UPPSALA UNIVERSITY

Department of Government

Spring Term 2011

Master’s Thesis

EU Conditionality and Minority Rights:

A Comparative Study on Romania and Turkey

by

Merve Yildiz

Supervisor: Åsa Lundgren

Abstract

Minority rights protection has been one of the significant litmus tests for the success of EU conditionality. In Romania, the accession process helped transform key minority policies and improved the records whereas in Turkey, the traditional minority policies still linger despite the small changes in early 2000s. This paper aims to analyze how EU conditionality in minority related policies has become successful in Romania but not in Turkey through the application of the external incentives model to the cases to see under which circumstances minority rights measures were adopted and refused. The model assumes that the EU conditionality can be expected to improve minority conditions when the credibility of conditionality is higher, the conditions are determinate and the domestic adoption costs are lower in target states. Therefore, the paper attempts to test this model’s assumptions and expectations within the cases of Romania and Turkey. The paper argues that although the veto players and domestic adoption costs primarily determine the success of EU conditionality in minority rights in target states, the EU conditionality can, to an extent, undermine the power of resistant political forces by credible membership prospect and clear conditions. (21.114 words)

Key Words: European Union, conditionality, minority rights, external incentives model, Romania, Turkey

To my family and my best friend M. Şimşek who always believed in me…and to Z.A.G... I could not have done it without you…

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 11.2 Purpose 2

2. Theoretical Framework 32.1 External Incentives Model 4

2.1.1 Determinacy of Conditions 52.1.2 Size and Speed of Rewards 62.1.3 Credibility of Conditionality 62.1.4 Veto Players and Domestic Adoption Costs 8

2.2 Key Concepts 92.2.1 Minority Rights 92.2.2 European Union and Minority Rights Protection 102.2.3 Conditionality 11

3. Methodology 123.1 Case Selection 123.2 Delimitations 133.3 Research Design 13

3.3.1 Operationalization of Independent Variables 143.3.2 Operationalization of Dependent Variable 15

4. Analysis I – Romania 17Interval 4.A - Minority situation and relations with the EU prior to conditionality 17Box.1 EU demands from Romania on minority issues 20

4.1 Determinacy of Conditions 204.2 Size and Speed of Rewards 234.3 Credibility of Conditionality 254.4 Veto Players and Domestic Adoption Costs 28

Interval 4.B- Current situation of minorities in Romania 325. Analysis I – Turkey 34

Interval 5.A – Minority situation and relations with the EU prior to conditionality 34Box.2 EU demands from Turkey on minority issues 36

5.1 Determinacy of Conditions 365.2 Size and Speed of Rewards 385.3 Credibility of Conditionality 395.4 Veto Players and Domestic Adoption Costs 47

Interval 5.B- Current situation of minorities in Turkey 476. Assessment of Findings 487. Concluding Remarks 508. Annexes 539. Bibliography 55

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1 Introduction

The enlargement policy of the European Union (EU) is generally considered as one of the

successful and yet demanding processes with regard to the transfer of the EU norms to the

aspiring countries who wish to be members of the Union. The massive voluntary compliance

with the requirements that actually compromise the sovereignty of the states has attracted the

scholarly attention of the researchers. (Vachudova 2001:7) The membership conditionality of

the Union is a means to promote sine qua non liberal democratic norms and values within the

target countries. At this point, Europeanization of these countries that is synchronizing the

policies via conditionality seems to stand at the heart of the enlargement policy by obligating

target states to comply primarily with the Copenhagen Criteria, and it is interesting to explore

and see empirically the influence of the EU conditionality imposed upon the candidate states

by comparing two problematic candidates, namely Romania and Turkey with regard to their

compliance with minority rights protection norms, and how this huge process turned out to be

a success story for the former while the latter still shy away from complying with the

conditions and still has substantial amount of problems dealing with its minority groups.

Therefore, this paper will explore whether there is a causal link between the factors

that have an influence on the effectiveness of conditionality and the rule adoption processes

with regard to minority rights protection. Focusing on the rule adoption process on minority

rights is primarily significant considering the EU’s emphasis on democracy and human rights

and the fact that even though there is no common internal standard on minority rights within

the Union, EU strictly urges the aspiring countries to ratify certain international documents

including the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) of the

Council of Europe (CoE). Also, minority rights protection within the EU conditionality has

another angle as it is one of the most politically sensitive issues both for Romania and Turkey.

However, no matter how sensitive the issue is for the governments of respective countries,

both have showed a degree of compliance and effort to transpose the imposed rules and norms

into the national legislations. The effort shown makes it more interesting to study the impact

of Europeanization of the aspiring countries and how they try gradually to consolidate their

democratizations in order to receive the material benefits from the EU. Yet, despite the

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similar backgrounds and poor records on minority treatments in both countries during the

1990s, by 2007 the records were distantly different in both countries as Romania has

improved the situation of its principal and large Hungarian minority group while Turkey has

still had deep problems to tackle the Kurdish issue or property rights of non-Muslims.

In the first part of the paper, the theory that the research will apply to the cases and the

key concepts that are used extensively in this research will be elaborated in detail. The second

part deals with the methodology of the research including the reasons of the case selection and

the delimitations to the research. The fourth and fifth sections constitute the analysis parts of

the paper. Each analysis part follows the structure of first a brief historical explanation of the

minority situation within the case and its relations with the EU, second the demands from the

EU on minority issues, and third the application of the external incentives model’s variables

to the cases in four subsections. In the end of each analytical section, a short overview of the

current situation of minorities in each case was given in order to support the research question

that assumes success in Romania but not in Turkey. The fifth part provides a comparative

assessment of the cases derived from the analysis and summarizes the findings. The paper

ends with author’s concluding remarks on the study.

1.2 Purpose

In light of the above mentioned, the research aims to explain why EU conditionality on

minority rights protection towards Romania has been successful in formally adopting norms

and rules than Turkey during the EU accession process. In other words, the paper will seek

the answer to the question whether there were any conditions/factors for conditionality to be

effective and bringing about the results intended by the European Commission in Romania

and Turkey, and when it was effective and when it was not. It has been observed by the author

that the literature on the effectiveness of the conditionality is mainly located in a broader

context both temporally and spatially, and it is, by and large, studied outside the country-

specific contexts apart from a few scholars.

Therefore, the research in general will attempt to find out and thus contribute to the

relevant field by assessing the impact of the factors of the external incentives model by

applying it to the cases below, and see whether the EU conditionality can explain the

compliance in terms of inducing a target country to follow what an international actor requires

to be done in order for the target country to achieve membership. More roughly, can the

material incentives model belonging to rational-choice approach explain the generation of

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change along the lines with the EU requirements or does the improvement of minority

situation during the accession process require more than a materialist account? It should be

acknowledged that the research is designed in such a way that it will mainly explore the top-

down impact of the EU on the domestic politics of the target countries, therefore, although the

historical legacies, and political culture of the target countries are not purposefully ignored,

the emphasis, due to the macro level design of the research, will be on the role of the EU and

how it is relevant for the domestic political changes within these countries. The research

question therefore is;

Why has EU conditionality on minority rights protection been more successful / effective in

Romania during the accession process than in Turkey? What are the factors determining the

impact of the minority conditionality in target countries and render the conditionality

effective in some countries? Is it EU conditionality and how it is applied that can explain the

success in the case of Romania or are there any other explanatory factors influencing the

effectiveness of EU conditionality in terms of successful rule adoption during the accession

process?

