Europeanization of foreign policy and world culture: Turkey’s Cyprus policy

Abstract

The re/definition of national interests is a dialectical process that involves not only internal dynamics and domestic interests but also explanatory factors transcending national level, such as the European-level and global-level stimuli. Accordingly, the study offers four alternative explanantia for Turkey’s preferences on the Cyprus question: European Union’s (EU) constraining stimuli, EU’s constitutive stimuli, global-level constraining stimuli, global-level constitutive stimuli. The original empirical data support that it is the in/congruence between the ‘EU-level constraining stimuli’ and the ‘global-level constitutive stimuli’ that predicts Turkish perceptions on national interests and thus, Turkish attitudes towards the EU-led reform on Cyprus policy.