Turkey-European union Relations in World Polity

Abstract

By ‘bringing in’ the global dimension, this thesis aims to explain the main reasons for Turkey’s failure to comply with EU conditionality. Existing studies in the field either look at the hardships in Turkish-EU intergovernmental bargains or at the ‘cultural mismatch’ that triggers opposition in the conservative circles of both Turkey and Europe. Such tendencies mislead many students to miss the ‘bigger picture’; in other words, the global legitimation processes underlying Turkey’s interactions with the EU. By introducing World Polity theory, an innovative sociological institutionalist theory developed by a Stanford University sociologist, John W. Meyer, since the 1970s, this thesis promises a fuller analysis of the difficult relations between Turkey and the EU through the study of three key sectors where EU-led reforms prove particularly problematic: foreign land ownership, ombudsmanship, and Turkey’s Cyprus policy. Benefiting from original interview and survey findings, the thesis demonstrates that the likelihood of EU-led reform depends on the extent to which it is perceived as globally legitimate in the candidate country, Turkey. The main argument is that Turkey-European Union relations should be considered within the context of a wider global cultural environment in which they are deeply embedded and which constitute their agency. This argument is innovative in three ways. First, it adds the global context, which is severely neglected in the prevailing studies on EU-Turkey relations, as a constitutive element to the analysis. Second, it offers new analytical tools to rethink the EU as an ‘organizational carrier’ of world models and better explain the domestic motivations behind compliance with EU conditionality. Finally, it contributes to World Polity research that is increasingly criticized for having a top-down approach and lacking in-depth case studies on how world models spread.