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The relationship between Türkiye and Germany is one of the most complex and consequential bilateral relationships in European history. Shaped by decades of labour migration, deep family ties across two countries, shared NATO membership, contested EU accession, and persistent cultural misunderstanding on both sides, it is a relationship that needs more genuine dialogue — not less. Youth exchange is one of the most effective tools available for creating it.
The Historical Background
The guest worker (Gastarbeiter) agreements of the 1960s brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish workers to West Germany. Their descendants — now three or four generations on — form the largest Turkish diaspora community in Europe: approximately 3 million people. Yet despite decades of shared geography, the relationship between Turkish-origin communities and majority German society remains often characterised by distance, misunderstanding, and mutual stereotyping.
Young people in Türkiye and young people of Turkish heritage in Germany often hold equally distorted images of each other — shaped by media, family history, and the absence of genuine contact. Youth exchange is uniquely positioned to address this, because it creates the conditions for real contact: sustained, structured, emotionally engaged.
What Research Shows About Contact
Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis — developed in the 1950s, refined over decades of subsequent research — demonstrates that contact between groups reduces prejudice under specific conditions: equal status, shared goals, inter-group cooperation, and institutional support. Youth exchanges, when well-designed, create precisely these conditions.
The young German who has spent two weeks collaborating with Turkish peers on a shared project — arguing about ideas, cooking together, navigating cultural misunderstandings openly — is unlikely to maintain the same simplistic stereotypes they arrived with. The question is whether youth exchange creates conditions for real contact, or just parallel tourism.
What This Means in Practice
Turkish-German exchanges that work share several features. They address the history between the two countries directly — not avoiding difficult topics but creating facilitated space for them. They include participants with Turkish heritage from both countries, creating a more complex triangular dialogue. They use programme time for genuine collaboration on shared projects, not just cultural performance.
They also take language seriously: not expecting everyone to speak German or English perfectly, but creating multilingual environments where all forms of communication are valued and translation is treated as a shared responsibility rather than a burden.
The YouthTICK Dimension
Turkish-German youth dialogue is at the heart of YouthTICK's mission. We are developing programmes that create genuine space for this dialogue — not to resolve everything, but to create the kind of real encounter that makes the relationship between two countries a little more human. If you are working on this from the German side, we want to hear from you.