU to adopt a restrictive measures framework in 2019, but the framework has been extended with an empty list of designations, meaning that no individual or entity has actually been sanctioned under it. The European Union has described the Turkish Libyan maritime memorandum as null and void and contrary to the law of the sea, but the declaration has not been followed by enforcement measures that would change Ankara’s calculus. Turkish jets continue to cross into Greek airspace on a near weekly basis, and Turkish survey vessels continue to test the continental shelf whenever Ankara wants to send a message. Each time the message lands, it fades from the news cycle, and the European response remains confined to statements of solidarity with Greece and Cyprus that carry no operational consequence. The concept of Mavi Vatan, or Blue Homeland, which envisions Turkish sovereignty over vast maritime areas that include Greek islands, is taught in Turkish naval academies as doctrine. It represents a direct challenge to the territorial order that the EU claims to uphold. Yet European institutions have not treated it as a fundamental threat to the European security order. They have treated it as a bilateral dispute between Greece and Türkiye, and they have encouraged the parties to resolve it through dialogue. The framing of the dispute as bilateral is itself a political choice. It removes the issue from the realm of EU norms and places it in the realm of diplomatic management, where the default outcome is the preservation of the status quo. The status quo favours the stronger party, and the stronger party is Türkiye. The Diaspora as a Vector of Influence A less visible but equally important factor in European passivity is the role of the Turkish diaspora and its associated lobbying structures. Türkiye’s European embeddedness is demographic as well as institutional. At the end of 2024, around two million Turkish citizens held valid residence permits in the EU, excluding naturalized citizens and second generation Turks born in Europe. Germany alone is home to about two point six million people of Turkish background, the country’s largest single origin immigrant community. Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden also have sizeable Turkish communities. These communities connect Turkish cities and regions to European labour markets, schools, businesses, media, and political parties. They also make Europe an arena of Turkish domestic politics: governments and opposition parties campaign among overseas voters, while disputes about nationalism, religion, Kurdish identity, and democratic rights spill into European public life. The Turkish government has cultivated this diaspora through organizations that function as extensions of the ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP. The Union of International Democrats, known as UID, presents itself on its website as a non governmental organization committed to social peace and harmony and opposed to all forms of discrimination. Its statutes declare that it pursues no party political goals and is politically and ideologically neutral. German security authorities and academic experts have reached a different conclusion. They describe the UID as a lobby organ of President Erdoğan and a propaganda centre that mobilizes AKP voters and represents Erdoğan’s political interests in Germany. The UID has been mentioned for years in reports of the domestic intelligence service as an unofficial foreign organization of the AKP in Germany, with the capacity to directly influence the formation of opinion and behaviour among the Turkish diaspora and indirectly to influence political decision making processes in Germany. Documents from the American branch of the UID, which registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, explicitly identify the AKP as a foreign principal and describe the organization of political, social, and cultural activities among Turkish citizens for the party. The existence of these structures matters for European policy because they create a political constituency that is responsive to Ankara’s framing of events. When European parliaments debate resolutions on the Armenian genocide, on Cyprus, or on the imprisonment of journalists, they can expect a reaction from diaspora organizations that are aligned with the Turkish government. The reaction is not always decisive, but it raises the political cost of confrontation. It also reinforces a narrative in which criticism of the Turkish government is presented as hostility to the Turkish community as a whole. This narrative is useful to Ankara because it obscures the distinction between the Turkish state and Turkish citizens, and it makes European politicians more cautious about speaking plainly about the character of the regime. The diaspora factor operates alongside a broader phenomenon that might be called the normalization of authoritarianism. European publics have become accustomed to seeing Erdoğan described as a strongman, an autocrat, or a sultan. The vocabulary of exception has become the vocabulary of routine. When a political leader is consistently described in these terms, the description loses its capacity to shock. It becomes part of the background noise of international affairs. The result is a form of desensitization that makes it easier for European governments to continue business as usual. The words of condemnation are still spoken, but they are spoken in a register that signals that no action will follow. The condemnation becomes a ritual, and the ritual becomes a substitute for policy. The Media Frame and the Production of Selective