2 Theoretical Framework

This research will apply Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier’s (2005) rationalist bargaining

model called External Incentives Model to the cases in order to measure the effectiveness of

conditionality defined in terms of successful formal rule adoption. The model will be

elaborated in detail in below as it is the main theory which this research will employ and

develop further by applying it to the cases of Romania and Turkey. It is better for the readers

to note herein that in some sources, Schimmelfennig use external incentives model together

with the concepts of either Europeanization or EU socialization. Although they have

conceptually different meanings, the usage of these does not change the actual direction of the

term as Schimmelfennig refers to these two concepts simply in the same sense.1 Briefly,

Europeanization which refers to the harmonization or synchronization with the EU by the

target country and the EU’s impact on “domestic discourse, identities, political structures and

public policies” (Radaelli 2000:4) is a subsection of socialization of target countries in

accordance with the rules that an international organization wants.2

1 See Schimmelfennig 2005 in Flockhart, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005, Schimmelfennig et al. 20062 More on Europeanization, see Radaelli (2000); Börzel and Risse (2000); Heritier (2001); Featherstone (2003)

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2.1 The External Incentives Model

The studies on the effectiveness of conditionality can be principally divided into two

theoretical perspectives as rational choice and constructivist approaches. Rational-choice

approach mainly assumes that the actors are rational, goal-oriented, and purposeful, and

conditionality only works when it brings benefits to a national government; in other words,

the actors try to maximize the benefits while lowering the expenses. (Rechel 2009:3)

Moreover, whereas rational-choice approach “explain compliance by the use of positive and

negative incentives, which constrain or empower states and domestic actors by allocating

differential costs to alternative courses of action, constructivists emphasize processes of

international socialization in which domestic actors change their identities and preferences as

a result of imitation or argumentative persuasion.”(Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005:6)

A constructivist approach, therefore, emphasized the sharing of norms and values through the

abovementioned processes. (Börzel and Risse 2000; Vachudova 2005) These two forms of

external influence are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary, they are complementary, yet

due to limited time and space allowed for this research, the debate will be structured around

the rationalist approach as it is difficult to trace the effects of the latter model.

According to Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, the EU sets the adoption of its rules as

conditions that the candidate countries have to fulfill in order to receive rewards from the EU.

(Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:10) The model they employ to explain the EU’s impact

upon the target countries is a rationalist bargaining model which assumes that the actors are

“strategic utility-maximizers interested in the maximization of their own power and welfare.”

(Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2004:663) It is based on logic of consequences that actors

exchange information, threats and promises to their preferences and the outcome depends on

the relative bargaining power of actors. Schimmelfennig et al. (2003) present that the EU

follows the strategy of “reinforcement by reward” which means that the EU does not support

or punish candidate states, yet reacts to the changes within these countries.

To simplify, by “external”, they refer to an international organization or any actor

other than the target state itself. By “incentives” the scholars mean the rewards or the tangible

benefits of either becoming a member to an international organization or establishing an

institutional or financial bound. In the external incentives model, Schimmelfennig and

Sedelmeier expect a likelihood of rule adoption even in the absence of legitimacy, identity

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and resonance if the conditions specified by the external incentives model were favorable.

(Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:25)

Based on the external incentives model, Schimmelfennig’s main hypothesis is that the

likelihood of compliance increases as the size and credibility of international rewards

increase and the power of costs of compliance for the target government decrease.

(Schimmelfennig 2005:6) Accordingly, EU offers two kinds of rewards to nonmember

countries: assistance and institutional ties. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005) Assistance

includes technical to financial assistance like PHARE program for the Central and Eastern

European Countries (CEECs) for the transition to market economies and later redesigned to

support EU accession. Institutional ties, on the other hand, range from trade and cooperation

agreements via association agreements to full membership, and these provide increasing

market access to the EU with the prospect of gains from trade and investment and

participation in EU decision-making. (Ibid.:10) Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier propose that

there are four sets of factors determining the effectiveness of conditionality that will be

explained in the subsections below.

2.1.1 Determinacy of Conditions

Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier point out that the likelihood of rule adoption increases if

rules are set as conditions for rewards and the more determinate they are. Determinacy

refers to clarity and the formality of the rules. When the conditions set by the EU becomes

clearer, the implications of that rule will be more binding for the target state. (Ibid.:12)

Determinacy matters in two respects according to Schimmelfennig; first it has an

informational value. It helps the target states by prescribing what they exactly have to do in

order to receive the rewards or to avoid punishment. (Schimmelfennig 2005b:110) Second,

determinacy enhances the credibility of conditionality. It sets down the rules so that the target

countries cannot manipulate the rule to their advantage or avoid adopting it at all. (Ibid.)

Furthermore, it binds the organization that sets down the rules so much so that “if a condition

is determinate, it becomes more difficult for the organization to claim unjustly that it has not

been unfulfilled and to withhold the reward.” (Ibid.:110) Although Schimmelfennig et al.

(2005) admit that there are shortcomings with respect to the clarity of rules set by the EU,

they claim that during the accession of the CEECs, the lack of determinacy was offset by the

instruments of conditionality which the annual Progress Reports, Opinions and in extreme

cases démarches that draw a general road map for the aspiring countries by underlining

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specific issues within the continuous stream of the EU communications. Hence, according to

Schimmelfennig et al. (2005), the determinacy of conditions has been high because of the

clear feedback mechanism by the instruments above.

2.1.2 Size and Speed of Rewards

The offer of full membership at the ‘end of the tunnel’ is according to Schimmelfennig et al.

(2005) what makes the effort to comply with many arduous prerequisites of the EU worth of

trying. It is not the simple institutional tie bound by trade agreements or associational links,

yet what matters and so renders conditionality effective despite the hardships that applicants

face before they are considered as official candidates is the eventual prospect of becoming a

member of the Union, which Schimmelfennig et al. (2005) claim that is more powerful than

the attraction of promise of assistance or association. Briefly, the promise of enlargement

should be more powerful than the promise of associations or assistance and the impact of EU

on candidates should be stronger than on outside states that are not considered as potential EU

members. Moreover, the rule adoption becomes more likely the closer the day of EU

enlargement decision-making gets. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:13) Therefore, the

hypothesis is that the likelihood of rule adoption increases with the size and speed of rewards.

(Ibid.)

2.1.3 Credibility of Conditionality

Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier propose the hypothesis that the likelihood of rule adoption

increases with the credibility of conditional threats and promises which increases with the

internal consistency and consensus, and additive or parallel conditionality, and decreases

with the asymmetries in information in favor of the target government. (Ibid.:16) Credibility

literally means the realization of either the promise or the threat, hence, in the case of EU

membership conditionality; credibility means the prospect of membership and the threat of

being excluded from accession process if the rule adoption is not realized. (Schimmelfennig

& Schwellnus 2006:3)

Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier present four sub categories to explain the credibility

of the conditionality factor; first one is capabilities and costs of the agency employing

conditionality. Particularly, the capabilities of the actor that provides the reward should be

greater than the applicants, as well as the costs should be low or none to the actor. In other

words, conditionality is credible when there is a substantial asymmetry in power between the

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demandeur and the institution granting the reward, since the leverage of the institution3, in our

case the European Commission, will be stronger over the applicant to achieve the intended

implementation of reforms and the EU must be capable of paying the rewards with little or no

cost to the Union. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:14) Therefore, promises will stop

being credible, if the costs of the rewards get higher for the EU, and the eventual payment to

the target countries starts to look more doubtful. (Ibid.) According to Schimmelfennig and

Sedelmeier, there is more than meets the eye in terms of the costs to the international

organization. It is the ‘sunk costs’ of rewarding which means that the organization puts up

front many resource as possible in order to prepare the aspiring countries for the membership

prospect; however, this requires ‘large input of political and human resources’ which in the

end implies a willingness to conclude them. (Ibid.) Henceforth, if the cost of opening of

accession negotiations and the eventual membership of a country is calculated to exceed the

expected costs, conceivably EU may refrain from starting the accession process overall or act

slowly and reluctantly which would subsequently decrease the credibility of conditionality.

