Turkey and the European Union: A troubled relationship or a historic partnership?

This chapter seeks to provide an account of the attitudes hampering Turkish accession from both the Turkish as well as the European perspectives. It focuses on the road to full Turkish membership, utilizing the Copenhagen Criteria (CC) to summarize and highlight the potential obstacles and irritations for both sides. In the economic field, Turkey has, even despite the February 2001 crisis, ‘achieved most of the hallmarks of a market economy’. The European Union (EU) has to realize that the pace of human rights reform, and the o democratization of politics, must be commensurate with the institutional and financial capacity of the state to implement these reforms, while taking into account the mood of Turkish public opinion. The portion of the guidelines in CC about ‘institutional preparedness’ is a minefield of competing values and norms between Turkey and the EU, and trouble always lurks just beneath the surface