Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Akademi Dergisi

Yazarlar: Diğdem SOYALTIN COLELLA

Konular:Beşeri Bilimler, Ortak Disiplinler

Anahtar Kelimeler:Turkey,European Union,Democratic conditionality,Customs Union,1990s,Lesson drawing

Özet: The integration process in Europe has gone through important milestones in the 1990s. Started with the establishment of European Economic Community (EEC), the integration process promoted economic and political cooperation between the member countries first under the name of European Community and then the European Union (EU). The EU had turned into a political structure with supranational features in the 1990s. The deepening initiatives were coupled with widening of the EU with the membership applications of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). Given the political condition in the CEECs countries, the EU revised the accession conditions and opted for a more comprehensive policy of conditionality to promote democratisation in the candidate countries. The democratic conditionality tuned out to be the main mechanism of the democratic transformation in the CEECs. While the EU was dealing with widening and deepening at the same time in the 1990s, Turkey was occupied with taking steps to ensure political stability and re-establish democracy after the 1980 coup d’etat. The coalition governments, political and economic stabilities of the 1990s prevented the EU to have a deep and strong democratic impact in Turkey. With the candidacy status in 1999, Turkey became subjected to the conditionality/compliance principle of the EU. Similar to the CEECs, the conditional incentives offered by the EU promoted democratic reforms in Turkey. Yet, the literature focusing on the democratisation in Turkey largely focused on the period after Turkey gained accession status from the EU in 1999 without paying enough attention to the lessons learnt in the 1990s. Aiming to fill this gap in the literature, this study focuses on the period of 1990s in the Turkey-EU relations and examines the impact of lessons learnt for the democratisation process in Turkey. Turkey-EU relations gained an official status with the signature of Association Agreement with the EEC in 1963 which envisaged establishing a Customs Union by 1996. The empirical evidence shows that the Customs Union did not only contributed development of trade between Turkey and the EU countries but also provided an institutional foundation for the political relations. Moreover, as Turkish officials started to attend meetings in Brussel, socialize and exchanged ideas with their counterparts, a “we-feeling” emerged which promoted cooperation between two parties. More importantly, the political and economic crises in the 1990s laid the democratic foundations for the process that brought candidate country status to Turkey and gave lessons to domestic actors. The momentum created by this learning process was accompanied by the strong impact of democratic conditionality and pushed Turkish government into democratic reforms in the early 2000s.

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