ABSTRACT
Introduction The Kurdish problem has been a crucial issue in Turkish politics since the establishment of the Republic in the early 1920s. Particularly in the last three decades, Kurdish ethnonationalism has emerged as one of the major challenges to the Turkish state and democracy (see Gunter 1997; Ozbudun 2000; Kramer 2000; Moustakis and Chaudhuri 2005; Somer 2005). Moreover, the official documents of the European Union (EU) (e.g., Progress Reports) show that the Kurdish issue has been not only an important domestic matter but also a crucial issue in Turkey’s relations with the EU. A quick look at the evolution of the Turkish state’s attitude towards Kurdish ethnic identity and rights during the Republican period shows three different stages. From the mid-1920s until the early 1990s, denial, suppression and assimilation characterized the state’s attitude. In the 1990s, several political elites recognized “the Kurdish reality” in Turkey but the state’s policy of suppression and assimilation persisted in that period. However, in the 2000s, we see a new era in the state attitude vis-à-vis the Kurdish issue: acknowledgement of the problem as an ethnopolitical issue and democratization efforts (see also Yegen 2011). The EU played a key role in this transformation in the last decade. In this chapter, we focus on the role of the EU factor in the reform process in Turkey’s Kurdish issue. The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section provides a brief discussion of the misfit between EU norms and standards and the domestic status quo in terms of human rights and freedoms and the protection of minorities in Turkey. The second section provides a list of major reforms in Turkey’s Kurdish issue. The third section interprets the outcome of the reform process. The fourth section analyzes the mechanism through which the EU trigger promoted the reform process in the Kurdish issue. The fifth section discusses the possible impact of alternative factors which might have shaped the reform process in the last decade. The concluding section summarizes the chapter’s main arguments.
