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Failure of EU conditionality in Turkey: positive conditionality, negative result

Issue 6 from 27.06.2020

In order to join the European Union, candidate countries have to meet a specific set of conditions (the Copenhagen criteria), which include maintaining stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities. Incentivising the countries wanting to join the EU to strengthen democratic institutions, EU membership conditionality - tying the possibility of membership to compliance with membership conditions - is considered to be an effective tool for  promoting  democracy  and  the  rule  of  law.  However,  the  effectiveness  of  conditionality  was  recently  questioned  by  an authoritarian turn in Turkey and democratic backsliding in other candidate countries.

The  question  that  arises  from  recent  developments  is  whether  EU  membership  conditionality,  based  on  rewards  rather  than sanctions (“positive” conditionality), is equipped to deal with democratic backsliding in candidate countries. This article closely examines the EU’s choice of responses addressing the problem of democratic deterioration in Turkey, the country with the most drastic dismantling of democratic institutions amongst the candidate countries, and assesses the scope and limits of the tools the EU employed to redress severe democratic backsliding.

The article concludes that positive conditionality by itself is limitedly equipped to effectively counteract the consolidation of authoritarianism. For Turkey, the situation was also aggravated by the lack of expertise on the part of the EU, which previously had no experience in dealing with democratic backsliding in candidate countries. Additionally, there were instances of conditionality being applied inconsistently, compromising its credibility. What also affected the application of conditionality is the leverage Turkey gained in EU-Turkey relations due to the EU’s need to enlist the country’s support in curbing the flow of Syrian refugees to Europe. Combined, the problems resulted in the ineffectiveness of measures taken to counteract democratic deterioration in Turkey.

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