Trials of Europeanization: Turkish Political Culture and the European Union (review)

In Trials of Europeanization: Turkish Political Culture and the European Union, Ioannis Grigoriadis examines how Turkey’s candidacy to join the European Union brought about a liberalization process of Turkish society and its political culture between 1999 and 2005. During that period there was an irreversible change in formal institutions and political practice in Turkey. As Grigoriadis observes, “There had been an ongoing process of social capital accumulation, a shift from a predominantly subject to an increasingly participant model of political culture.”

Grigoriadis’s core tenet is that “democratic institutions and elections cannot guarantee the existence of a fully functioning democratic political system if a democratic political culture is not present.” Underlying the difference between procedural and substantive democracy, Grigoriadis carefully documents the new substance of Turkish democracy. He focuses on key theoretical concepts such as

“Europeanization” (when European Union member states were forced to adapt to European political, economic and social standards prior to accession);

“historical institutionalism” (stressing the autonomous power and energy of society, especially of entrepreneurial institutions and agents);

“path-dependence theory” (whereby history matters and the costs of reversal may be unacceptably high); and

the “two-level games model” (the interactions of domestic and international policies during diplomatic negotiations).

The purpose of Mustapha Kemal’s republican revolution in 1924 was to ward off the disintegrating trends of the declining authoritarian Ottoman Empire and redefine a Turkish national identity. The Kemalist model — largely inspired by the republican model of France’s Third Republic — was to remain ingrained in the minds of the Turkish establishment for a long time. According to Grigoriadis, the Kemalist model would account for the successive military coups during the Cold War era and for the Turkish military’s firm stand on the secularist principle. The military coup of 27 April 1960 and the adoption of the 1961 constitution were aimed at strengthening Kemalist centralization and tightening the Turkish state’s control over Turkish society. However, lingering political violence involving opposing leftist militants and government-tolerated rightist extremists led to a second military coup “by memorandum” on 12 March 1971. The latter was followed by a third military coup on 12 September 1980 and a constitution that was approved by a referendum on 7 November 1982, even though it severely curtailed the rights of Turkish citizens. Eventually, military rule ended in 1983, allowing for unprecedented economic liberalization by the government of Turgut Ozal with his Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party).

Trials of Europeanization traces the liberalization of Turkey to the creation of the Terrakiperver Cumhuriyet Firkasi (Progressive Republican Party) in November 1924, a step followed by the introduction of a multiparty system in the 1946 constitution and the creation of the Demokrat Parti (Democrat Party). Grigoriadis’s book focuses on the liberal “Europeanization” of Turkey under the Copenhagen Criteria between 1999 and 2005. Adopted at the European Summit of June 1993, the criteria became a yardstick against which reforms were measured as well as a standard for the progress that Turkey was required to achieve before the European Union would consider opening accession negotiations. Turkey’s quest for EU membership “required a series of political decisions, which entailed, among other things, a reconsideration of state-civil society relations, the civilianization of politics, and a new approach to secularism and national identity.” By creating a dynamic situation that neither the Turkish government nor the Turkish elite could ignore, the Copenhagen Criteria paved the way for the liberalizing process of Turkish political culture illustrating the “path dependence theory.” A series of Turkish reform packages dutifully monitored by the EU provided for the emergence of a more effective civil society, which became a fait accompli.

EU recommendations on human rights, democratic government, minority rights, and religious rights — if not the rights of non-Muslim ethnic minorities — were largely respected by Turkish reformers. The Europeanization process, however, met with the resistance of the so-called Turkish deep state...