EU-Turkey Relations: Facilitating or Constraining Democratization?

In trying to bridge between external Europeanization literature and studies on the international dimension of democratization, we use the concepts of leverage and linkage to analyse how EU-Turkey relations, in combination with domestic-related factors, favoured or constrained democratization. Whereas in the first part, we reconstruct economic and political linkages to show what EU-related factors affect EU’s leverage on Turkey, in the second part we identify the combination with domestic factors, which facilitated democratization until 2007 and constrained it since then. We argue that, as the EU has no more leverage on Turkey’s ruling elite, only extensive linkages at the level of civil society, business groups and opposition elite, could contribute to favour Turkish democratization process over the long-term.