Conceptualizing the internal factors for the emergence of pro-Europe social forces in Turkey : The background of Turkey’s EU candidacy and reform period from 1999

Abstract

This paper argues that the different concepts of “political Europeanization” have only limited explanatory power to the past and the present of the Turkish European Union candidacy, furthermore, the explanation of Turkey’s reform process cannot be understood by emphasizing exclusively its efforts to become a state which fulfills the Copenhagen criteria. As an alternative, my goal is to shift focus from the merely political explanations of the reform period and European accession process to the sociological research of the internal factors, which highlight the social transformations that made this political, legal and economic change possible. The paper is going to give an adequate answer to the question of what kind of social transformation was responsible for the emergence of a pro-Europe social base in Turkey. The theoretical basis of these arguments is laid down by the Gramscian passive revolution theory adapted by Tugal for the case of Turkey, which means that the adequate theory can be found within the framework of the discipline of sociology, although it pays particular attention to the political actors who, in Tugal’s terminology, can be best described as the ‘political society’.