Avrupa Birliği'nin Akdeniz ve Doğu genişlemesi: gelişen AB müktesebatına ilişkin karşılaştırmalı bir araştırma.

The main focus of this thesis is analyzing the Mediterranean enlargement and the Eastern enlargement of the European Union by utilizing Frank Schimmelfennig's rhetorical entrapment theory. The admission of Greece to the Community in 1981 on political grounds which aimed to support the country's transition to democracy after the regime of the Colonels between 1967-1974 and the Community's own efforts in the same era to transform the integration project into a noble enterprise based on rights and values had significant effects on the enlargement process: following the Greek accession, democracy promotion developed into the fundamental reason for widening the Community's membership, making both the Iberian and Central and Eastern European accessions impossible to oppose for the member states. Even though both the Mediterranean countries and the CEECs appealed to the Union's self-perception as a value-based community, who aimed to promote liberal democratic norms, to overcome their obvious shortcomings on economic and administrative terms in their membership applications, they were granted a very dissimilar deal when it came to the negotiation process. This divergence in practice can be explained by the evolution of the Community's acquis communautaire. Therefore, a two-dimensional question lies at the heart of this study: How were the Mediterranean countries and the CEECs able to exploit the Community's emerging identity which surpassed its purely economic nature, and how has the evolution of the acquis communautaire from the mid-1980s until the accessions of the CEECs affected the enlargement policy of the European Union?M.S. - Master of Scienc