(Ibid.) Yet, if the exceeded costs stand at a bearable rate, in other words if they are not

prohibitive in the sense that EU could neglect the fact that the marginal benefits of including

countries into the Union would be lower than the costs during the accession period, the

enlargement process could still continue. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2004:665)

Second, credibility depends on the consistency of an organization’s allocation of

rewards. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:15) Specifically, if the EU is perceived to

subordinate conditionality to other political, strategic or economic considerations, the target

state might either hope to receive the benefits without fulfilling the conditions or conclude

that it will not receive the rewards in any case. (Ibid.) Also, internal EU conflict would create

another source of inconsistency about conditionality. If a target state learn about such internal

conflict and receive inconsistent signals, they will either be tempted to manipulate it to their

advantage or simply be confused. (Ibid.) Last but not least, credibility increases with the

consistent and uniform application of conditionality, and remains respected as long as it is not

sacrificed for a politically motivated purpose conditionality principles. (Ibid.)

Third, cross-conditionality should be absent or minor, because EU conditionality

would not be effective if the target government had other sources offering comparable

benefits at lower adjustment costs. That is, there should not be an alternative to the EU in the

3 For a detailed work on the leverage of the EU, see Vachudova, Europe Undivided, 2005

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sense that the aspiring country will not try to circumvent the conditions set upon for its

inclusion. Conversely, conditionality will be more effective if other international actors offer

additional benefits in return for fulfilling the same conditions (parallel conditionality) or if

other international actors make their rewards conditional upon prior fulfillment of EU

conditions (additive conditionality). (Ibid.)

Fourth and the last sub-factor of the credibility of conditionality is the fact that

asymmetries in information reduce the effectiveness of conditionality. (Ibid.) Asymmetries in

information refers to the inability of the international organization to monitor the target state

or the inconsistent or lack of information gathered from other monitoring agencies which in

the end gives the target state the chance to conceal its noncompliance record from the

monitors and therefore weakens the credibility of conditionality. (Ibid.)

2.1.4. Veto Players and Adoption Costs

Schimmelfennig (2005) suggests that provided that the conditions are determinate, and

rewards or punishment are credible and the speed of granting of rewards does not seem far

away, then the effectiveness of conditionality varies mainly with the size of domestic

adoption costs and the preferences of domestic actors within the target state. (Schimmelfennig

2005b:111) In other words, the likelihood of rule adoption decreases with the number of veto

players incurring net adoption costs (opportunity costs, welfare and power loses etc.) from

compliance. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:17) Schimmelfennig et al. (2005) propose

that domestic adoption costs are the most tangible factor that influences the decision of

governing elites whether or not to comply with non-negotiable and sometimes politically

sensitive norms. By costs, the researchers mean losing the grip over power by the elites via

reforms that are imposed on them by EU requirements. Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier

(2005), therefore, claim that if the costs of adopting rules are lower than the benefits of

adhering to the norms, governments adopt and implement those EU rules.

The external incentives model assumes that rule adoption is always costly – otherwise

it would take place even in the absence of conditionality. (Ibid: 16) Adoption costs, moreover,

have two kinds of sources. First is that the adoption costs “may take the form of opportunity

costs of giving up from alternative rewards offered by adopting rules other than that of EU

rules.” (Ibid.) Second one refers to “the welfare or power costs for private or public actors.”

At this point, the effectiveness of conditionality depends on the preferences of the “veto

players” within the government as the EU rules have to be adopted and implemented by the

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target country’s government. (Ibid.) Furthermore, because in the case of the EU, the

requirements expected considerably affect certain instruments to preserve power (such as

freedom of press, freedom of expression, individual or collective rights of the minorities,

more accountability, independent judiciary or free and fair elections), “the most relevant

domestic adoption costs are the government’s cost of power preservation”. (Schimmelfennig

2005b:111) Herein, the number of veto players does not constitute as much of a significant

factor as their policy-influencing rank. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:16) However,

because of the general assumption about the small numbers of veto players in the CEECs, it is

widely considered that effectiveness of conditionality is contingent upon the cost-benefit

calculations of governing elites rather than the societal veto groups, as the scarcity of veto

players increases the influence of the government as the main target of EU conditionality, by

at the same time increasing the executive power and therefore the speed of adoption and

policy-making. (Ibid.: 17)

Schimmelfennig et al. (2003) in their research corroborated the significance of

political costs of compliance by demonstrating that as the aforementioned factors held

constant, adoption cost is the variable that affects mostly the dependent variable of rule

adoption. According to Schimmelfennig et al. (2003), the rule adoption, consequently, has

been high in the target countries given the small number of veto players and little domestic

adoption costs compared to the huge benefits of EU membership.

Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, on the other hand, also present that the domestic

adoption costs can be balanced by the benefits of the EU rewards which renders the strenuous

period of before and during the accession negotiations endurable. (Ibid: 16) To that end, if the

target countries’ governments perceive costs lower than the expected benefits to receive, and

if they are certain about the chances of winning the next elections due to being pro-EU or -

Western –as the aspiring countries have functioning democracies and periodic elections-,

therefore the veto players or the domestic actors will most likely comply with the EU

requirements. (Ibid.: 17)

2.2 Key Concepts

2.2.1 Minority rights

Best understood as human rights with special rights to minority groups, minority rights

protection is itself highly debated. There is still no universal definition of a minority but, the

definition of Francesco Capotorti (1979) has been widely accepted by the international

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community. Capotorti defined the term minority as referring to several characteristics; “being

numerically smaller to the rest of the population, being in a non-dominant position, possessing

ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those rest of the population and

show a sense of solidarity directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or

language.” (Capotorti quoted in Packer 1993:52) Despite the absence of a consensus on the

definition, there are several legal documents produced to protect the rights of minorities by

United Nations (UN), CoE, Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and

European Court of Justice (ECJ).

2.2.2 European Union and Minority Rights Protection

As Pentassuglia puts forward, with the exception of some activities of the European

Parliament “in support of minority languages and cultures, the protection of minorities was

virtually absent on the EC agenda in the pre-Maastricht era.” (Pentassuglia 2001:6)

Nonetheless, it was the treatment of the Kurdish minority that caused the questioning of

Turkey’s application for membership by the European Parliament. (Von Toggenburg 2001:221)

It is also interesting to note here that the EC introduced minority protection as a new element

within the spectre of conditions for the recognition of statehood. (Ibid.) The European Court

of Justice, meanwhile, progressively developed a case law on human rights in order to

compensate the lack of specific human rights references in the EC law. (Pentassuglia 2001:6)

Yet, the new challenges brought about with the end of Cold War have led to significant

changes in the EU’s interest in minority rights, and the new attitude has marked by the

adoption of the Declaration on Human Rights at the Luxembourg European Council in 1991

when a whole paragraph was dedicated to minority protection. (Lerch & Schwellnus 2006:313)

In the Copenhagen European Council in 1993, ‘respect for and protection of

minorities’ were included in the political accession criteria. This development symbolized

EU’s ambition to shape minority policies in the future member states during the enlargement

process, however, this external promotion of minority protection did not have any internal

ground in terms of EU minority standard. Therefore, the Copenhagen Conditions “marked a

significant disjuncture through the explicit mention of minority protection.” (Sasse 2005:1)

As de Witte states “the insistence on genuine minority protection is clearly the odd one out.

Respect for democracy, the rule of law and human rights have been recognized as

fundamental values of the European Union’s internal development and for the purpose of its

enlargement, whereas minority protection is only mentioned in the latter context.”(De Witte

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2000:140. [emphasis in original]) What is more, because EU did not have a single minority

protection of its own, the Copenhagen Criteria for the protection of minorities for new

members was borrowed from the existing OSCE and Council of Europe norms, as these were,

according to Hughes & Sasse, “considered … to be the best practice of ‘international

standards’.”(Hughes & Sasse 2003:6) EU, thereafter, imported these international and

regional conventions and they were incorporated into the accession criteria although they are

not part of the acquis communautaire. Briefly, as put forward by Rechel (2009), EU

conditionality in the area of minority rights “motivated a change of policies, but the CoE and

OSCE often shaped the substance of policy solutions.” (Rechel 2009:4)

Therefore, due to the absence of a common minority rights law at the EU level and the

external use of the minority protection as a membership condition, there occurred a

“conceptual discrepancy between internal non-discrimination based approach and external

promotion of special minority rights beyond this standard.” (Schwellnus 2006a:186) For this

reason, the minority rights promotion of the EU in its external relations is often called as a

practiced of “double standards”. (Ibid.)

