EU-Turkey Relations. A New Direction for EU Foreign Policy?

This book aims to contribute to increasing our understanding of European Union (EU) foreign policy by uncovering how the EU’s main institutional actors and the structural context affected its conceptualization of relations with a specific target country, Turkey, and the main foreign policy decisions made in the timeframe 2014–2019, which corresponds to the EU political cycle which started with the 2014 European elections. Unlike most studies on EU foreign policy vis-à-vis Turkey, which focus on the Union’s enlargement policy and analyse the impact of EU norms, or the lack thereof, on the transformation of the country, this book adopts an institutional focus and investigates in a systematic way how the main political institutions (Commission, European Council, Council of Ministers and Parliament) and their bureaucratic bodies contributed in the period examined, in both crisis and day-to-day foreign policy making, to this process, to the substance of the decisions taken (the outputs), and to the implementation of these decisions. It also investigates the extent to which these decisions were influenced by the structural context at both the EU level and the Turkey level. In order to do this, it adopts an original foreign policy analysis framework, which combines actor-oriented factors – stemming from the theoretical perspectives of bureaucratic politics, new institutionalism, new institutional leadership, new intergovernmentalism, incrementalism and hegemonic stability, applied to EU foreign policy – with structural factors, starting from the notion of ‘opportunity’ used by Bretherton and Vogler (2006), to analyse EU actorness. By doing this it presents a more comprehensive evaluation of EU actorness, which is based on the role played by different institutional actors, different modes of decision making related to different foreign policy areas, different foreign policy outputs and a multi-level structural context of action. The main findings of the book show the usefulness of performing a more comprehensive evaluation of EU (foreign policy) actorness, based on the role played by different institutional actors, in different foreign policy areas, in different phases of the decision-making process and in a constantly changing multi-level structural context that commences with each new political cycle at the level of the EU.