Turkey’s alignment with the common foreign and security policy

This chapter examines Turkey’s performance in aligning with EU foreign policy as an indication of the formal dimension of change in the substantive area. The chapter provides a systematic analysis of Turkey’s alignment with EU foreign policy starting with the European Political Cooperation to the present-day Common Foreign and Security Policy. It relies on the quantitative data on the voting alignment with the United Nations General Assembly as well as the quantitative content analysis of the EU’s progress reports, supplemented by qualitative data from press releases, strategy papers, accession partnerships, declarations, Council conclusions and major speeches given by EU officials. With this data, the chapter both assesses how the conditionality mechanism triggers a change in the general orientation of Turkish policy and presents evidence to contribute to axis-shift debates at different points in time since 1987 to the present day.