EU citizens’ attitudes towards Turkey's membership

This thesis examines EU citizens’ attitudes to Turkey’s potential EU membership. When it comes to Turkey’s EU membership, the citizens of the EU seem to be more reluctant towards Turkey’s membership compared to other acceding countries. It is this thesis’ aim to understand why this is the case and what factors could be influential in EU citizens’ opposition. Based on this, this thesis asks itself the following research question: “To what extent do EU citizens’ attitudes towards Islam and opinion about Islamic culture explain their position regarding Turkey’s EU membership?” The theoretical concepts that have been investigated depicted that Turkey’s culture and religion, Islam, are decisive for EU citizens to oppose Turkey’s membership. It has been tried to test these claims by formulating two hypotheses. These two hypotheses have been tested by conducting a cross-sectional study for which an already existing data set from the European Commission has been used, namely the Eurobarometer 53 survey from 2001. The findings showed that indeed culture and religion explain EU citizens’ opposition. Citizens that are Islamophobic as well as fear to lose their own culture with Turkey’s accession are more likely to be against Turkey’s membership. Moreover, even after introducing gender as a test variable for both hypotheses the relationship between the two original bivariate relationships did not change. Thus, the relationship between being Islamophobic and being against Turkey’s accession, as well as the relationship between being afraid of losing one’s own culture and being against Turkey’s membership are not due to mere chance but are, on the contrary, substantial and significant