Europeanization or not? Turkish foreign policy and the Cyprus problem, 1999-2014

Abstract

This thesis sought to illuminate how the Europeanization process takes place, in the context of enlargement by providing empirical findings regarding the EU’s potential to impact on the foreign policies of candidate countries. By placing Turkish-EU relations and the Cyprus dispute within a theoretical framework of Europeanization, with particular emphasis on the Historical Institutionalist strand of new institutionalism, this dissertation examined how the EU impacted on Turkey’s Cyprus policy between 1999 and 2014. Alongside EU-related factors such as the credibility of both EU conditionality and accession perspective, what accounts for change is predominantly determined by how domestic actors perceive it, and the extent to which domestic power struggles are affected by it.