PROTRACTED BETROTHAL: A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRESENT TURKEY-EUROPEAN UNION ANTAGONISM

Öz The European Parliament called for the suspension of European Union (EU)-Turkey accession negotiations on the basis of democratic conditionality in March 2019. This development was a link of the chain of events that soured Turkey’s relations with the EU roughly since 2013. This article presents a historical assessment of Turkey’s interrelations with Europe and the EU that provides the historical context on which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government constructed its foreign policies antagonizing the EU since its third term. Scholarly and journalistic literature on the negative trend in Turkey–the EU relations mainly focuses on the failing democratic conditionality aspect of relations. This approach inevitably causes presentism trap in analyses. The paper sheds light on the historical context of relations turned into ideational baggage carried by the sides. In its overview of the past of interrelations, the article locates four historically institutional dimensions: (1) Mutual “otherness”, (2) Turkey’s modernization, (3) symbiotic modus vivendi and (4) regional power politics. The article also touches the role played by Turkey’s domestic secularist and conservative political schism. This analysis of political interrelations comes to the conclusion that the current problems are not only consequences of the AKP’s or the EU’s recent moves but also the burdens inherited from fluctuating historical experience. The parties’ past, and thus todays, are saliently intertwined. Therefore, these conditions do not let Turkey and the EU have a complete break-up or union regardless of contemporary agents’ intentions or decisions.

PROTRACTED BETROTHAL: A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRESENT TURKEY-EUROPEAN UNION ANTAGONISM

Keywords:

Turkey European Union,

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