Research Papers

The 2004 decision by the EU to open accession negotiations with Turkey was one of the most controversial it has ever taken. So why, given Turkey’s unpopularity before, and since, 2004 did it happen? It is argued here that the UK played an active role in this process. The paper takes an eclectic Historical Institutionalist approach to explain how even those member states with misgivings were “rhetorically entrapped” into saying yes to Turkey at the Brussels EU Council in 2004 and this was a process in which the New Labour government played a salient role. The UK had been a long-term advocate of Turkey in “Europe” for geostrategic reasons. Between 2002 and 2004 the UK worked closely with the AKP government to advise it on the implementation of constitutional reform. This was done through close links with the UK Embassy in Ankara and, serendipitously, there were also several “well placed Brits” within the European Commission in both Brussels and Ankara. The result was that by the Brussels EU Council of December 2004 Turkey had ticked enough reform boxes for the Commission to recommend the opening of negotiations and for the member states to feel obliged to agree - even though Ankara remained an unpopular candidate. This outcome was possible between 1999 and 2004 because of a confluence of circumstances stemming from the structural geostrategic changes in Europe in the late 1990s. These made the member states more sympathetic to Turkey’s cause than they had previously been and, through various path dependent processes, gave Turkey’s advocates within the EU an unprecedented window of opportunity to exercise agency and override the underlying normative and cultural objections to Ankara's case.