2.2.3 Conditionality

Conditionality, by and large, can be defined as “the exercise of policy instruments by one

party to secure compliance and shape the actions of another party”. (Barnes & Randerson

2006:352) It generally refers to a foreign policy tool aimed to promote democracy and respect

for human rights through the attachment of these ideals to mostly economic relations. (Usul,

2011:30) It is an implicitly coercive instrument wielded by the Commission to secure

compliance with certain desired policy or institutional outcomes. (Hughes et al. 2004:525) EU

requirements for membership can be roughly divided into two parts: the fundamental political

principles of the EU such as the norms of human rights and liberal democracy including the

Copenhagen criteria which is in general called as the democratic conditionality, and the

specific rules of the acquis communautaire that is acquis conditionality. (Schimmelfennig &

Sedelmeier 2004:669) For the purpose of this research, the focus will be on the ‘democratic

conditionality’ instead of ‘acquis conditionality’.

Also, it can be discussed in a different topic that although the candidate states are

deemed to fulfill the political criteria of membership including the ‘respect for and promotion

of minority rights’ before the accession negotiations can be opened up, because the

monitoring procedure continued during the accession process both for Romania and Turkey

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with an ever increasing intensity, the incentives for reforms did not reduce, and the

democratic conditionality did not lose its relevance, it still requires to be further explored due

to the significance it holds. Furthermore, even though the date when the democratic

conditionality starts to be mentioned can be stretched from early 1990s to the day of the actual

accession due to the facts I listed above; however, as far as this research is concerned, I will

follow the theoretical distinction suggested by Vachudova and later taken up by

Schimmelfennig, that is the implementation of the ‘active conditionality’ owing to the

rationalist approach of this research starting from 1997 with the publication of the Opinions

by the European Commission. By ‘active leverage’, Vachudova means the deliberate

conditionality exercised in the EU’s pre-accession process by the introduction of the

systematic mechanisms to enforce target countries. (Vachudova 2005:63) By passive

leverage, Vachudova means the attraction of EU membership without any particular material

incentives attached to it. (Ibid.) Henceforth, for this research, the appropriate definition of

conditionality is the explicit usage of the material incentives by an external actor. (Vachudova

2001:7) According to Sasse, the issue of minority rights is a test for the notion conditionality,

for a consensus on norms and rules on their transmission within the EU and beyond, clear

benchmarks and enforcement mechanisms ensuring credibility, consistency and continuity

over time lie at the centre of a meaningful definition of conditionality. (Sasse 2005:4)

3 Methodology

3.1. Case Selection – Why Romania and Turkey?

In order to provide a comparative perspective to the EU policy of conditionality on minority

rights, two countries were selected, respectively Romania and Turkey. Both countries have

gone through the EU conditionality and Turkey is still receiving conditions for the EU

membership. Also, each state has at least one big minority group that is, by and large,

geographically concentrated and has claimed a different identity than that of the nation-state.

Moreover, both countries have substantial number of the Roma people whose situation has

been a repeated issue of conditionality. Both, therefore, are ‘hard’ cases in the sense that the

changes EU conditionality triggers can be easily tracked, so much so that “we will be able to

learn more about the conditions of its effectiveness and ineffectiveness since the challenge to

conditionality is higher in cases of significant conflict.” (Schimmelfennig et al. 2003:501)

Furthermore, both countries were generally criticized because of their minority

policies by several international and nongovernmental organizations including the OSCE, the

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CoE, and MRGI, and the EU policy towards them has been stricter than previous candidates

in terms of possible delays in the date of accession in the case of noncompliance.

Last but not least, the author acknowledges that the impact of having a kin-state could

play an important role in improving the situation of minority groups; however, due to lack of

time and the fact that this determinant does not account for the rule adoption in Turkey but

only for Romania, it has been left outside the research.

3.2 Delimitations to Comparative Analysis

Due to the limited time period allocated for research and inaccessible data and lack of

reporting in the first half of the 1990s, and considering the application date of Romania, the

research will focus on the evaluations of the NGOs like MRGI, in determining the degree of

success of the countries, which will be used as external objective tools to assess the

developments, including and after 1995 until 2010.

Additionally, the limited time and the language barrier forced the author to briefly

mention some of the variables and have access to limited amount of sources that could have

had an influence on the rule adoption for example the role of the society in affecting the

formal rule adoption process because of the difficulty in measuring and choice of research

design. Therefore, the societal variable had to be left out both due to the time allocated to the

student and due to the fact that this variable is not included in the external incentives model as

an explanatory factor of the conditionality. Also, there are analytical limitations to

comparative study, such as the cases have different historical backgrounds. While Romania

has been a parliamentarian democracy for only 20 years, Turkey has had a much longer

history with parliamentary democracy. What is more, both cases have different relations with

the EU in terms of time.

3.3 Research Design

The research will try to analyze whether there is a variation between the two cases in terms of

the variables below by applying the factors of the rationalist bargaining model to the cases of

Romania and Turkey. Although the variables seem to overlap to some extent, each factor will

be explored in itself in order to discern the influence of each from the other. The analyses also

aim to test that the hypothesis by Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) that it is the veto

players and domestic adoption costs that primarily affect the rule adoption. The author will try

to find out whether the other variables have as much influence on the rule adoption as the veto

14

players and domestic adoption costs variable. Each independent variable in analysis parts in

their respective order corresponds to first, what and how EU demands, second, what and when

EU offers, third, how EU offers, and lastly how EU’s impact is reflected on and responded by

the target states.

It is significant to note here that with regard to the dependent variable, the way this

study is conducted addresses two kinds of explanations at the same time; first it seeks out how

the EU conditionality in Romania has been successful by following a chronological path and

also at the same time, explores why it was successful. By this research design, the author aims

to substantiate the research by providing a historical overview while analyzing the factors in

their specific contexts.

3.3.1 Operationalization of the Independent Variables

There are four independent variables that will try to account for the dependent variable. The

first variable is the determinacy of conditions which is defined as the clarity and formality of

the rules set out in the Copenhagen Criteria or in the Regular Reports. By this the author

means the usage of the definition of minority, minority rights in the EU, how these are

defined and promoted within the conditionality instruments such as Regular Reports and what

kind of concepts such as, non-discrimination or collective rights, are used when addressing a

minority. The author will also seek if the reports refer to specific ‘road maps’, in other words,

a guide to adopt and implement the norms that are mentioned in the reports. Moreover, it will

be explored if there is a consistency in demands from countries, in other words, if there is

continuity within the reports, that is, whether the EU constantly mentions the same group of

minorities or not and also if there are minorities that are mentioned in one annual report and

not in the other.

Second variable is the size and speed of rewards. This variable relates to the prospect

of EU membership and timing of the reward and whether the size of this reward was constant

across Romania and Turkey countries and does not change during the negotiations. The third

variable is the credibility of conditionality. It will be measured against the fact that if the

threat is credible and mentioned in the EU documents in case of non-compliance in the form

of withdrawing the reward or the promises are credible in case of compliance with conditions

in the form of membership. It also relates to target states’ reception of signals whether

consistently or not from Member States and EU institutions and whether the EU has the

15

capability to accommodate a country without costs. Moreover, it will be also studied if there

are any parallel conditions from another organization for the target state to follow.

Fourth variable is the veto players and adoption costs. This variable will be measured

by the reaction that the political parties, elites or actors who can affect the decision-making

process or the adoption of the rules, give to the EU demands on minority protection. Also

domestic adoption costs will be measured through the perceptions of these veto players with

regard to the effects of a probable rule adoption. If they are against the EU membership or if

they perceive that they will lose the power in case of rule adoption, they tend not to comply

with the conditions. Usually, nationalist political parties or governments trying to win in the

next elections will see the cost of adopting the rules high so they avoid reforms.

