Obstacles and Challenges Faced by Turkey’s Long-Term Europeanization

Abstract

As a long-decade candidate state to the European Union (EU), Europeanization process in Turkey (officially Türkiye) has reflected variation from strong harmonization to stagnation. Its path towards the EU began even before its candidacy to the Union when both created a customs union in 1995 – a product of their association created in the 1960s. Having this background, Turkey’s actual harmonization with the EU’s values and norms began with its candidate status gained in 1999 and increased during the 2000s, the decade when Turkey-EU accession negotiations were launched. Despite being also an era of frozen talks between the parties, e.g., suspension of the negotiations on some Turkey’s accession chapters, Europeanization, especially in economic and technical sectors, has been going on since then, but with a politics where the cost of alignment would not exceed its benefits, a politics caused by Turkey’s EU membership uncertainty. The aim of this panel is to reveal obstacles and challenges facing Turkey’s long-standing EU accession process, a more than two-decade process taking place under the administration of the AKP, the ruling party. Beside the problem of accession credibility, the panel explains how external threats, democratic erosion, the limits of domestic actors and the fragility of local-level actors have affected Europeanization process in Turkey. The panel also points out how procedural dimension of the EU accession process itself has become a challenge complicating the functioning of legislative democracy in Turkey, a problem faced by other EU candidate states as well. Moreover, the panel also touches upon Europeanization in Northern Cyprus, where the process has been affected by its parent state, Turkey.

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