ABSTRACT
Europeanization has had various impacts both on the European Union’s (EU) new members and on candidate states. As a top-down process, Europeanization has an observable impact on three main domains: domestic politics, policies and polities, as claimed in the introductory chapter of this volume. As the main actors in the domain of politics, political parties are not immune from the effects of this process; they can be influenced in two main ways. First, the organizational structure of the political parties may change in accordance with EU requirements. Second, the patterns of party competition (Ladrech 2002, p. 397) can change, with parties taking pro-or anti-EU positions as an electoral strategy to attract new voters. However, various researchers have claimed that the impact of Europeanization on domestic political parties has been limited (Mair 2000; Usul 2011; Pridham 2006). During the process of Europeanization, the EU has neglected political parties as democratic actors by simply engaging with governing parties as the main actors (Pridham 2006, p. 392). The main reason for this lack of attention is related to the fact that the EU perceives accession as a bureaucratic rather than political process (Pridham 2006, p. 391). The aim of this chapter is to explain the impacts of Europeanization on the structures and attitudes of political parties in Turkey. More specifically, we are dealing with the positions of political parties as an outcome of Europeanization in Turkish political life by specifically focusing on Eurosceptic parties. In this regard, we will answer the following questions: What is the outcome of the process of Europeanization in the domain of politics with regard to the political parties? What is the nature of party-based Euroscepticism in Turkey? How did it change after the start of accession negotiations in 2005? In doing so, we will examine the harmonization packages Turkey adopted in the early 2000s and the Progress Reports issued by the European Commission to trace any structural changes regarding political parties. In addition, to trace the attitudes of parties regarding EU membership, we will examine party programs and electoral manifestos of the 18 political parties that ran in the 2002 general elections, the 15 political parties that competed in the 2007 general elections and the 16 political parties that ran in the 2011 general elections. We believe that this will contribute to the literature both by providing a detailed analysis of party-based Euroscepticism and by providing a longitudinal analysis
through comparing the positions of all political parties competing in the 2002, 2007 and 2011 general elections.
