Politics & Power Quote by Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk’s “I see” is doing more than offering a geopolitical preference; it’s staking a novelist’s claim on the right to imagine a nation differently than its loudest politicians. By framing Turkey’s future “in Europe,” he isn’t merely pointing to a map. He’s invoking Europe as a moral brand: prosperity, tolerance, democracy. That triad reads like an application form for belonging, and that’s the provocation. Pamuk knows the word “Europe” functions in Turkey less as a destination than as a referendum on identity - modernity versus tradition, pluralism versus majoritarian piety, civic law versus the romance of strongman rule.

The sentence is carefully optimistic, almost defensively so. “One of many” downshifts any whiff of imperial nostalgia; Turkey isn’t returning as heir to an empire, but joining a crowded table of comparable democracies. It’s a subtle rebuke to exceptionalism, the kind that can curdle into nationalism. The phrasing also suggests an anxiety: that Turkey could slide out of that orbit, not because “Europe” is inherently pure, but because the internal struggle over institutions, speech, minorities, and secular public life is real.

Context matters here: Pamuk has been both celebrated as a Nobel-winning emblem of Turkish letters and attacked as a traitor for speaking on taboo histories and state violence. So the quote doubles as self-defense. He’s positioning the novelist - and by extension civil society - on the side of openness, betting that cultural belonging precedes diplomatic accession. It’s an act of political imagination with consequences.