Contemporary Perspectives on Turkey’s EU Accession Process: A Reluctant European?

Despite having made its first application for EEC membership in 1959, Turkey’s bid to join the EU remains as controversial as ever, with Turkey and EU relations arguably at an all-time low in the aftermath of the attempted coup d'etat of July 2016. In this context, the essays here, while using (de)Europeanisation as a broad theoretical framework, explore the current state of Turkey’s EU accession bid from a variety of perspectives, including discourse analysis, Euroscepticism and institutionalist approaches. The essays focus not only on discursive and policy (de)Europeanisation within Turkey, but also examine both official EU and European right-wing Eurosceptic discourse on Turkish accession, as well as approaching the Turkish accession process through comparisons with the contemporary Western Balkan countries and with post-war Germany.