European Union Influence and Candidate Countries' National Foreign Policy: The Need for Alternative Explanations. Turkey's Foreign Policy towards Armenia and Cyprus
Athanasios Manis, London School of Economics and Political Science
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 convincing explanation as to why Turkey changed its neighbourhood policy vis-à-vis the case of Armenia and Cyprus. As the comparison of the two cases indicates, Turkey’s agreement with Armenia in 2009 regarding the normalisation of their relations challenges rationalist and constructivist institutionalism accounts that had been employed in the case of Turkey’s stance towards Cyprus in 2004. More specifically, the comparison of the two illustrates that there is a broken link between what the literature of Europeanisation explained in the form of the two institutionalisms in 2004 in the case of Cyprus and what could be predicted for Turkey’s neighbourhood policies in the aftermath of 2006 based on the same literature, and what actually happened when Turkey seemed not to deviate from its policies of conflict resolution even after 2006. In other words, there is no covariance to validate the causal link between EU influence and Turkish foreign policy change vis-à-vis Armenia and Cyprus. This means that without excluding totally the significance of the EU factor, one should put forward alternative explanations that are able to explain both cases in a consistent manner; even more, because the active consideration of alternative explanations is reassuring against monistic accounts that reproduce themselves without any criteria of verification.