중동부유럽

Since the Association Agreement with the European Community in 1963, Turkey has been striving for full membership in the EC/EU. The pursuit of EU membership for Turkey has been a painfully slow process. By the end of the 1980s, integration with Western Europe took on a new priority in Turkish foreign policy with Turkey’s application to become a full member of the EC in 1987. However, Turkey's EC membership bid was rejected with ambivalence by EC countries throughout the late 1980s to 1990s. After the collapse of communism, the EC focused their enlargement agenda on Central and Eastern Europe, former members of the Soviet block. Despite the signing of a Customs Union between Turkey and the EU in 1996, the troubled EU-Turkish relationship culminated in the EU’s Luxembourg summit in 1997. With the EU’s Luxembourg summit, Turkey was excluded from the EU’s enlargement negotiations. The EU’'s 1997 decision provoked a hostile reaction from Turkish elites as well as the public. The common view held in Turkey was that Turkey was being excluded from the EU on religious and cultural grounds. After the EU’s Luxembourg summit, Turkey has continuously carried out political reforms. The EU approved the intention of Turkey to reform the human rights of minorities and declared that Turkey was a ‘candidate State' at the Helsinki summit of 1999. At last, In December 2002, the EU acknowledged the decisive progress made by Turkey in its far-reaching reform process. By 2004, the Commission Progress Report on Turkey acknowledged that Turkey had met the political criteria to commence accession negotiations. The European Council in December 2004 decided to set a date for the opening of accession negotiations with Turkey on the 3rd of October 2005. But, there are many internal and external hurdles to overcome the delay in accession negotiations. Some external factors include the unresolved issue of Cyprus, the Armenian question and the Aegean dispute in Greece. What hinders Turkey within from the viewpoint of the EU is its slow pace in carrying out the necessary political and economic reforms.