3.3.2 Operationalization of the Dependent Variable

The dependent variable is the success in terms of formal rule adoption. Formal rule adoption

means the “transposition of EU rules into national law or the establishment of formal

institutions and procedures in line with EU rules.” (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005:8)

Taking the difficulties into account, the research will leave the implementation processes of

these rules out of the research design. Monitoring the implementation process is also difficult

as in certain cases there are no official data or reports on minorities. Success is measured as

the positive changes in the minority policies in line with the EU demands, so basically it is the

more Europeanized minority policies in terms of granting such as linguistic rights to minority

groups, eliminating discrimination within a country or signing international treaties on the

minority protection during the EU accession process. (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005;

Vachudova 2005; Rechel 2009) Success can be therefore pursued by comparing the demands

from the EU and the response of the country to these demands, for example, in terms of

signing the international treaties that are mentioned in the Regular Reports or enacting laws to

grant broadcasting rights or coming up with strategies to prevent discrimination after the

short-term priorities are released within the Accession Partnerships. Also, it can be the

Constitutional amendments or changes in the laws that address minorities to improve their

situation. For example, in the case of Turkey, success is also measured in terms of the changes

within the laws which used to prevent granting rights to minorities, rather than enacting laws

that grant rights to minorities. Henceforth, in order to measure the ‘success’ in terms of rule

adoption, the study will explore the amendments to Constitution, changes within laws of the

target countries in terms of expanding the rights given to minorities, enacting strategies to

16

tackle problems of minorities or the signing of international agreements in order to trace

whether the EU conditionality has really influenced the rule adoption in minority rights.

It should be noted that there are no clear-cut rules to reach a conclusion of two definite

values of success of failure. The author is aware of the pitfalls that, for instance, there may be

different degrees of rule adoption in Romania and Turkey which may render the study

incomparable; yet, to avoid this problem the dependent variable will solely focus on the full

rule adoption as the international organizations also base their assessments on whether or not

the countries have formally adopted the suggested rules and norms.

17

4 Analysis I – Romania

Interval 4.A - Minority situation and relations with the EU prior to conditionality

After 1989, with the end of the Cold War, Romania had to go through an arduous process of

democratization which required a wide range of legal reforms. EU, herein, represented the

democratic stability and prosperity of Western Europe, and “Return to Europe” became the

motto of the post-communist regime. (Vachudova 2005:83) Though reluctantly due to deep-

seated authoritarian traditions, Romanian elites started to express their will to rejoin the

Western community and thus developed a Western identification in the first half of the 1990’s

during the post-communist Iliescu government. (Schimmelfennig 2005a:13) Nevertheless, the

post-communist transition in Romania started with a violent clash between Romanians and

Hungarians in March 1990, the same month that Romania applied for the Council of Europe

membership. (Ram 2009:181) The elites in Bucharest were aware of the fact that the road to

the EC was going through the CoE and it was Romania’s chance to certify itself with

democratic values and step into the Europe. (Ram 2001; Drzewicki 2008:160) It should be

noted herein that all of the EU member states are also members of the CoE. Therefore, the EC

expected candidate countries to join the CoE in the first place, and to comply with its

standards on human rights and minorities for it was CoE which was trying to bring countries

“into conformity with European norms.” (CoE 1991, cited in Ram 2001) The CoE

application, thus, was followed by a new Constitution in 1991 which was to be amended in

2003.

The Constitution declared that Romania is a “sovereign, independent, unitary and

indivisible National State” (Article 1); nonetheless, the Constitution recognized “the right of

persons belonging to national minorities, to the preservation, development and expression of

their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity.” (Article 6) (Constantin 2004:3)

However, according to Schwellnus (2005), this provision was circumscribed by a restrictive

formula that “protective measures…shall conform to the principles of equality and non-

discrimination in relation to other Romanian citizens.” (Art. 6/2, cited in Schwellnus 2005:58)

The same Constitution also granted representation rights to the minorities in the Parliament.

(Constantin 2004:3) Before being granted membership in 1993, Romania was supervised by

CoE, and it was acknowledged that “Romania was subjected to the deepest possible scrutiny”

in evaluating its application for membership, because it started “from the lowest possible base

in the denial of human rights, lower than that of the Soviet Union.” (CoE 1994 cited in Ram

18

2001) What is more important for the purpose of this research is that the ethnic diversity in

Romania has been enormously complex. (Andreescu 2001b:271) According to 1992 census,

there were sixteen different national minorities ranging from 1,620,199 Hungarians to 2,023

Armenians and the population of Romania at that time was 22,760,479. (Ibid.) Although after

Hungarians, the Roma people constitute the second largest minority group, the number of

Roma tends be underreported. (Ram 2003:52) What is more, during the early 1990’s,

Amnesty International regularly criticized Romania for violating human rights treaties, and

EC, CoE and OSCE were also critical of the situation in Romania because of the severe

human rights violations and political instability in the country. (Schimmelfennig et al.

2006:133-134) CoE membership therefore was made conditional upon the adherence to the

standards and the improvement in the situation of the minorities, following the CoE

Parliamentary Assembly Opinion 176 on the need to “…adopt and implement (…) legislation

on national minorities and education.” (CoE 1993 quoted in Andreescu 2001a)

Despite the establishment of a consultative body in 1993 called Council for National

Minorities composed of representatives of national minorities, because of its lack of power

and further, government’s reluctance on putting the Constitutional Articles into practice, the

situation of minorities in Romania did not improve as expected especially from the

Hungarian’s side. (Constantin 2004:3; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:133-134) According to

Human Rights Watch Country Report of 1995 on Romania, the violence and discrimination

towards Roma people had increased and the aggressive attitude by the far-right politicians

towards the existence of Hungarian minority had heightened. (Human Rights Watch 1995)

Additionally, in the UN ECOSOC 1994 Report on Romania, it was criticized that Romania

still did not introduce a minority law and the concerns over the realization of the right to

education for minorities still persisted. (UN-ECOSOC 1994) What is more, OSCE High

Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel stated that Romania did not pursue

the international treaties on the protection of minorities it has signed and pledged to abide.

(der Stoel 1995)

It was with the 1994 Stability Pact Process, which was meant to resolve ethnic

tensions in the region, that the EU went beyond shaming Romanian government and made the

conclusion of a friendship treaty with Hungary, including especially a legally binding

minority protection rules, a prerequisite for membership. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:135)

Faced with increasing conditions on the protection of minorities, Romanian government

19

symbolically signed the CoE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National

Minorities (FCNM) in February 1995 without making any concrete decisions about

implementation. (Ram 2003:36; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:138)

In June 1995, Romania submitted its official membership application to the EU and a

month later, the Parliament passed a new Education Law in July 1995 in order to placate the

criticisms from the EU. (Ram 2001) The Education Law which would be renewed several

times in the following years in accordance with the EU demands, revealed the need of the

Romanian government to satisfy the EU to increase its chances of becoming a member. (Ibid.)

Despite the signing of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECMRL) in

also July 1995, the Education Law eliminated the earlier provision of the opportunity to take

exams in the mother tongue which was criticized by the Hungarian community due to its

restrictive manner, and later, it would become a hot potato in the EU conditionality agenda on

minority issues with regard to university training in Hungarian language. (Andreescu

2001b:274) What is more, together with the EU, NATO also stipulated that Romania signs a

friendship treaty with Hungary and resolves the ethnic tensions with improved minority

protection policies, and therefore, the candidacy of Romania to NATO and EU was linked

with its compliance. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:138) The signing of the friendship treaty in

1996 shows the strength of the conditionality in helping to overcome the domestic opposition.

(Kelley 2004:143)

Given the complicated situation with respect to minorities in Romania, positive the

developments achieved since mid 1990’s can be explained with “strong and persistent

promotion of minority protection by international organizations linked with explicit EU

conditionality.” (Schwellnus 2005:58) It should be noted that the abrupt change in the field of

minority politics in Romania came with 1996 elections by the inclusion of the Democratic

Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR) into the coalition government. (Ram 2009:182)

This meant the replacement of nationalist forces with a democratic and pro-Western coalition.

