Turkey and Europe

This chapter examines historical asynchronicities and perceptual asymmetries between Turkey and Europe. The major historical asynchronicity has been that in Turkey a bourgeois public has not grown and accrued the power necessary to turn the state into a state based on the rule of law. As for the perceptual asymmetries between Turkey and Europe, this chapter interprets the data gathered from research with the participation of Turkish and French university students. By applying a method of “deliberative dialogue,” the chapter uncovers the diverging opinions of the Turkish and French youth on such critical issues as European and Turkish identities and Turkey’s integration with the European Union. In the third and concluding section, the chapter argues that the postmodern European space is a competitive arena, with continually changing “boundaries” rather than fixed “borders.” Hence, Turkey’s integration with Europe will take the form not only of the Turkish state becoming a member of the European Union but, equally importantly, of the inclusion of Turkish cities, regions, academic institutions, political parties, art galleries, museums, labor unions, student associations, and the like into the emerging European cultural, academic, economic, and social space. Since the end of the Cold War, the peak point in EU–Turkish relations was in December 1999, when the European Council declared Turkey a candidate state to join the European Union. Yet the euphoria generated by this decision proved to be short-lived, and relations took a downturn soon after. In the 2010s, EU–Turkish relations entered a new phase, which can be termed “ultra-instrumentalism,” characterized by an almost complete demoralization and depoliticization of EU–Turkish relations.

Voluntary attention improves performance similarly around the visual field

Performance as a function of polar angle at isoeccentric locations across the visual field is known as a performance field (PF) and is characterized by two asymmetries: the HVA (Horizontal-Vertical Anisotropy) and VMA (Vertical Meridian Asymmetry). Exogenous (involuntary) spatial attention does not affect the shape of the PF, improving performance similarly across polar angle. Here we investigated whether endogenous (voluntary) spatial attention, a flexible mechanism, can attenuate these perceptual asymmetries. Twenty participants performed an orientation discrimination task while their endogenous attention was either directed to the target location or distributed across all possible locations. The effects of attention were assessed either using the same stimulus contrast across locations, or equating difficulty across locations using individually-titrated contrast thresholds. In both experiments, endogenous attention similarly improved performance at all locations, maintaining the canonical PF shape. Thus, despite its voluntary nature, like exogenous attention, endogenous attention cannot alleviate perceptual asymmetries at isoeccentric locations.