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.
Turkey is in search of a new social contract premised on an extensive revision of the country’s Kemalist inheritance and incorporating the economic and political transformations set in motion in the Ozal period. This is not a straightforward task for the reformist forces in Turkish politics and civil society; the imperative and nature of reform are the object of contestation between those factions within the bureaucratic and military elite that have associated their social supremacy with the maintenance of the Kemalist tradition and its preferred variant of modernization, and the emerging reformist forces which rally around the demand for Europeanization. In this internal struggle between the established model of authoritarian modernization and a more open modernist conception of political liberalism, the prospect of a deepened relationship between the EU and Turkey has played a significant role in shaping Turkish politics during the past two decades.
