ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief and, admittedly, cursory outline of domestic responses within Turkey to its long and, at times, volatile relationship with the EC/EU. After an examination of the main parameters within which Turkish politics have developed since the establishment of the Turkish Republic, including the dynamics of the processes of political modernization, the chapter shifts its focus to the post-1983 political scene and examines its institutional and cultural dimensions. In many quarters of Turkish politics today, Europeanization is treated as synonymous to 'democratization' or pressure to enhance and deepen liberal democracy and to activate appropriate citizenship rights. The chapter demonstrates that Turkey today is in search of a new social contract, premised on an extensive revision of the country's Kemalist inheritance and incorporating and institutionalizing the economic and political transformations that were set in motion in the Ozal period and pursued by reformist governments of the 1990s, even though not always decisively.
