The EU’s response to the autocratisation challenge in Turkey

How coherent is the EU’s response to the autocratic challenge in its neighbourhood? The existing literature has put an emphasis on the nature, domestic drivers and the impact of this autocratic challenge on the EU’s transformative power. However, the coherence of the EU institutional actors’ response to this challenge and the impact of this inter-institutional coherence on the EU’s capacity to engage with authoritarian countries remain understudied. We address this gap by studying the EU’s response both discursively and in practice. More specifically, we question the EU’s credibility in facing the autocratic challenge and examine whether the EU institutions consistently use the EU’s main tool for engaging with these autocracies, namely its conditionality policy. Theoretically, we revisit the EU conditionality literature and add value through drawing on the emerging dissensus literature in IR. Empirically, we focus on the case of Turkey, a rapidly autocratising regional power and an EU candidate country. By studying the discourses and practices of the EU institutional actors vis-à-vis Turkey since 2016, we seek to identify the main discrepancies not only among the EU institutions, namely the Commission, European Parliament and Council, but also between the EU’s discourse and behavioural response in meeting the autocratic challenge. Based on a qualitative frame analysis focusing on the EU’s speeches and institutional documents between 2016 and 2023, we argue that this key period is marked by Turkey’s rapid autocratisation process, antagonistic discourse and conflicting policy choices. We further posit that this has led to divergence among EU institutional actors in their discourse and engagement tools with Turkey.