The European public debate on Turkey's EU accession either emphasizes Turkey's political (in)competence for EU membership, or marks its cultural difference. Based on the discourse analysis of this debate in the German mass media, this paper questions the dominant European perspective, by placing emphasis on how and where the symbolic borders of an imagined Europe become visible. I will argue that the debate surrounding Turkey's accession to the EU reveals an ambivalent discursive process as it places the construction of the self-definition of Europe at the frontier of its Turkish-Islamic “Other.”
