📌 An interesting development from #Brussels today — particularly when viewed from #Türkiye. 🇪🇺🇹🇷 @Politico reports that the European Commission is considering offering candidate countries gradual access to the Single Market before membership. But the most interesting part is the conditionality attached to it. This would not simply be regulatory alignment turning into greater market access. The emerging model links deeper economic integration to strategic alignment: investment screening, export controls, sanctions implementation, protection of sensitive technologies and management of critical dependencies. Access could also be reversible. For Türkiye, this raises a particularly important question. Türkiye is already deeply integrated into the European economy through the Customs Union and European value chains. At the same time, Ankara has increasingly pursued an autonomous foreign policy, including relations with Russia and China and selective alignment with EU foreign-policy positions. So perhaps the emerging question for 🇪🇺–🇹🇷 relations is no longer simply whether the Customs Union will eventually be modernised. How much deeper economic integration with the EU is possible without deeper strategic alignment? Earlier this year, I argued on @istanpolinst that Türkiye’s position was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain: economically intertwined with Europe, but institutionally outside the mechanisms through which the EU is redesigning its trade and industrial perimeter. The EU now increasingly appears to be treating market access, economic security and geopolitics as parts of the same architecture. For Türkiye, the future of economic integration may therefore become increasingly inseparable from the broader question of its strategic relationship with Europe. 🔗 My analysis for @IstanPol: istanpol.org/en/post-eu-trad… 📰 POLITICO report: politico.eu/article/ursula-v… #Türkiye #EU #EUTürkiye #Geoeconomics