For the people, who are making an overview of 2014, the Middle East became the name of the region, where many firsts were experienced and many shocking incidents occurred. 2014 was the year where “savage, primitive, barbaric” images, which completed Western media organizations’ exotic East image, had come true. This savage and barbaric image of the East, which is being observed with an orientalist’s glasses, is not a sterile image for Europe that they could observe from a distance, as before.

The images of the Middle East transformed into a mirror, which compels every orientalist glance to take a look at themselves. During Turkey’s EU adventure, one of the most crucial objections of the Europeans was the fear of becoming a neighbor to the Middle East. Even if Turkey wants to regard itself as European or present itself that way, in the mentality of Europeans, Turkey is still a Middle Eastern country. No matter how much our official codes are represented in Western, European official institutions, in the Europeans’ subconscious, Turkey is still the “other”, in other words, Ottoman.

History is witnessing that this codification is indicative in EU’s relations with Turkey, and that exceeding this psychological threshold is not as easy as it’s assumed.

The formula, which, by cutting corners, states that Turkey and Europe/Europeanist codes are clashing, amounts to accepting Turkey into the EU, and thus, having borders with the Middle East.

The developments, especially in the past few years, have shown that this issue is already being exceeded in another aspect. From now on, the issue is, EU having borders with the Middle East and even becoming Middle Eastern‘ized’, while Turkey is still not a member of the union. From now on, they stopped being a border country, and become an internal issue, which they become a side in regional internal balances and conflicts.

The evocation of “Europe’s Middle-Easternization “is different from the image portrayed by the classic orientalist view; however, it presents a template, whose content is similar to that picture. However, this template is meeting with a Middle East, which spreads within them and whose burning effect they could feel on their skin, rather than the primitiveness and deficiency image, which they observe from a distance and which gives them the feeling of supremacy. In another sense, Europe is moving to the Middle East. This moving is equal to interlacing with the chaos that, in their eyes, belongs to the geography, which orientalists are observing from a distance with arrogance.

What’s being experienced is not the incident of Europe becoming neighbors with Middles, but rather, the state of removing the borders with the Middle East…

On one hand, we are looking at a European image in which they; join the opposition in Syria and participate in the war, were spotted chopping heads with ISIL militants, export volunteer women warriors against ISIL. This image is full of shattered contradictions within…. According to the Middle East equation, which took a stand within their own children, the differentiation between the applauded warriors and the warriors that are regarded as terrorists, is appearing in the press and even in the legal field. On the other hand, the increasing number of Islamphobic demonstrations in Germany…. If the demonstrations against Islam, to which tens of thousands of people attend, are representing Germany’s consciousness, then, what is the position of the Muslims, who are the target of the demonstrations? Even if the Muslims, who are replacing the Jews in the minds of Anti-Semitic Europeans, are being victims in the “European kind” of racisms, the justification presented for this is being Middle Eastern… Even this justification includes Europe in the Middle East.

The feeling of being dragged to the whirlpool of a region, which regulates the Middle East from a distance, draws maps with rulers and doesn’t state any other value then pumping crude oil to the global economy, must be a situation that extremely disturbs Westerners.

In the globalization era, where the economy, or to put it better, capitalism had become global, borders become transitive, and the culture became liquid, Europe doesn’t want to accept that this liquidity is not going to be single-track.

Europe was accustomed to a financial relation system, which routinized the communities of global capitalism and the habits of popular culture and consumption, and made them dependent.

They unwillingly put up with Muslim immigrant workers; like Pakistanis and Indians in England, Arabs in France, and Turks in Germany. In the end, they were hoping that the “bottom liners”, which they disregarded, were going to be assimilated in the name of cultural integration.

However, the effect of experiencing the happenings in Iraq and Syria, which are far away from their own geography, caustically in the Western capital is being reflected by the media. These scary developments always belonged to the other; those pains belonged to others. As for now, those pains and developments are quite close to themselves.

Even a codification, which designates the ones who go to war for ISIL as global terrorists and the voluntary ones who go to war against ISIL as freedom fighters, is unable to save the sterile stance.

The analysts, who will be making the 2014 evaluation, will now have to include Europe in Middle East’s agenda. Besides, we are talking about a Europe who joined the Middle East without first becoming neighbors with Turkey.

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