Shlykov Pavel Vyacheslavovich – Ph.D. in History, Associate Professor, Middle Eastern History Department, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University, visiting scholar, project «Multi-factor analysis of the “Asian turn” in Russian foreign policy (achievements, problems, prospects)», MGIMO (U)
The article considers the paradoxes of interconnection between internal and external factors in the democratization process in Turkey, a country that began the transition to democracy in the middle of the last century. It would seem that the process of preparing the country for accession to the EU should have given a serious impetus to larger-scale democratization. Indeed, it was Turkey’s aspiration to meet the Copenhagen criteria that was the driving force behind the most ambitious and successful liberal reforms of the 2000s. However, despite the reforms, which continued to take place in Turkey in the first decade of the 21st century, EU membership became an increasingly elusive prospect. In the 2010s, when these reforms finally lost their steam, the scholarly debate focused on the correlation between internal and external factors in the process of democratization of non-Western countries. Turkish political dynamic of the 2000s and 2010s allows a deeper analysis of the specifics of Europeanization in the countries aspiring for the EU membership, and of the correlation between the politics of conditionality and democratization. The ideas that until recently prevailed in the scientific literature about the primacy of the foreign policy factor (that is, the principles of the EU) as the main driving force of democratic reforms and the secondary role of domestic political context have been replaced by a completely opposite opinion. The author analyzes three components of Turkish political dynamics – the role of the democratic values in the Turkish politics, the correlation of external and internal drivers of modernization, and the overall logic of Turkish politics in the 2010 s. Such an analysis allows the author to prove the thesis that the internal political context in such complexly organized large non-Western countries as Turkey was noticeably underestimated both in the scientific literature and, most importantly, in the practice of the democratic process.
Turkey, accession to the EU, Copenhagen criteria, R.T. Erdogan, non-Western democracy
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