The changing nature of the political in Turkey over the past three decades has had a significant impact on the nation’s Romani (“Gypsy”) citizens. Economic liberalization, the pluralization of cultural identities, and the legalization of civil society organizations have created new opportunities for Turkey’s Roma to engage in public debates about national belonging, citizenship, and the role of civil society. What may be less obvious, and what I bring attention to in this paper, is the ways in which the Roma are in turn impacting the nature of the political in Turkey. Both the subject of local and international discourses regarding minority rights and the object of state and civil society interventions, the Roma are often referenced as a ‘litmus test’ for the success or failure of democratization. However, rather than demanding equal rights on the basis of minority status, Turkey’s Roma appeal to the republican ideal of equality for all Turkish citizens. Thick descriptions based on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey serve to demonstrate the fragmented and contested nature of Romani identity in Turkey today and the central role that the politics of Romani citizenship plays in Turkey’s democratization process. Framing this issue in terms of a state – civil society divide, however, only reifies assumptions about national homogeneity and minority citizenship. Instead, Chatterjee’s concept of “political society” (2004) offers an alternative way to understand the role of the Roma in Turkey today, allowing us to rethink universality and global cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and minority identity and cultural difference on the other hand, as a conflict shaped by the politics of governmentality. This paper works against suggestions that Turkey’s democratization process is incomplete. It also does not suggest that the Roma would begin to resist the narratives of nationalist belonging once they become conscious of their oppression by the state. Rather, the Roma in Turkey are involved in a politics of heterogeneity, which is “always contextual, strategic, historically specific, and provisional” (Chatterjee 2004; 22). Indeed, this is what democracy looks like; not only in postcolonial states and the so-called ‘developing nations’ or ‘third world’, but also in the very places where democracy is modeled on European notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity and where its progress is monitored by the European Union.