20

Box 1. EU demands from Romania on minority issues4

4.1 Determinacy of Conditions

After the perusal of the Reports, a bifurcation within the EU conditionality on minority rights

protection became conspicuous as it is mainly addressed with two different concepts; namely,

non-discrimination and minority rights. (Schimmelfennig & Schwellnus 2006:1) Before we

elaborate this distinction, it should be noted that the Copenhagen criteria and uncertainty in

tasks despite the deliverance of annual Progress Reports were criticized by Grabbe and Sasse.

They put forward that vagueness in the language impair the determinacy of conditions, since

the wording of the Progress Reports is hazy. For example, in the 1998 Regular Report, after

sorting down the achievements done in the minority rights situation, it is stated that “much

needs to be done in protecting individual liberties and rights of Roma”. (EU Commission

1998a:12) However, the vagueness in terms of “much” coming after the listed improvements

affects the strength of determinacy. (Grabbe 2006; Sasse 2009) It creates inconsistency in

terms of the delivery of the tasks. Similarly, the reports employ the words such as

‘substantial’ and ‘comprehensive’ without putting down a roadmap, as will be mentioned

below, in particular with regard to minority rights. (EU Commission 1998a) By and large,

these reports solely point out to the deficiencies in the introduction of the rules and regulation

rather than assisting the Romanian government in direction and monitoring the

implementation. (Grabbe 2001; Sasse 2009)

4 For a more comprehensive and chronological list of EU demands on minority issues, please see Annex Table 3.

EU Commission set the conditions on Romania via its Regular Reports, Opinions, short-

term and mid-term priorities listed in the Accession Partnerships and the Council

Conclusions. These official documents can be roughly divided into two parts; the first

paragraphs under the section of the Minority rights and the protection of minorities in the

Regular Reports talks about the positive developments happened in the past year, and the

ensuing paragraphs demonstrates the shortcomings with respect to the minorities. The main

topics covered in the Reports by and large refer to the language rights of the Hungarian

community, the discrimination against the Roma population, and the institutional

deficiencies in addressing the minority problems. (European Commission 1999; 2000;

2002; 2003; 2004)

21

In the Regular Reports, the conditions set before Romania pointed out the Hungarian

community’s problems with respect to their cultural rights to be practiced mainly in terms of

using Hungarian language in education and administration, while the Roma people, which

occupy a central place within the Reports, are addressed with respect to the non-

discrimination principle. According to Schimmelfennig and Schwellnus (2006) non-

discrimination norms are legally binding and clearly defined. In other words, non-

discrimination is required as part of the acquis communautaire which forces the candidate

countries to adopt and implement the acquis before they can join the Union. (Schwellnus

2005:51) However, the conditions in the field of minority protection were political and varied

among target countries. (Ibid.)

Accordingly, Hughes et al. (2004) indicate that the ambiguity and ambivalence of the

acquis lead to little or non-compliance with the prerequisites. They emphasize further that the

acquis is replete with unevenness given that some parts of the acquis are thick on particular

policy issues that may provide a strong leverage for the Commission, while it is thin on some

other policies that results in weak compliance or informal practices. Therefore, Hughes et al.

(2004) reflect that the breadth and vagueness of the acquis combined with the weakly defined

features of tasks and the lack of prescription of standards to be met generally decreases the

effectiveness of EU conditionality as the aspiring countries do not know exactly the path that

they are supposed to pursue. Hughes et al. and Schwellnus presume that minority rights, thus,

fall into the second category that is weak acquis, as it is not mentioned in the acquis but only

under the Social Policy (Chapter 13) by a referral to the non-discrimination principle. Against

this background, it can be seen that speedy rule adoption process realized in Romania with

regard to the Roma people with the issuing of Emergency Ordinances on non-discrimination

and the introduction of the Roma Strategy can be accounted for the thick acquis rules and the

clear and well-established norm practices at the EU level.

Hughes et al., also, put forward that conditionality is not a clear-cut variable; on the

contrary, it is flexible, continuously evolving and highly politicized. (Hughes et al. 2004)

They point to three key characteristics with regard to minority criterion that we see in the

Reports on Romania which are a hierarchy of minority issues, ad hocery and inconsistencies

resulting from the lack of clear benchmarks, and a dilemma of implementation. (Hughes and

Sasse 2003) These three characteristics, however, reduce the determinacy of the conditions.

22

For example, Regular Reports mainly speak of the problems of the Russophone and Roma

population. (Sasse 2009:22) According to Sasse, the reason lies at the

“EU’s interest in good relations with its most powerful neighbor and energy supplier Russia and its own soft security concerns linked to migration. Furthermore, a non-territorialized, internally diverse and marginalized minority like the Roma is a politically less sensitive group to focus on compared with territorialized and politically mobilized minorities such as Hungarians in Romania.” (Sasse 2009:22)

In the case of Romania, the Regular Reports mainly focused on the Roma population

at the expense of downsizing the problems of other minority groups and the Hungarian

community. (EU Commission 1998a, 1999a, 2000a, 2001a, 2002a) For instance, although the

relations with the Hungarian community are generally depicted as positive and the progress is

said to be recorded within the Reports, the complaints by the Hungarian community about the

lack of a proper minority law was disregarded. (Mahony 2006)

What is more, within the 1999 Accession Partnership, the need to eliminate the

discrimination against the Roma people, to elaborate and implement a strategy to improve

socio-economic conditions of Roma and provide adequate financial support to minority

programmes were stated both as a short-term and as a medium-term priority. (EU DG

Enlargement 1999:17&19) In the same Accession Partnership, no other minority issue was

listed. Henceforth, the Reports and other official documents demonstrate the prioritization of

certain minority groups over others depending on whether they pose a security problem to the

EU or not. As with the Roma people, the improvement of the conditions was of significance

due to its connection to migration. Regular Reports, in this case, had rather clear roadmaps,

guidelines by demonstrating explicitly in some of the reports for example, the need to increase

housing for the Roma people, and the staff and funds allocated to improve the situation of

Roma people. (EU Commission 2000a; 2004a) Yet the reliance on “anectodal evidence” (EU

Commission 1999a:19) curbs the informational value of the determinate conditions by giving

Romanian government the chance to argue otherwise.

Reports, therefore, provided clues of how to carry out a strategy for the Roma people;

however, they fell short on showing a direction for the improvement of the conditions of other

minorities which are actually neglected until the 2004 Report and their situation is only

touched upon with regard to the stable relations they had with the government. (EU

Commission 2004a:30) Furthermore, the Csango minority was mentioned only in the 2002

23

Report which stated that their right to education in mother tongue was obstructed. (EU

Commission 2002a:37)

On the other hand, although the EU Reports maintained the importance of the

improvement in the linguistic rights of the Hungarian minority, it should be noted herein that

Romania did develop its own way of granting rights to Hungarian minority due to the absence

of a single and common EU standard on collective rights. (Schwellnus 2006a:186; De Witte

2000:4; Toktaş 2006:512) Thus, the inconsistencies resulting from a lack of clear benchmarks

in minority rights were tried to be overcome by the Romanian government by the reports of

the other international organizations such as CoE FCNM Report 2005. However, the

indeterminacy of conditions comes also along with one of the recurrent themes about the

Hungarian minority that is the necessity for the Romanian government to solve the debate on

the establishment of a university that will teach in Hungarian language. (EU Commission

2000a; 2004a) Because there is no specific law within the EU on minority rights, and at the

same time, Max van der Stoel, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities which EU

draws upon mostly as abovementioned, states that “there is no such international norm, which

would instruct Rumania as to what it should do … the Rumanian government and Parliament,

and the relevant educational, cultural and social factors have to make the decision in light of

needs of persons belonging to national minorities.” (der Stoel 1998, quoted in Ram 2001)

Therefore, even though the EU demand may morally stand on solid ground, technically the

‘double standards’ in addressing the minorities makes the issue problematic, and furthermore

reduces the credibility of conditionality and increases the chances of manipulation.

