Türkiye has become structurally embedded in Europe’s evolving defence ecosystem, even as it remains formally excluded from the European Union’s core defence institutions. Across NATO force posture, Black Sea security, military mobility, counter-terrorism, migration control, and, increasingly, defence-industrial production and supply chains, Türkiye now operates as a net security producer at a moment when Europe is struggling to regenerate its own military capacity in the shadow of the Ukraine war. Turkish platforms, subsystems, and operational experience are already interwoven into European capability development in practice, even as Ankara remains institutionally confined to the status of a peripheral ‘third country’ within the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, the European Defence Fund and the emerging SAFE framework.
This widening gap between functional centrality and political exclusion cannot be explained by alliance logic or material capability alone. It reflects the persistence of identity-based securitisation embedded within European defence governance. This paper examines how identity- tainted frames have shaped Türkiye’s marginalisation within Europe’s fragmented defence order, how Ankara has responded through a strategy of peripheral autonomy and defence-industrial localisation, and how a de facto EU-Turkish defence complex has emerged beneath the surface of formal politics. It argues that as Europe’s defence imperatives intensify, the contradiction between institutional exclusion and operational dependence is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, pointing toward a gradual but ultimately unavoidable recalibration of Europe’s security architecture.
