Politics & Power Quote by Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk slips a blade into the polite language of diplomacy: “legitimate need” makes national dignity sound like something you could invoice for, then he pivots to the real sting - dignity, for Turkey, isn’t just sovereignty or pride. It’s being seen. And more specifically, being seen as Western, European, modern. The line performs the tightrope Pamuk has walked for decades: he refuses to romanticize Turkish nationalism, but he also refuses the Western habit of treating Turkey’s anxieties as either irrational swagger or inconvenient geopolitics.

The phrase “this includes” is doing quiet work. It reframes “defending dignity” from chest-thumping to a demand for recognition in a club that has historically kept Turkey at arm’s length. Subtext: Europe’s gatekeeping helps manufacture the very defensiveness it then condemns. When Turks insist on respect, Pamuk suggests, they’re often responding to a long tradition of being positioned as “almost European” - useful, adjacent, strategically necessary, culturally suspect.

Context matters: Pamuk writes from inside Turkey’s culture wars, where “Europe” can mean liberation, hypocrisy, betrayal, aspiration, or insult depending on who’s speaking. His intent isn’t to grant nationalism a blank check; it’s to make the emotional logic legible. National dignity becomes a proxy for a deeper wound: the fear of being permanently stuck in the waiting room of modernity, judged by standards set elsewhere, then blamed for wanting entry too badly.