1. Introduction – the “invisible Europeans” label
The recent Deutsche Welle article on “invisible Europeans” offers a useful point of entry into these questions because it openly acknowledges that Turkish Cypriots hold EU citizenship and live on EU territory, yet remain at the margins of how the Union imagines itself. The choice of the label “invisible Europeans” is analytically significant: it implicitly distinguishes between formal juridical status and practical recognition, and it invites the question of why a community that is legally part of the European project can be so weakly represented in its narratives and institutions. [1]
Placed in the context of the Cyprus file, this question becomes even more pointed. Since the accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the EU in 2004 under Protocol 10, the acquis communautaire has been suspended in the northern part of the island, and the EU has dealt almost exclusively with the Greek Cypriot administration as the government of a member state, even while repeatedly noting the “special situation” of the Turkish Cypriot community. The DW article, read against this background, is more than a human‑interest story: it is an illustration of how the structural asymmetries created by the breakdown of the 1960 bi‑communal order and by subsequent EU choices translate into everyday feelings of invisibility, frustration, and misrecognition for Turkish Cypriots.
[1] “Turkish Cypriots: The EU’s Invisible Europeans,” AVİM Bulletin, Center for Eurasian Studies (AVİM), January 13, 2026, https://avim.org.tr/en/Bulten/TURKISH-CYPRIOTS-THE-EU-S-INVISIBLE-EUROPEANS