4.2 Size and Speed of Rewards

Size of the rewards from the EU for Romania has grown over time as the EU moved from the

conclusion of trade and cooperation agreements to association agreement and finally to the

negotiation of membership. (Schimmelfennig 2005:120) Vachudova (2001), at this point,

demonstrates that candidates envision benefits which can only be gained from the

membership that is offered uniformly to all candidates as long as they satisfy the conditions.

Initially, Romania was a recipient in the PHARE programme, however as Moravcsik and

Vachudova (2005) suggest, it is the economic, institutional or geopolitical benefits that comes

and are packed with the membership prospect rather than a Customs Union Agreement or

financial support like PHARE that enforces the target countries comply even with the

unfavorable requirements as they expect to gain more out of the reward of EU membership,

24

solely because of the magnitude of membership. According to Grabbe (2006), it is this

‘carrot’ of membership that drives applicant states to transpose the necessary laws and

implement them at the national level. This is visible in the case of Romania because after the

end of the Cold War, “Rejoining Europe” has become Romania’s foreign policy objective

motto. (Ram 2009)

From the beginning onwards, Romania’s desire was to become a member to the

Union. Despite the wane in the relations between the EC and Romania in early 1990s due to

the severe human rights violations and political instability (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:134),

on 1 February 1993, Romania signed the Association Agreement with the EU. The agreement

was meant to provide a basis for economic, financial, cultural and social cooperation, yet, in

the Article 1, one of the objectives of the agreement was stated as

“to provide a framework for Romania’s gradual integration into the Community. To this end, Romania shall work towards fulfilling the necessary conditions.” (Association Agreement 1993)

What is more, the Preamble of the agreement referred specifically to the protection of

minorities and human rights, rule of law and adherence to democracy. (Schimmelfennig et al.

2006: 134) Henceforth, with the Association Agreement, EU started to utilize the membership

perspective early on as a means to induce improvements in the field of minority protection.

(Schimmelfennig & Schwellnus 2006:16) Although the size of the reward was what Romania

had wanted from the beginning, in other words, gradual EU membership, the accession date

was not yet in the sight. What is more, in June 1993, at the Copenhagen European Council,

EU had made the principled decision to enlarge to the East and ever since, the size of the

reward has been high for Romania. (Schimmelfennig 2005:120)

In June 1995, Romania officially applied for the EU membership and with the

application the presence and visibility of the minorities in political sphere increased

dramatically. This will be explained more in detail in the Sections 4.3 and 4.4. In terms of the

speed of rewards, Steunenberg and Dimitrova (2007) suggest that the timing of the EU

conditionality is of great significance considering the acute decrease in its effectiveness when

the accession date is set, as the infinite time vision no longer holds. They, therefore, propose

that EU conditionality has an expiration date and the closer the applicant gets to the accession

date, the less active it becomes with regard to the implementation of reforms.

25

Against this background, it is necessary to explain why Romanian government in May

2005 proposed a new minority law, which includes provisions for cultural autonomy – long

after EU had dropped any demands for collective minority rights to Romania.

(Schimmelfennig & Schwellnus 2006:17) It is also important to note here that the EU

membership prompted Romanian government to discuss this law which beforehand was

viewed as highly controversial because the Romanian government saw this as a challenge to

the notion of a ‘unitary national state’. (Ram 2009:182; Csergo 2002:10-11) The reason, inter

alia, lays in the inclusion of “safeguard clauses” within the April 2005 Accession Treaty

allowing for a one-year-delay in the EU entry in the event of obligations not being met.

(Pridham 2007b:353)

Being the “laggard” of the post-Communist enlargement process (Pridham 2007), the

possibility of delay in the accession pushed Romania to speed up the improvement of the

conditions of the minorities and thus, this could explain the eagerness to follow the demands

of the Union. However, despite the delay in the accession date, the size of reward for

Romania was still high. (EU Commission 2005a:3) Conclusively, the Romanian government

applied not for the sake of getting financial support or having an institutional bound with the

Union –although as a matter of fact these were significantly essential-, but for the full fledged

membership prospect. Moreover, although the speed of the reward was quite slow compared

to other CEECs, the awareness of the fact that they will become a member one day increased

the willingness to improve the situation of minorities within the country.

4.3 Credibility of Conditionality

According to Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) the rule adoption, thus effectiveness,

increases with the credibility of conditional threats and promises. Schimmelfennig et al.

(2005) claim that credibility has been high with respect to the given promise of membership

and the threat of withholding the membership when the political conditions are violated

shown by the démarches and additional conditionality principles such as safeguard clauses

which can delay the accession date.

EU membership requirements, according to Vachudova (2001) applied uniformly and

on equal footing to each and every applicant state. What is more, she argues that the

effectiveness of EU leverage depended upon the merit-based approach; namely, placing an

applicant to the appropriate rank which corresponds to the progress it has made towards

fulfilling the requirements. (Vachudova 2001:32) Above all, the differentiation principle,

26

which can be explained as the fear of being left behind from the group of applicants, acted as

a strong competition factor that prevented Romania from slowing down on reform processes.

Both Smith (2003) and Grabbe (2002) herein underline the impact of assessing countries

performances individually based on their speed on preparing for the accession; hence,

differentiation principle, according to the scholars, fosters speedy policy changes with regard

to the reality of threat as there is always a chance of not making sufficient progress compared

to other candidates.

This was relevant in 1997 Luxembourg Council decision when Romania’s overall

improvement was found inadequate and was further required to implement several reforms

with regard to the socio-economic situation of the Roma people. However, Vachudova puts

forward that the EU Commission did not apply that principle on Romania. To be clear,

Romania was assessed on its performance with regard to its pace on the adoption of the rules

on minority rights; however, in 1999, it was not left behind of the group, on the contrary,

despite its shortcomings, the negotiations with Romania was opened. Pridham, at this point,

claims that the inviting Romania to negotiations in 1999 at Helsinki European Council was a

politically motivated decision by the European Council which took geopolitical

considerations into account and overrode the Commission’s conditionality demands on

Romania and at the same time clashed with the criticisms coming from EP. (Pridham

2007b:355) Romania’s support to NATO action in Kosovo was thus rewarded by the leaders

of the Member States while the Commission was trying hard to improve the situation in

Romania. Therefore, the institutional differences inherent in the EU and politically influenced

decision to include Romania to negotiation process casted doubts on the credibility of

conditionality in terms of the consistency within the EU. (Ibid. 356; Schimmelfennig and

Sedelmeier 2005:15) Accordingly, although the strength of the credibility in terms of the

threat of exclusion was crippled with the 1999 decision in Helsinki Summit to start accession

negotiations, the promise of credibility increased further.

Furthermore, Barnes and Randerson (2006) agrees with Schimmelfennig et al. (2005)

upon the fact that as long as there is parallel conditionality, such as NATO membership

attached to realizing democratic stability and/or additional safeguard clauses, which increases

the credibility of threat of being excluded, the effectiveness of conditionality will be higher as

experienced by the CEECs before 2004. According to Steunenberg and Dimitrova (2007), the

additional conditionality strategy conveys the threat of punishment which is partial or

27

permanent exclusion from the accession negotiations, and thus, creates a push dynamic for the

applicant. NATO membership had been of significant foreign policy objective for the

Romania. According to Ram (2001), it actually weighed as much as the EU membership so

much so that when the NATO also rejected the membership application of Romania in 1997,

the same year Romania was rejected by the EU also, it further pushed for the consolidation of

democracy and the improvement of minority rights, because NATO conditionality had put

forward the similar demands as the EU that influenced Romania’s compliance with

international obligations positively. Parallel conditionality, therefore, increased the credibility

of the EU conditionality by putting forward similar prerequisites before Romania and forced

Romania to embark upon more radical and better reforms in order to improve the situation of

minorities. (Ram 2001; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:142)

The same year with the Opinion on Romania, a rather negative assessment of the

minority situation in Romania further increased the notion of the threat of exclusion. With

regard to the situation of minorities, the Commission welcomed the efforts of Roma and Sinti,

and noted down the positive developments concerning the Hungarian minority; yet, found the

situation of the Roma unsatisfactory and in general it concluded that Romania did not meet

the political criteria. (EU Commission 1997a:18) It should be noted here that as the Regular

Reports started to approve the improvements in Romania and declared that Romania was

getting closer to meet the political criteria, the credibility of exclusion remained the same.

