Abstract
Turkey’s relationship with the European Union (EU) has a long history that reaches back to its application for associate membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) in July 1959 and the resulting Ankara Agreement in 1963. Turkey made its official membership application in 1987 and was granted official candidate status in 1999. Throughout this long process, Turkish political elites perceived EU membership as an ideal for Turkey and highlighted their commitment to their alization of Turkish accession to the EU. However this ideal, began to change towards the second half of the 2000s. Many commentators take October 2005 the official start of membership negotiations between Turkey and the EU, as the beginning of the end, the turning point where the ‘golden age’ of the EU membership project ended, after which it gradually began to Euroscepticism. There are more than enough reasons for the growing Euroscepticism in Turkey. In this context, the study aims to analyze the reasons of Euroskepticism in Turkey with particular focus on Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AKP (Justice and Development Party) and how this suspicion would affect the membership course.
Highlights
Formation of the European Union had its objective in the beginning to improve the economic development in the member states and to promote exchange of goods
While this study aims to discuss the Euro-skepticism in Turkey with particular focus on AKP, it should be firstly noted that only AKP does not hear of a suspicion about Europe, various parties have had suspicion about European Union (EU) due to the reasons listed above
Keyman and Aydın-Duzgit (2013) refer to this new appearance of Euroscepticism, i.e. underestimating the importance of Europe and overestimating the power of Turkys as a global power as delusional Euroscepticism. Despite all these suspicions and thought of the President Erdogan involving participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead of EU so as to expressly show Brussels that it is not the only option for Turkey, as expressed by Tezcan and Aras (2015), EU membership desire of AK Party continues in principle. This does not mean that Euro-skepticism has come to end in AKP, but implies that AKP has realized the perceptual distinction between Europeanness and EU membership, and that it has succeeded to approach the issue of EU pragmatically
Summary
Formation of the European Union had its objective in the beginning to improve the economic development in the member states and to promote exchange of goods. While initially the rhetoric of “becoming part of Europe-the civilized world” was passionately embraced by both political elites and intellectuals in Turkey and EU membership was evaluated in an idealist framework; the developments inthe course of membership have eroded the said idealism in Turkish society, and changed the relationships with EU into a more pragmatist and skeptical structure. In this context, the study aims to analyze the reasons of Euro-skepticism in Turkey with particular focus on Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - AKP (Justice and Development Party) and how this suspicion would affect the membership course
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