Description
This paper will examine the EU’s relationship with Turkey – and vice versa - in the decade since the Gezi Park protests. This time has seen a marked increase in illiberal governance within Turkey. However, whilst it has made minimal progress towards accession since candidate status was granted in 2004, Turkey remains a candidate state. The research puzzle revolves around the EU’s apparent toleration of increasingly illiberal policy by the AKP government and how this is justified discursively. At the same time, it will examine the reaction of Erdogan and the AKP government to the EU’s attempts to balance an adherence to the Copenhagen criteria in the progress reports against the need to maintain the relationship for security reasons. This research takes the European Commission’s progress reports on Turkey since 2014 and the official press releases and statements associated with them. It will also gather the Turkish government’s official responses including presidential statements and reports by the Anatolia News Agency, to the progress report each year. These two datasets will be analysed using thematic analysis to isolate the ways each side seek to justify and react to the progress reports which waltz around Ankara’s very obvious, and arguably increasing, democratic backsliding. The paper seeks to place this contemporary situation within the Turkish centenary framework and consider whether the current stalemate dynamic relates in any way to the original Europeanisation focus of Mustafa Kemal.
