Minority Rights in Turkey: A Battlefield for Europeanization by Gozde Yilmaz

Author:Gozde Yilmaz [Yilmaz, Gozde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138639737
Google: eSc7vgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 32455432
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-01-15T11:15:26+00:00

Pull without push: from the EU push to the domestic pull

In spite of the 2005 EU decision to launch accession negotiations with Turkey that considerably strengthened the credibility of EU conditionality, developments following the decision dragged EU conditionality into a politicized, indecisive and less credible status. To begin with, although accession negotiations with Turkey opened in 2005, references to the open-ended nature of the negotiations and EU’s non-Copenhagen-related considerations of Turkey’s accession (e.g. EU’s absorption capacity, public support for enlargement within the EU’s borders, Turkey’s size and demographic growth) influenced the credibility of EU conditionality negatively (European Commission 2005b: 2–4; European Commission 2005c; Tocci 2005: 77). For instance, the Negotiating Framework for Turkey (European Commission 2005c) referred to the negotiations as an open-ended process: “these negotiations are an open-ended process, the outcome of which cannot be guaranteed beforehand.” Besides, the same document referred the absorption capacity of the EU as a Copenhagen criterion: “While having full regard to all Copenhagen criteria, including absorption capacity of the Union”. At the end, the EU over-emphasized the open-ended nature and the possibility of a halt of/in the accession process and pushed EU conditionality towards a more politicized level, though recommending the launch of accession negotiations (Tocci 2005: 77).

Furthermore, increasing stress by the Commission (e.g. 2006: 5, 16) on the necessity of public support for the enlargement process constituted another challenge against Turkey’s accession process. Such an increasing emphasis can be linked to the downward or negative trend of European public support for Turkey’s possible membership to the Union in the concerned period (Transatlantic Trends 2006: 21). The report of Transatlantic Trends (2006: 21) illustrates this by stating that

there has been a reversal in the percentages who see Turkey’s membership as a good or bad thing – those who see Turkey’s membership as a good thing have fallen each year from 30% in 2004 to 21% in 2006, and those who see Turkey’s membership as a bad thing have grown from 20% in 2004 to 32% in 2006.

In turn, taking into account public support within member states, the Commission primarily reflected that downward trend in public support for Turkey’s membership and such an emphasis within the enlargement process had a negative impact on Turkey’s accession process through implying that no public support for enlargement means no more enlargement.

In addition to the aforementioned issues, debates among EU member states in 2005 following the decision to launch accession negotiations influenced the credibility of EU conditionality negatively. During 2005, Germany, France and Austria proposed a ‘privileged partnership’ to Turkey rather than full membership, stressing open-ended accession negotiations, and the debate added further ambiguity and uncertainty to the accession process. It is vital to note that the debate was partly a result of the change of relatively Turkey-friendly leaders of France and Germany with Turkey-skeptics (Göksel 2009: 34).

The debate among EU member states focused on the absorption capacity of the Union, in which the ability of the EU to absorb Turkey with its size, population and culture was discussed (Öniş 2010: 365).

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