Turkey's accession to the European Union: institutional and security challenges

In a historic moment, the European Council decided in its December 2004 summit to open accession negotiations with Turkey on 3 October 2005. Even though Turkey has been on the borders of the European Union since its Association Agreement in 1963, there has always been a degree of ambivalence towards Turkey’s membership. This paper proposes that the following factors will determine, to a large extent, both the nature of Turkey’s accession negotiations with the EU and whether Turkey will ever accede to the EU as a full member. These factors are: the institutional restructuring in the EU, in other words the changes that the Constitutional Treaty brings to the functioning of the EU and the security challenges for European and western security, particularly important here is the Islam vs. Europe divide