ABSTRACT
The political history of EU-Turkish relations can be divided into two main parts: the pre-Helsinki period and the post-Helsinki period. The 1999 Helsinki Summit thus represented a real watershed in these relations. The EU offered clear prospects of membership to Turkey at the summit, on the condition that Turkey complied with the Copenhagen criteria. It has previously been discussed in detail how the EU adopted the role of ‘gatekeeper’ in the negotiation process with other candidate states. Furthermore, a genuine mechanism for monitoring and reporting was created through the decisions reached at Helsinki. The EU could be best said to have provided ‘active leverage’ since the conditionality mechanism already described was created at the end of 1999, and Turkey’s position had been that of ‘not-yet-negotiating candidate’ between 1999 and 2005, the time period during which the effectiveness of EU conditionality had been at its greatest, and then that of a negotiating country after 2005.
