Europeanization of Minority Norms in Turkey

In the recent Eastern enlargement, the EU has put particular minority conditions for the accession of the candidate countries. It has used membership incentive to promote minority norms and principles in the candidate countries. The state in question recorded important legislative changes which promote the level of minority protection and which would not have been possiblewithout the EU's conditionality. All candidate countries have engaged in a large scale process of transformation and approximated their human rights to European practices. Turkey also became the target of the EU's minority conditionality. Since Turkey was given candidate status at the Helsinki Summit in 1999, reform process in the field of minority rights has gained important momentum; Turkey has taken important steps in linguistic, property and religious rights of the minority groups and complied with the EU's minority norms. As such, the EU has appeared to be main catalyst in accelerating Europeanization of minority norms in Turkey. Despite the fact that the steps taken so far are far-reaching, the reform process has suffered from an important problem of endurance. Europeanization of minority norms in Turkey is not smooth and steady. Important ups and downs and halts and restarts occurred in the reform process. It is not possible to talk about constant process of Europeanization in minority norms in Turkey. This irregularity in the Europeanization process begs the question of how different dynamism in terms of the degree and pace of minority reforms can be accounted for Turkey. In this respect, this book intends to explore internal and external factors that are responsible for the variation in the reform process. The study is centered on the EU's norms and conditionality as main variables. It aims to find out whether conditionality or normatively induced factors explain continuity and change in domestic change concerning minority protection in Turkey. By assessing explanatory power of norms and conditionality in Turkey's case, the book contributes academic discussions concerning Europeanization of candidate countries and policy convergence.