Turkish Foreign Policy since 1774 by William Hale

Author:William Hale [Hale, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

8 Turkey and the west after the Cold War II

Turkey and the European Union

Of all the candidates for accession to the European Union, Turkey has had the longest and most contested journey, lasting more than 50 years, and with no certain outcome yet in view. The journey was affected by the end of the Cold War, but not so dramatically as other aspects of Turkey’s foreign relations. Having opened up to eastern Europe after the fall of communism, and thus accepted a massive geographical enlargement as an aim, the countries that formed the European Union (formerly the European Community) in 1993 were bound to face the question ‘why not Turkey?’ On the other hand, the political economic and cultural obstacles to Turkish accession, especially on the EU side, did not go away. Periodically, also, Turkish enthusiasm for the project has flagged in response. As Luigi Narbone and Nathalie Tocci point out, there has been a cyclical relationship between Turkey and the EU, with marked ebbs and flows in the integration process, and crucial interactions with Turkey’s domestic politics.1 During the 1990s, there was progress in the economic dimension with the institution of a customs union between the EU and Turkey in 1996, but the process then stalled and for a time it looked as though Brussels might abandon it altogether. This was succeeded by a dramatic turnaround in 1999, which ended with the landmark decision by the European Council in December of that year to accept Turkey as a candidate for full membership on the same terms as the other candidate countries – that is, that it should meet the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ of economic and political standards to allow accession negotiations to begin. After a delayed start, and in the face of domestic political conflicts, the Ecevit government began the process of ‘harmonization’, as it was referred to, in 2001, and this was continued by the AKP administration that took office in November 2002. The government received its reward in October 2005, when the accession negotiations were officially inaugurated.

After 2005, however, the process went into the doldrums. On the EU side, new leaders came to power in France and Germany who openly rejected the idea of eventual Turkish accession. Although the AKP government and the Turkish Cypriots had made determined moves to solve it, the continued dispute over Cyprus re-emerged as a crucial obstacle. Later, the global financial crisis of 2008–9, and the urgent need to prevent a collapse of their common currency in 2011, preoccupied most of the EU countries, apparently consigning their ‘Turkish question’ to the sidelines. On the Turkish side, the ‘harmonization’ process stalled, as the government was distracted by internal conflicts. By 2011–12, major political reforms were back on the government’s planned agenda, but whether this would have significant effects on its quest for eventual accession was still far from certain.

At the outset, it should also be said that the story of Turkey’s relations with the European Union has become easily the most thoroughly explored aspect

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