Outrage The European media landscape plays a role in this process that deserves scrutiny. European outlets do report on Turkish authoritarianism. They report on the imprisonment of journalists, the crackdown on protests, and the occupation of Cyprus. But the framing of these reports is often shaped by a set of assumptions that limit their political impact. A critical discourse analysis of Deutsche Welle’s coverage of Türkiye’s stance on Sweden’s NATO membership found a consistent pattern of negatively connoted language depicting Türkiye and President Erdoğan as authoritarian, obstructionist, and opportunistic. Lexical choices such as threaten, stall, u turn, and so called terrorist contributed to a discourse that delegitimized Türkiye’s security concerns and diplomatic agency. The study concluded that these findings reflect a broader trend in Western media narratives that problematize non Western dissent and reinforce dominant geopolitical perspectives. This finding is important because it suggests that European media coverage of Türkiye is simultaneously critical and limited. It is critical of Erdoğan’s methods, but it is often framed within a geopolitical narrative that treats Türkiye as a difficult ally rather than a systemic challenge. The coverage focuses on the personality of the leader, on his rhetoric, and on his tactical maneuvers. It pays less attention to the structural relationship between European economic and security interests and Turkish impunity. The result is a public discourse that generates outrage at specific incidents while failing to connect those incidents to the policies that enable them. European citizens learn that Erdoğan is a problem, but they do not learn that their own governments are part of the problem. The media frame therefore performs a function that is compatible with the interests of European governments: it allows them to appear critical of Ankara while continuing to cooperate with it. The contrast with coverage of other authoritarian states is instructive. When European media report on Russia, they routinely frame the coverage in terms of a systemic threat that requires a comprehensive response. When they report on Türkiye, the framing is more ambivalent. Türkiye is presented as a strategically located ally whose behaviour is problematic but whose cooperation is indispensable. The ambivalence is not necessarily deliberate, but it has political effects. It signals to European publics that the Turkish case is different, that the normal rules do not apply, and that the costs of confrontation are too high to contemplate. The media frame thus reinforces the policy frame. The Collapse of the Normative Framework The deeper explanation for European passivity lies in the transformation of the EU’s own normative framework. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the European Union presented itself as a normative power that could transform candidate countries through the magnetic attraction of membership. The accession process was designed to socialize elites into democratic norms, to strengthen institutions, and to create a political culture in which human rights and the rule of law were internalized rather than imposed. Türkiye was a test case for this model. It became a candidate country in 1999, opened accession negotiations in 2005, and was held up as an example of how the EU could anchor a Muslim majority democracy in the European order. That model has collapsed. Academic analysis traces a three phase evolution in EU Türkiye relations: from early consent and reform, to stagnation, and finally to counter hegemonic confrontation. The EU’s shift to material bargaining, especially after the 2016 migration deal, hastened Türkiye’s authoritarian turn and revealed the EU’s normative contradictions. The chapter argues that the EU’s normative power over Türkiye deteriorated, giving way to transactionalism, migration securitization, and authoritarian resilience. In other words, the EU stopped trying to transform Türkiye and started trying to manage it. The management model is based on a trade off between cooperation on migration and security and a tacit acceptance of democratic regression. The trade off has become the operating framework of the relationship, and it has proven remarkably durable. The durability of the framework is reinforced by the absence of a credible alternative. European governments know that suspending Türkiye’s accession process would not improve the situation on the ground. It would remove what little leverage the EU retains and would push Ankara further towards Russia, China, and the Gulf. The logic of the lesser evil is invoked routinely in European capitals. The argument is that engagement, even flawed engagement, is better than isolation. The argument has a certain plausibility, but it ignores the fact that the engagement has been structured in a way that asks almost nothing of Ankara. The conditionality that was supposed to be the core of the accession process has been reduced to a rhetorical formula that is repeated in communiqués and ignored in practice. The European Parliament can call for a tougher response, as it did in 2025 when it urged the EU to issue an effective and bold response to the Erdoğan government’s attack on the rule of law and human rights. But the Parliament does not control the instruments of foreign policy. The Council and the Commission do, and their calculus is shaped by the strategic anchors described earlier. The result is a relationship in which the EU continues to describe Türkiye as a candidate country while treating it as a transactional partner. The description