European Integration and Minority Rights

Abstract

This chapter explains how minority rights have been addressed in European politics and how the EU has used accession conditionality to advance minority rights in candidate countries like Turkey. The chapter shows that although the EU has made the protection of minorities an explicit criterion for accession, it has not provided unequivocal leadership on minority rights. This ambiguity has supported differences across candidate and member countries. The second part of the chapter provides an overview of how the EU has evaluated Turkey’s progress in the field of minority rights by analyzing the Commission’s annual regular reports from 1998 to 2015. This reveals a pattern of mixed and partial progress that has recently stalled.