The Europeanization of Turkey and its impact on the Cyprus problem

The European Council Summit in Helsinki in 1999 was a turning point in Turkey–EU relations. It radically transformed the nature of the relations through granting Turkey an official candidate status. The Summit also brought the EU to Turkey’s political agenda as a credible actor, difficult to disregard. The crucial aspect of this change in the nature of EU–Turkey relations is increasing pressure on Turkey to adopt European standards in several policy areas, including democracy and human rights. The current process of change, recently labelled as Europeanization, turns actually into a process of democratization, showing its clear impact even on the transformation of Turkey’s policy on such issues like the Cyprus problem with highly nationalist resonance and hard security content. The process of Europeanization in the post-1999 period gave the government of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey a better chance to make manoeuvres on this issue dominated by the overwhelming power of military perspectives. However, the Europeanization process did not give a major change on the issue. The changes in Turkish foreign policy together with EU involvement only made the government vulnerable to the charges coming from circles of hard security as its initiatives did not deliver a positive result. The structure of the conflict preceded the changes in the action of the parties and the regional balance of power preceded the power of an external anchor, the EU, to change the balance. The EU involvement in the conflict only transformed the situation into a new impasse. The study will proceed as follows. Firstly, a theoretical background will be provided on the processes of Europeanization, democratization and foreign policy with special reference to the Turkish case. This will be followed by an examination of the Cyprus issue in Turkey–EU relations together with an analysis of the impact of Greek–Turkish rapprochement on the prospects of solution. The paper will be concluded by an assessment of the impact of Turkey’s Europeanization on the Cyprus issue.