Paper Titles & Abstracts

European Union influence on national foreign policy of member and candidate countries has been discussed as part of the Europeanisation literature. By and large, the literature argues that, in the case of candidate countries, the EU exerts influence through EU conditionality and/or EU socialisation/persuasion. In this paper, I argue that the EU influence, as it has been conceptualised and theorised in the literature of Europeanisation, cannot form a consistent and thereby plausible explanation as to why Turkey changed its neighbourhood policy vis-a-vis the case of Armenia and Cyprus. A comparative analysis of the two cases indicates that Turkey's agreement with Armenia in 2009 regarding the normalisation of their relations challenges rationalist and constructivist institutionalist accounts as they had been employed in the case of Turkey's stance towards Cyprus in 2004. More specifically, the Europeanisation argument falls short from explaining why Turkey signed the Zurich protocols with Armenia in 2009, a groundbreaking change in Turkish neighbourhood policy. After stipulating the analytical implications that the Armenian case bears regarding the Europeanisation argument on the Cyprus case, the paper presents and refutes three other alternative explanations that had been employed in the case of Turkey's benign neighbourhood policies. Subsequently, I put forward a new argument that focuses on the dynamics of civil-military relations and the impact that they have had on the AKP government's vision for a new neighbourhood policy. The main argument is that the AKP government following the politics of survival has been utilising neighbourhood policies in order to enhance its position internationally while at the same time weakens the army's position domestically. Finally, within this new analytical framework the EU influence is reconsidered for its importance with regard to Turkish foreign policy change.