The ‘European Turks’ : identities of high-skilled Turkish migrants in Europe

Using exceptionally rich qualitative data coming from the FP7 EUCROSS project on the ‘Europeanization of the Everyday Life’, this paper focuses on high-skilled and highly transnational Turkish migrants who reside in the UK, Romania and Italy. The article analyses participants’ discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness and shows how specific images and symbols of Europe and Turkey influence their own relationship to Europe. We argue that understanding Turkish migrants’ identification with Europe requires a comprehensive analysis of the development of a Westernization discourse in Turkey that has framed people’s identities. This discourse symbolizes the desire for being part of the Western world, and especially Western Europe, but, at the same time, the fear of being dominated by the very same world. We show that we need to grasp the values, images, symbols and discourses that underline transnational practices to understand the making of European identity among migrants