1 - Introduction

Summary

It was a little over two years before this introduction was written (February 2007) that Turkey appeared at last to have taken the final steps to become a candidate member of the European Union. The agreement that was signed at the end of 2004 promised a period of negotiations, which, albeit long and difficult, would eventually end in Turkey’s accession to full membership. Yet two years later, people in Turkey find themselves in the position of having to watch from the sidelines as Romania and Bulgaria become full members. In the meantime, eight of the thirty-four articles under which Turkey’s status was being negotiated have been frozen, and being against Turkey’s accession to the EU has become a necessity for winning elections in major European countries.

Turkey has repeatedly had to pull back from such ‘points of no return’, or ‘thresholds of new eras’ in the course of the twentieth century, each time turning its back on a hopeful turn of events and retreating to closure and isolation. In 1958, Daniel Lerner was so impressed by the progress Turkey had made that he stated confidently that the ‘production of “New Turks” can now be halted, in all probability, only by the countervailance of some stochastic factor of cataclysmic proportions–such as an atomic war’. But less than two years after these words were published Turkey experienced a bloody military coup that would set its democratic development back significantly. In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Turgut Özal would declare that Turkey had ‘skipped a whole epoch’ in the race to modernise, implying that the reforms that were implemented were irreversible and that Turkey had been firmly placed on the path of continuing liberalisation and progress.