Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper will focus on two questions. The first is whether the EU's prospective enlargement to include Turkey can still be argued as relevant for strengthening its CFSP in the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern region and towards the Muslim countries. The second one is whether Turkish foreign policy as that of a candidate country can or should still be compatible with the EU policies towards the Middle East and Africa after 2011. The author's book titled "the Influence of the European Union on Turkish Foreign Policy" published in 2010 argued that Turkey's foreign policy had showed a major example of Europeanisation of both policy content and of the actors that make this policy, as a result of a credible accession prospect supported by the major European actors but had asked whether this was a sustainable process. The author discusses in this paper whether Turkey and the EU still see their relationship with each other in foreign policy matters as an ongoing engagement or whether they have already thrown away the ring for some time but did not announce it yet. In the paper both parties' policies towards the Middle Eastern and African countries (especially towards Libya, Egypt, Mali and Palestine as major examples) will be discussed in a comparative perspective to discuss whether Turkish foreign policy can and should be maintained as EU-compatible without a functioning accession process and whether current Turkish policy towards the Middle East can be evaluated as an enriching contribution to the CFSP if Turkey is to be seen as a future member country.