Turkey and the EU: Democratization, Civil-Military Relations, and the Cyprus Issue

Abstract: The paper analyzes Turkey’s democratization efforts between 2004 and 2008. In addition to the challenges that the EU accession process brings to the Turkish political structure, an assessment of the current impasse of Turkey’s democratization along the EU accession process is made with respect to the detailed analysis of two major issues: the Cyprus issue and civil-military relations. With an eye to studying the EU’s impact on the domestic politics of accession countries with special reference to Turkey, the paper concentrates on the current government’s performance over the past three years in EU accession negotiations, showing how this immediate experience reveals the main problematical issues of Turkey-EU relations under these two headings. The concluding remarks focus on two crucial problems of the post-2004 period in Turkey: the sustainability of the reform process and the importance of the time factor in evaluating the EU’s leverage on democratization.