However, by singing the Association Agreement in 1963 and a custom union agreement in 1996, which was one of the Ankara Treaty's goals, Turkey has demonstrated that the its economy is able to deal with competitive pressure and to adopt the Community's standards, in particular, the body of Community law, regulations, and directives. Moreover, with the reform process in economics since 2001 and in the political system since 2002, Turkey was able to overcome most of the obstacles and fulfill the EU criteria in its economic and political aspects. As a result, when the EU opened the accession talks with Turkey on October 3 2005, upon the Turkish fulfillment of the Copenhagen criteria, debates "concerning the various dimensions of European identity and the boundaries of and the ambiguities surrounding the European project" have sharply increased in number. This meant that Turkey's ability to adopt the EU standards was only one aspect of the whole picture with the EU specifıc factors playing an equally important role.

             The EU's evolution of political conditions in other applicant countries that were found to satisfy the Copenhagen criteria, such as Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, despite the facts that their democracies are no more stable than that of Turkey, meant that, aside from political and economic, there is another variable in the question of Turkeys' EU membership and this variable is identity. Questions about Turkey's identity are directly related to the concept of a European identity. One theory of European identity posits that: "the very idea of what Europe was from the beginning is defined partly in terms of what it was not. In other words, the Other, i.e. the non-European barbarian savage, played a decisive role in the evolution of the European identity and in the maintenance of order among European states." Therefore, in order to construct a ˜Self vs. Other' identity, the importance of historical, racial, ethical, and cultural factors have radically increased.