Foreign policy change in a polarized two-party system: Greece and Turkey’s EU candidacy

Abstract

This article aims to theorize about how dynamics of party competition influence government decisions to engage in foreign policy change. It shows how a focus on the functioning of polarized two-party competition in Greece in the late 1990s sheds light on crucial questions concerning the content, timing and institutionalization of Greece’s decision to allow the EU to grant Turkey candidate-member status. The article problematizes this foreign policy change as a decision influenced, among other factors, by the demands of party competition, and especially the strategy of the then ruling socialist party. More generally, this article shows how a focus on party politics complements in various interesting ways our understanding of foreign policy decisions and foreign policy change. Party system dynamics are shown to act as significant intervening factors between determinants of foreign policy usually analyzed in the literature and eventual foreign policy change.