Turkey's Reform Effort Reconsidered, 1987–2004

Abstract

The Helsinki Summit of the European Council in 1999 was a turning point in terms of clarifying a concrete membership perspective regarding candidate status for Turkey and accession to the European Union. Political reforms in Turkey to complete the 1993 Copenhagen criteria also gained significant momentum in the aftermath of the Summit. However, arguments stressing the influence of European Union conditionality seriously undervalue the gradual political transformation that Turkey was already undergoing in the years before 1999 and the societal pressure in Turkey that lay behind it. Basing Turkey's eligibility for membership wholly on the effects of European Union conditionality makes the democratic process extremely vulnerable to the still-delicate process of European Union–Turkey relations. The article aims to develop a more coherent explanation of the European Union's impact on Turkey's politics between 1987 and 2004, by offering an alternative framework of analysis based on Moravcsik's analysis of the European human-rights regime and Risse's theory of communicative action. The main argument is that the principal dynamics driving recent democratization in Turkey were its newfound location within the European human-rights regime and the increasing power of ‘European argument’ as an alternative way of resolving domestic conflicts.