Greater Alignment, Yet Separate Paths?

Turkey and EU countries continued to engage in wide-ranging dialogue and bilateral and transatlantic cooperation on key issues, however the accession process had progressed little. Was the relationship between Turkey and the EU bound to be marked by a high degree of alignment but only limited convergence? At the root of the problem, there seemed to be different trajectories. EU leaders were the first to recognize the significant progress that Turkey had made in recent years, becoming a widely-praised success story of both economic and political development. Yet, what was celebrated among Turkish ruling elites as the emergence of' New Turkey 'was the product of developments that had either been out of sync with EU trends or that the EU had helped trigger but had then taken a distinctly national course.

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