Europeanisation Without Credible Accession: Turkey, Geopolitics, and Autocratisation

Turkey is a paradigmatic case of Europeanisation beyond EU borders: decades of engagement with EU rules and practices have produced meaningful alignment in some policy fields, while convergence has stalled or become reversible in others. This paper asks: how does Europeanisation evolve when a) accession credibility declines, b) EU conditionality is geopolitically constrained, and c) domestic politics shift towards autocratisation? The paper advances a mechanism-based argument centred on “Europeanisation without credible accession.” When membership prospects lose credibility, the incentive structure that sustains EU-induced domestic change weakens. Compliance shifts from transformative adaptation to selective and instrumental alignment, shaped by the domestic political costs of reform and the expected material pay-offs from cooperation with the EU. Geopolitics further reshapes this balance: where the EU is strategically dependent on Turkey (most visibly in migration governance, security cooperation, and regional stability) conditionality tends to be diluted or inconsistently applied, as sectoral cooperation becomes partially decoupled from democratic benchmarks and short-term bargains compete with long-term reform pathways. Under autocratisation, executive centralisation and institutional capture widen the gap between formal rule adoption and effective implementation/enforcement, generating “thin” Europeanisation in some areas and stagnation or backsliding in others. Methodologically, the paper combines process tracing with a within-case, cross-sector comparison across three domains that capture variation in political salience and EU leverage: 1) rule of law and judicial independence (high salience, high domestic cost); 2) migration governance and operational cooperation (high geopolitical bargaining, mixed norm content); and (3) regulatory/market alignment linked to economic interdependence (lower political salience, stronger functional incentives). Europeanisation is operationalised across three stages (legal transposition, institutional capacity, and enforcement outcomes) using triangulated evidence from EU assessments and key policy documents, major legal-institutional changes, and selected indicators capturing rule-of-law and democratic performance over time. The paper contributes to Section S23 by specifying the causal pathways through which membership uncertainty, geopolitics, and autocratisation jointly constrain Europeanisation in a long-standing candidate state. More broadly, it offers a portable framework for analysing Europeanisation beyond membership, clarifying when long-term engagement yields durable convergence, when it produces selective adaptation, and when it permits stagnation or reversal.