The Role of the European Parliament in the Enlargement Process: Insights from Inter-Parliamentary Relations with Turkey

The chapter assesses the role of the European Parliament (EP) in the enlargement process of the European Union (EU) – a topic which has remained largely understudied in the burgeoning literature on parliamentary diplomacy. It has three objectives: First, the chapter shows that, in addition to its formal role, the EP has an informal, yet potentially crucial normative role in the enlargement process. Second, combining the literature on norms and Habermas’s theory of communicative action – as popularized by Risse (2000) in the form of ‘the logic of arguing’ – ,the chapter offers an analytical framework for studying the EP’s normative actorness in engaging the political elite of third states in communicative processes. Third, it evaluates this analytical framework in light of the empirical evidence from inter-parliamentary relations with Turkey, with a special focus on Joint Parliamentary Committee meetings over the course of two legislative terms of the EP (seventh (2009-2014) and eighth (2014-2018) terms). The chapter concludes that the EP’s normative role in EU-Turkey relations remains largely limited when the EP aspires to promote new, politically controversial conditions that go beyond the Copenhagen political criteria.