Turkish Trade Unions and the European Boomerang

Abstract

The boomerang and spiral models argue that domestic groups that are repressed by their states would seek international allies to help them affect their states’ policies in favor of their own agenda. While these models explain the level of interconnectedness between domestic and international politics, and trace a framework that helps us study the transnational interactions between different actors, using “weak/strong” dichotomy to explain the domestic actors’ position within the national realm prevents us from understanding the changing dynamics of state-domestic actor- international organization relations. Arguing that the perception of the international ally, that may change across time, and the levels of closeness of the domestic environment are factors that affect these relations, this paper focuses on three Turkish trade union confederations’ appeal to the European Union since they started interacting with their European counterparts (since the 1960s). The research finds that the trade unions’ using of the EU as a “stick” against the government depends on their own organizational position since their EU perceptions change according to the domestic environment.