Abstract
This article discusses the main reasons why the AKP and the CHP, the leading pro-EU political parties in Turkey, started embracing a highly critical stance against the EU and showing reluctance towards Turkey’s EU membership. The extant scholarly works only give a limited account on how to explain such an attitudinal change in the selected parties as they offer rather static terms for analysing the phenomenon. Instead, a contextual framework will be introduced in order to better analyse eurosceptic change in candidate countries in general, and in Turkey in particular. The framework explicates the notion that the ‘eurosceptic turn’ within candidate countries develops mainly as a reaction to extra conditional pressures coming from the EU that are not officially part of the standard membership conditionality. After discussing the empirical findings concerning the shifting EU stances of both parties in detail, the article will make sense of the rising euroscepticism in Turkish political arena in accordance with the suggested theoretical framework. The article concludes that the rise of euroscepticism in Turkish political arena has been developed as a firm reaction to the increasing scepticism and reluctance within the EU towards Turkey’s accession.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Didem Buhari-Gülmez, James Sloam, Ziya Öniş and two anonymous referees for their invaluable feedback.
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Baris Gulmez, S. Rising euroscepticism in Turkish politics: The cases of the AKP and the CHP. Acta Polit 48, 326–344 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.2