This paper examines how the Europeanization of Turkey’s civil-military relations problematique triggered a process of transformation in civil-military relations in contemporary Turkey, in which the armed forces gave up most of their traditional role as political arbiters and guardians of the Kemalist tradition in Turkish politics. Voter re-alignment in the November 2002 elections, the emergence of a single-party government with a strong will to change the domestic balance of power in its own favor, and the domestic mobilization of opposition to the military mediated between the EU’s external pressure and domestic change. An analysis of the behavioral, attitudinal, and institutional dimensions of democratic control, however, shows that in the post-Helsinki period Turkey has not attained democratic control of the armed forces, but instead has shifted from the tutelary regime category to the defective democratic control category.
