ABSTRACT
The introduction presents the rationale and aims of the book and introduces the book’s major theme: how, and to what extent, EU rules have been institutionalised in Turkish foreign policy longitudinally since it applied for full membership in 1987. It introduces current debates surrounding Europeanisation in the national foreign policy of non-member states and presents the conceptual framework of the book, which relies on two broad areas (normative and substantive), each in three dimensions (formal, behavioural and discursive). Within this context, the chapter also introduces four measures of change: adjustment, transformation, inertia and retrenchment, which capture both the direction and the magnitude of change. It then introduces the Turkish context, the axis-shift debates, along with the data and methods of analysis used in this book that contribute to these debates. Subsequently, the chapter briefly introduces the EU- and domestic-level variables established in the conditionality mechanism and presents the key findings of the book.
