ABSTRACT
Over a decade after Turkey was named a candidate country for EU membership in 1999 and eight years after formal accession talks began in 2005, Turkey is arguably no closer to its long-held goal of EU membership. True, since the beginning of the 2000s Turkey has implemented numerous reforms, spurred in large part by EU conditionality. These included dozens of constitutional amendments and several EU harmonization packages and addressed issues such as minority rights, freedom of expression, torture, judicial reform and the political role of the military (Özbudun 2007). Each of these concerns (in addition to others) had been highlighted by the EU as a shortcoming in Turkey's democratic and human rights record and something that would have to be rectified in order for Turkey to meet the political requirements of the Copenhagen criteria and begin accession talks. If, in the 1990s, one witnessed a ‘vicious circle of delayed reforms and slow progress toward full membership’, in the early 2000s one saw a ‘virtuous circle’ of reforms that were ‘inconceivable in the absence of powerful incentives and pressures from the EU’ that ushered in a ‘golden age’ of Turkish-EU relations and political liberalization within Turkey (Öniş 2008: 37, 39). One author called this period one of ‘the miracles of political conditionality’ (Açikmeşe 2010: 139).
