I know this is off-topic, but I can't help saying two things about this east-west belonging: We are not Europeans. Even though we established states and sovereignties in Europe continent before most European civilizations even emerged. We are no longer Asians, even though our origins are Asian and we have deep traces, empires, orders in almost all parts of the continent. These modern Turks west of the Caspian, in the Black Sea and Mediterranean basin, are everything in between these two civilization blocks. Turks are in fact first and foremost one of the heirs of the intermediate zone and the element that sustains this phenomenon. We are not only the heirs of the Turkish state lineage, but also the heirs of all the past civilizations in our lands, which the west ignores, but the bloodline is in our society. We are a continuation of intermediate zone state order, and everything we stand for and everything that forms the strong foundations of our state orders derives from this.
It is not for nothing that 19th century European modern historiography based its entire civilization on a silly constructs, which today turns out to be mostly bullshit. Asia Minor, the entire Anatolian, Levant and Black Sea basin civilizations, starting even before the Hittites, are completely ignored. Even the scientific advances attributed to whole European civilization in history are a mass of plagiarism, stolen from a vast geography, from Andalusia in the west to Egypt and Asia Minor in the east to the Asiatic empires, if you extend the time span to the Enlightenment.
This lands there to be plundered for both blocs. The lives of their people do not matter and their states must be subjugated. For this, their history must be denied, their state kept on the brink. Because, history has repeatedly shown that these places, where everything is born, have the potential to completely reverse the roles when they reach a strong and independent order.