preserves a fiction that both sides find useful. For the EU, the fiction maintains the possibility of future transformation and avoids the admission that the normative project has failed. For Türkiye, the fiction provides access to pre accession funds, participation in EU programmes, and a platform for claiming European legitimacy. Neither side has an interest in ending the fiction, and so it persists. The persistence of the fiction is not a sign of European weakness in the sense of a lack of power. It is a sign of a deliberate choice to prioritize the management of immediate interests over the pursuit of long term norms. The choice is rational within the framework that European governments have adopted, but it is also a choice that has consequences. It legitimizes a regime that imprisons its opponents, occupies the territory of an EU member state, and projects military power in ways that destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean. The Question of Intent: Ignorance, Hypocrisy, or Strategy? It is tempting to explain European passivity as a form of ignorance or naivety. The temptation should be resisted. European institutions possess detailed knowledge of Turkish actions. The European Parliament’s reports document democratic backsliding, the occupation of Cyprus, and the divergence from EU foreign policy positions. The Council’s decisions on the Eastern Mediterranean demonstrate awareness of unauthorized drilling. The Commission’s statements on migration acknowledge the centrality of the Turkish arrangement. The problem is not a lack of information. The problem is a lack of will to act on the information. A more accurate explanation is that European governments have made a strategic choice to prioritize stability over normativity. The choice is not always articulated in these terms. It is often presented as pragmatism, realism, or the art of the possible. But the effect is the same. The choice reflects a judgment that the costs of confrontation with Ankara are higher than the costs of accommodation. The judgment may be correct in the short term. It may preserve the migration deal, maintain NATO cohesion, and protect trade flows. But it also produces a long term cost that is less visible but equally real: the erosion of the EU’s credibility as a normative actor. If the EU is willing to tolerate the occupation of a member state’s territory, the imprisonment of political opponents, and the systematic violation of media freedom in a candidate country, then its claims to stand for the rule of law and human rights ring hollow. The credibility gap is not lost on European citizens, on the Turkish opposition, or on other authoritarian leaders who are watching how the EU responds to a challenge from a strategically indispensable partner. The question of intent also extends to the individual member states. Germany, as Türkiye’s largest European trading partner and the home of the largest Turkish diaspora, has consistently favoured engagement over confrontation. The approval of Eurofighter sales in 2025 was a German decision, taken in the context of a broader defence relationship. France has been more vocal in its criticism of Turkish actions in the Eastern Mediterranean, but it has also pursued its own arms sales and strategic partnerships in the region. Greece and Cyprus have been the most consistent voices calling for a tougher line, but they have been outvoted or marginalized in councils where the larger member states set the tone. The asymmetry of power within the EU means that the member states with the most direct exposure to Turkish neo imperialism have the least capacity to change the collective policy. The states with the most capacity have the least direct exposure. The result is a policy that reflects the preferences of the least exposed and most commercially oriented member states. The Future of Acquiescence The structure of European acquiescence is not eternal. It is sustained by a particular configuration of strategic circumstances, and those circumstances can change. The war in Ukraine has increased the value of Turkish military cooperation, but it has also increased the value of European unity and the credibility of the EU’s normative commitments. A prolonged conflict on Europe’s eastern flank may make European governments more, rather than less, willing to tolerate Turkish autonomy, because they need Turkish drones, Turkish shells, and Turkish diplomatic channels. But a change in the migration dynamic, a new crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean, or a dramatic escalation of domestic repression in Türkiye could alter the calculus. The arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu in 2025 was a moment of this kind, and it produced statements of concern from European capitals but no change in policy. The question is whether a future shock will be severe enough to overcome the structural inertia that currently sustains the relationship. The more likely scenario is a continuation of the current pattern, with periodic crises, ritual condemnations, and the steady expansion of cooperation on trade, defence, and migration. The European Union will continue to describe Türkiye as a candidate country while treating it as a transactional partner. It will continue to express concern about the rule of law while approving arms sales. It will continue to call for a settlement in Cyprus while accepting the occupation as a fact of life. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality will remain, and it will remain because the member states that have the power to close it have decided that the cost of doing so is too high.