International dimension of democratization? the influence of the European Union on the consolidation of democracy in Turkey 1987-2002

This thesis analyzes the European Union (EU)-Turkey relations with regard to democracy and human rights and particularly the EU’s impact on the consolidation of democracy in Turkey. Democracy in the Turkey has not been adequately consolidated. The problem of Turkish democracy is the problem of democratic consolidation in Turkey. In the thesis, I propose that the EU promotes Turkish democracy when it provides a full membership perspective to Turkey. In other words, the degree and nature EU’s influence on Turkish polity and politics is correlated with question of whether the EU gives Turkey a real membership perspective. In this respect, I have compared three significant periods of the EU-Turkey relations regarding democratic consolidation in Turkey. The EU’s impact in the first two periods was limited and quite modest in its nature.

The EU has been an active leverage in the post-Helsinki period. In the post-Helsinki period, the pre-accession mechanism have made Turkey more vulnerable to the EU’s requirements and it has justified the EU’s interventions into Turkey’s domestic politics, which had been often regarded as breach of Turkey’s sovereignty in the pre-Helsinki period. Thus, domestic/international-internal/external differentiation in the context of EU-Turkey relations has become less salient within the post-Helsinki period. As far as the active leverage function of the EU is concerned, the EU’s impact had been mostly on the Constitutional level of consolidation in the period between 1987 and 2002.