The effectiveness of the European Union as a normative power: Human rights conditionality in the case of Turkey

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2008

Öğrenci: YAVUZ SELİM ALKAN

Danışman: SEVİLAY KAHRAMAN

Özet:

In this thesis it is attempted to shed some light upon the limits and effectiveness of the role of the European Union (EU) as a normative power has played in the transformation of Turkish politics especially in the case of human rights issues. First of all, this study reviews the original and current debates over the civilian and normative power Europe ideas, searches to find common elements underlying those accounts and assesses to what extent they offer an adequate categorization of the EU’s international significance. One of the main arguments of this thesis is that the EU is generally considered as the catalyst or the anchor of the reform process in the candidate countries to become members. With this in mind, an account of the development of the EU’s human rights conditionality vis-à-vis the third countries and the typology of the EU’s human rights conditionality within the framework of enlargement are also examined. The massive wave of transformation with regard to human rights issues undertaken in Turkey during its pre-accession relations with the Union is a case point in this thesis. Within the scope of the study, it is attempted to analyze the impact of the EU’s human rights conditionality upon the related state of affairs in Turkey with a view to exploring to what extent and under what conditions it could be regarded as the independent variable of the domestic reform process in the country.