Çiğdem Nas and Yonca Özer (eds.), Turkey and the European Union: Processes of Europeanisation,
(England: Ashgate, 2012, 286 pages).
This book studies Europeanization in Turkey since 1999 when the country earned official European Union (EU) candidacy status at the EU’s Helsinki Summit. The contributors seek to identify and explore the extent, pace, nature, direction and impact of Europeanization in wide-ranging issues and policy areas. The specific purpose is to evaluate Turkey’s EU accession process by testing the principal theoretical models of Europeanization in the individual case studies: the external incentives model, social learning and lesson-drawing models.
The book starts with a theoretical chapter analyzing the Europeanization approaches regarding EU candidates and neighborhood countries. Börzel argues that the existing models of Europeanization cannot explain Turkey’s “bottom-up” Europeanization which is rather driven by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s domestic political incentives.
Chapter 2 analyzes the Europeanization of Turkish identity. Nas argues that Turkey’s EU accession process has triggered key reforms addressing the EU’s political membership criteria. Following the social learning model, she finds that this process has “Europeanized” Turkish identity by helping domestic actors internalize democratic values.
Chapter 3 uses the external incentives model to explain Turkey’s democratization as required by EU conditionality. Özer claims that democratic reforms have stalled due to the falling credibility of EU membership after the start of accession negotiations and insufficient internalization of the EU’s democratic norms by domestic political actors.
Chapter 4 explores the Turkish constitutional amendments since the 1980s. Oder notes that the EU has exercised considerable influence over constitution-making via causing the removal of certain anti-democratic provisions. However, Europeanization concerning “real sense constitutionalism” remains insufficient.
Chapter 5 studies the EU’s impact on Turkish civil society. Öner finds that Europeanization has strengthened civil society organizations by way of enabling democratizing legal reforms and triggering a process of social learning focused on the internalization of European norms.
Chapter 6 analyzes the Europeanization of minority rights to argue that the external incentives and lesson-drawing models have respectively shaped the pace and extent of reforms in this area in the 2002-2004, 2005-2007, and 2008-2010 periods. Hence, Yılmaz demonstrates that explanatory models sequentially explain Europeanization in this area.
Chapter 7 focuses on women’s rights to assess Europeanization regarding gender equality. Çubukcu argues that democratizing legislative reforms adopted under EU conditionality expanded women’s rights in Turkey. Furthermore, women’s organizations have utilized Europeanization as a useful instrument serving this agenda.
Chapter 8 studies Turkish social policy reform under EU influence. Tsarouhas finds that Europeanization has been weak in this area due to several EU-related and domestic factors. At best, the EU has been used as a “legitimization device” by the government for the reforms and policies mostly shaped by domestic political priorities.
Chapter 9 investigates the EU’s impact on Turkish environmental policy, particularly regarding the issue of sustainable development. İzci notes that Turkey’s compliance with the EU’s environmental acquis has been made difficult by the low credibility of EU membership, and domestic financial and administrative problems.
Chapter 10 studies the Europeanization effect in the area of Turkish foreign policy. Terzi argues that despite AKP’s post-2007 foreign policy shift away from the EU, the conduct of foreign policy has been “Europeanized” since 2002. She concludes that this reflects a process of learning of “appropriate behavior” and norms by Turkish foreign policy-makers.
Chapter 11 focuses on Turkey’s Cyprus policy. Kaliber notes that the 2003-2005 Cyprus policies reflect a deep Europeanization effect in contrast to the post-2005 policies where the EU’s impact has been rather marginal. He argues that the extent of Europeanization in this area has been largely determined by domestic political actors who have used Europe as a “political/normative context”.
The last chapter explores the degree of Europeanization in Turkey’s migration and asylum policies. Macmillan finds that Turkish compliance with the EU’s acquis has been slow compared to Central and East European countries mostly due to the absence of credible EU conditionality.
By bringing together such a diverse set of issues which have emerged as key questions defining Turkey-EU relations, the volume stands as the most comprehensive study of Turkey’s Europeanization conducted to date. Indeed, its main contribution to the literature lies in the empirical richness provided by the individual case studies. Each chapter tackles a key area of reform under the EU acquis and thus closely analyzes the depth and pace of Europeanization as well as the causal dynamics shaping the process.
Turkey is a crucial case in EU studies since it has strived for EU accession longer than any other EU candidate. Furthermore, as Nas and Özer acknowledge in the Introduction, the credibility of Turkey’s EU membership has declined since 2006 due to various developments within the EU. Yet, despite the lack of a credible EU membership perspective and the rising costs of EU compliance, Europeanization has continued to influence the Turkish political system and society (p. 3).
This is the key puzzle when it comes to properly assessing Turkey’s EU accession process. The literature on EU-Turkey relations has long demonstrated the general trends in Turkey’s Europeanization, i.e., relatively effective Europeanization until 2005-2006, and slower Europeanization after. Therefore, instead of focusing on the dynamics shaping the general, changing pace of Europeanization, the individual chapters could have disentangled the more interesting puzzle of why reforms in some areas have persisted even after 2005. Indeed, Börzel emphasizes the importance of this point in Chapter 1. Yet, we do not see a systematic, empirical elaboration of this puzzle in subsequent chapters. The book’s analysis would have been far more innovative if the authors could develop an original theoretical argument addressing this puzzle instead of testing the existing accounts of Europeanization.
Nonetheless, in the final analysis, authors’ arguments are plausible and the chapters are well written. Perhaps most significantly, the case studies offer empirically rich analyses of Turkey’s Europeanization in various policy areas which have not always been sufficiently explored. The book is a must read for academic audiences, in particular, students of Europeanization and Turkey-EU relations.
Reviewed by Dr Beken Saatcioglu
Dr Beken Saatcioglu is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University. She was previously a post-doctoral researcher at Free University of Berlin’s KFG Research College ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’ (2009-2010) and at the Institute for European Integration Research (EIF) at Austrian Academy of Sciences (2010-2011). She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Virginia (2009). Her research interests include EU enlargement and conditionality, democratization via the EU, Turkey-EU relations, Turkish foreign policy and Turkish politics. Her publications appeared in journals including Democratization, Uluslararasi Iliskiler, Insight Turkey and Turkish Studies.
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