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Europe has always been a pivotal determinant in Turkish political history but this intense preoccupation gained a particular momentum and form with the 1963 Ankara Agreement (the Association Agreement between Turkey and the European Union-EU). Since then, European Studies has been a significant academic area of interest in Türkiye. Interestingly enough, ebbs and flows in Türkiye-EU relations during all those years left this academic interest intact and since the 1960s, the most established Turkish universities kept opening European Studies Centres including METU and has been involved in extensive research and teaching activities famously known all over by European academia. From the start, the urge to disassociate practical hurdles of the EU integration process from cutting-edge research on European integration has been a challenging yet enriching experience for the European Studies in Türkiye. Centre for European Studies at METU (CES-METU) has been founded in 1997 as one of the leading research centres specializing on European integration within Türkiye and its region against this background. CES-METU was granted the title of a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in 2007 and has been recognized as one of the best practices of its kind in Europe and beyond. In this respect, with its openness to the civil society, accumulated knowledge on EU integration and academic expertise to explore the correlation between academic knowledge and everyday information on European integration, CES-METU has been a significant initiative with its potential to foster development of novel teaching, research and knowledge exchange within the epistemic community in Türkiye. In this respect, if there is one name that needs to be honoured for contributing to the establishment and institutionalisation of Centre for European Studies in METU, as well as to the emergence of European Studies in Türkiye as a distinct discipline, it is Prof. Atila Eralp.
This foreword aims to put the challenges and opportunities faced by the European Studies in Türkiye in a conceptual and historical perspective, mainly with the aim of paying tribute to Prof. Atila Eralp, one of the pioneers of European Studies in Türkiye. Prof. Eralp, among others, has been pivotal for the establishment of the European Studies Programme and the Centre for European Studies of METU in 1997, which aimed to academically equip bureaucrats and policy makers in Ankara...