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At the time of Turkey's membership application to the European Community in 1987, Turkey's then prime minister (later president) Turgut Özal, said, "we are in a long and narrow path." No doubt, the late president's analogy proved correct, though the path seems to be getting longer and narrower, with no accession prospect in sight. In addition, the EU's fine-tuned strategy of conditionality, a key aspect of its enlargement policy, has lost its credibility and consistency in the eyes of both Turkish officials and public opinion. The absence of credible conditionality and the EU's ‘gate-keeping' role may seem to have strengthened Turkey's hand vis-à-vis the EU. But this article argues that the EU retains its leverage over Turkey due to a heavy dependence of the Turkish economy on the EU combined with the concerns stemming from the free trade talks between the EU and the United States. This article suggests that both these factors taken together, in particular the recent revival of the free trade talks, are likely to bring the EU accession back on the agenda of Turkish foreign policy.
Accession Process and the EU's Conditionality
Conditionality is the key mechanism used by the EU to influence the existing practices and structures in the candidate and accession countries. For the first time, in the 1990s, conditionality became the EU's accession strategy. It was initially applied to the central and eastern European countries and was rapidly considered an effective means of influence for the 2004 and 2007 enlargements.
Conditionality as a policy may take different forms. The EU's conditionality is based on the strategy of ‘reinforcement by reward.' Under this strategy, a social actor (in other words, the EU) tries to change or control the behavior of another social actor (in other words, candidate and/or accession countries) through granting or withholding rewards. The two main ‘rewards' the EU employed in its conditionality to central and eastern European countries are assistance (financial and/or technical) and institutional ties.
Conditionality became more tangible in Copenhagen European Council in 1993, where the EU leaders set out the conditions for EU membership. These conditions, which came to be known as the Copenhagen Criteria, require that a country has a stable, democratic political system, a functioning market economy, and the ability to apply the EU law as well as European norms and principles. The EU further clarified these conditions through a pre-accession strategy based on the Accession Partnerships that provided for a detailed list of tasks and measures to be undertaken by accession countries. Although conditionality may appear as something fixed, it is indeed a dynamic process.
Conditionality, by nature, entails an unequal partnership. While conditionality can have uneven effects over each applicant country due to several reasons, the EU nonetheless should have sufficient leverage over these countries to sustain this partnership in an effective and productive manner. This is particularly important considering the ‘time inconsistency' between the expected reforms and the actual delivery of the benefits. For this purpose, the EU's conditionality involves different processes and tools to influence the institutional structures and transformations of the applicant countries. Quite expectedly, the most powerful tool of EU conditionality and one that provides the EU its leverage, is the EU's gate-keeping role, in other words, the power to determine when to allow the applicant countries access to further stages in the accession. Other tools and measures of the EU's conditionality include, benchmarking and monitoring, aid and technical assistance, privileged trade access, provision of legislative and institutional templates, and technical advice.