Turkey’s Transition to Liberal Democracy and the Issue of its EU Membership

Abstract

Turkey has often been projected as a model by the US-based think tanks and Western media for enlargement of market democracies in its surrounding regions to contain the surge of radical Islam. The appropriateness of the Turkish democracy as a model is, however, contested by many from within the region and without. While the Arabs ridicule Turkey’s democracy as a farce and a ‘democracy of tanks’, Western critics harp on its illiberal character as reflected in the titular powers and reserved domains of military, high level of human rights abuse and denial of cultural liberties to the minority Kurds. It is in the past decade, particularly since the European Union’s (EU) decision in December 1999 to accept Turkey’s candidacy for membership that the country has experienced radical political reforms signifying a qualitative transformation of its polity to a liberal democracy. The purpose of this article is not to assess Turkey’s progression to liberal democracy or to analyse the domestic debate spurred by the reform process between the progressive Islamists and the secular establishment. Instead, it aims at examining the function of Turkey’s EU accession process in facilitating the second historic transition of Turkish polity (the first being the change-over from mono-party to multi-party system in 1946).