Using your resources, develop arguments for and against Turkey’s full membership of the European Union.

Turkey and the EU Turkey is often seen as the bridge or crossroads between Europe and Asia. Its largest and most populated part, together with its capital Ankara, lies in Asia; its smaller western part in Europe.
The country’s largest city, Istanbul, straddles the Bosphorus, the traditional border between Europe and Asia.
Turkey has been an associate member of the European Union since 1963. Although negotiations for it to become a full member began in 2005, a number of EU countries have made it clear that they do not consider Turkey would be a suitable member. Their one fundamental concern is that Turkey is not European, culturally or geographically. This particular standpoint has forced Europe as a whole to consider its own identity. Although the founding treaty of the EEC – later the EU –
declares that, for a country to join, it has to be European, the treaty gives no actual definition of the term ‘European’.
Proponents of Turkey’s membership argue that the country is European: It is successor state to the partitioned Ottoman Empire which stretched from the Red Sea to the gates of Vienna; as such it played an influential role in the history of Europe for over four centuries. Opponents maintain that if Turkey eventually became a full member of the EU, its large, mainly Muslim, population would threaten the Judeo-Christian cultural homogeneity of the continent.