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Turkey and Europe: Embodiment of the State and Representation of Society in the 20th Century In the debate surrounding Turkey’s integration into the EU, the country is often presented as an imperfect democracy, with a democratization process hindered by the Turkish state itself. Drawing both on Ottoman history and political philosophy, this article argues that the object to be examined with respect to its degree of democracy is less the state per se than its relationship to Turkish political society. This relationship is structured more around an opposition between the rulers and the ruled – an Ottoman legacy – than around distinctions derived from the theory of representation, in contradistinction to modern democracies. In fact, the very nature of the Ottoman state – defined by an original combination of dynastic legitimacy, autocracy and elite reproduction – isolated the Sultan’s Empire in its final years from the trends toward democratization that European political societies were experiencing. Analyzing the elements of continuity between the republican and imperial states and societies – revealed by the recent Ottomanist historiography – leads to emphasizing the extent to which the still perceptible Ottoman political figuration has paved the way for the construction of Kemalist state nationalism and has limited the emergence of a democratic culture of representation that conditions its integration into the EU.