Even when in 1999 Report the Commission concluded that Romania had finally fulfilled the

political criteria and is ready to start negotiations, Commission decided to open negotiations

based on the progress in each chapter, therefore extended the political conditionality into the

membership talks. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:144) What is more, the negotiations or the

membership talks are not in fact is about negotiating as Vachudova put forward. It is basically

accepting everything that the EU enforces and therefore, the target state cannot discuss what

comes as a package. (Vachudova 2005:131) Hence, due to the enforcement power of the EU,

the notion of threat and the promise never lost its credibility for Romania.

In terms of the asymmetries in information factor, the ability to screen the reform

process is criticized by Hughes and Sasse as the implementation of the transposed norms

generally eludes the Commission’s attention in the Regular Reports. (Hughes & Sasse 2003)

Yet despite the less focus on the implementation process, from 1997 onwards, with the

releasing of annual reports, membership conditionality relied more on the provisions of the

28

Association Treaty and Agenda 2000 that increased the tangibility of the demands.

(Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:135)

4.4 Veto Players and Adoption Costs

Domestic adoption costs and veto players’ factor present is distinguished by previous factors

by being totally at the disposal of the governing elites of candidate countries. In the previous

factors, effectiveness of conditionality usually depended on the macro-level politics while

herein it depends on micro-level politics. The domestic political considerations according to

Schimmelfennig (2005) stand as the primary independent variable because even if the factors

above are fulfilled when the adoption costs are perceived to be high than the expected benefit,

the rule adoption will not happen or happen inconsistently and slowly.

In Romania, the first years of post-communist period marked by the predomination of

the PDSR government led by Ion Iliescu who was critical of the democratic principles and

market economy. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:135) Yet, although PDSR had to cooperate

with the nationalist parties and the scapegoating of the minorities and anti-European

propaganda was used on a large scale (Andreescu 2001b:274), it was President Iliescu that did

not miss the opportunity to emphasize Romania’s quick signing of the FCNM in 1995 to

show that the country is assimilating the European standards. (Ram 2001) What is more, the

pressure from the EU and NATO to sign a bilateral treaty with Hungary was also an adoption

cost to Iliescu government as that decision was criticized harshly by the extreme right-wing

political party and ended the coalition. Yet, because of the reformist outfit worn by the Iliescu

government, PDSR could neither go forward in adopting a minority law that OSCE and CoE

demanded, nor retreat in the rights already granted to minorities. When Iliescu government

hesitated over the adoption of rules when EU and NATO were pressing Romania to act on

minority issues the systematized EU conditionality was not in practice, yet both the EU and

NATO were the long-term foreign policy goals and the public was siding with these

organizations at that time. The reason of reluctance could be that Pridham (2007b) and Usul

(2011) point to the political mentality or elite culture affecting the rule adoption process even

when the benefits are larger for that country. The reason why elites opposed EU policies in

the first place in Romania can be explained by the mentality of elites that are traditional and

paternalistic so much so that they were cautious about European political standards. (Pridham

2007b:355) Government officials in Romania have been resistant over certain political

conditions due to the fear of losing power which manifested itself in the non-implementation

29

of reforms. (Ibid., 367) During the election campaign, Iliescu even used extreme right-wing

rhetoric against the opposition Constantinescu who represented a pro-EU, more Westernized

and reformist values, and Iliescu even accused DAHR of plotting a secession. (Vachudova

2005:154)

However, the loss of power for PDSR and nationalists came in 1996 by the help of EU

which offered “immediate rewards for political parties that secured an implementation agenda

once they came to power.” (Vachudova 2005:162) Thereafter, Democratic National

Convention (CDR) and DAHR joined forces for a more dynamic and pro-EU government.

The inclusion of Hungarian minority political party to the coalition derived in part from the

concern for Romania’s international reputation. (Ram 2001) As President Constantinescu

indicated that EU was a key reason and that “the presence of DAHR in the ruling coalition

was brought about by the need to show Europe and Hungarians a positive sign over the rights

of minorities in Romania.” (Quoted in Ram 2001) Even the DAHR that was previously

defending the autonomy for the Hungarians gave up from the idea and conditioned its

inclusion to the coalition with demands on the amendments to local government law,

education law and restitution of confiscated properties. (Csergo 2002:22) Thus, the veto

players, including the minorities themselves, in power started see to benefits higher than the

costs incurred upon them. Even though, DAHR refused to be used as a showcard to the EU by

the actors in government to demonstrate the country’s improving records in minority rights

and threatened the government to leave the coalition, it did not do so as the EU “was thus an

important factor in the very design of the government, which had major implications for

minority rights legislation and protection.” (Ram 2003:38)

Soon after the Commissioner Hans van den Broek expressed the support of EU to

Romania and repeated the membership promise in April 1997, yet asked the government to do

more about the minority issues, in May 1997, the government quickly introduced and

Emergency Ordinance (Decree 22). (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:142) Decree 22 amending

Law no.69 on local administration “declared the right to use minority languages to conduct

business in the public institutions of communities where at least 20% of the population

belongs to this minority.” (Ram 2003:44) It also required employing Hungarian speaking

personnel in ethnically mixed areas. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:142) Therefore, the veto

players started to follow the demands of the EU.

30

Another critical decision affecting the minority legislation was the amendment of the

Education Law no 84/1995 by the Government Ordinance in July 1997 just before the EU was

to issue its Opinion on Romania’s eligibility for accession negotiations. (Ram 2003:44)

Beforehand, the 1995 Education Law was harshly criticized by DAHR to no avail at that time,

yet with this amendment, it is declared in the Article 118 that “persons belonging to national

minorities have the right to study and receive instruction in their mother tongue, at all levels

and forms of education where there is appropriate request.” (Constantin 2004:6) The

opposition parties including PDSR and Romanian National Unity Party (PUNR) strongly

opposed the law because this meant the expansion of the minority rights; that is why the

government had to issue an Emergency Ordinance to bypass the highly probable rejection

instead of submitting it in front of parliamentary discussion. (Ram 2003:44) Grabbe (2006)

shows that because the veto players in CEECs were relatively small and actually the veto

players were the government officials themselves, they did not obstruct the process of rule

adoption. Additionally, the veto players consisted of government officials were the first ones

to become Europeanized and although one institution may stand at the center of the

conditionality, other branches of the government have also implemented EU-inspired policies

not just because they were already inscribed into the national laws, but also they were EU

policies. (Grabbe 2006:205) In the case of Romania, first and foremost Constantinescu

government stands as the Europeanized veto player; yet as explained above, when the

political culture is not Europeanized as in the case of PDSR and PUNR, the objections were

tried to be circumvented by issuing of Emergency Ordinances at the expense of main

democratic principles such as parliamentary discussions. Although from the EU perspective,

the end could justify the mean as adoption of minority laws to improve situation is another

significant EU norm and these appeased Western critics by enhancing democratic rights of

minorities, the domestic adoption cost of this to Romania has become the moving of decision-

making power from the Parliament to the President creating a democratic deficit. (Ram 2001;

Ram 2003:50; Grabbe 2001:1059) Also, the issuing of Emergency Ordinances created an

inter-institutional problem later on. The Supreme Court ruled Decree 22 invalid as the

government failed to show the necessary emergency for it. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:143)

However, although prima facie the domestic adoption costs increased as the EU

demands increased, compliance with the EU improved more in the fields of democratic

reform and minority protection because at the same time the credible external incentives

increased. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:144) What is more as Andreescu (2001) put forward,

31

the main financial costs to government appear in the case of education for Roma as this

requires substantial infrastructure, yet this was also started to be overcome through the

financed minority programmes of the EU. (Ram 2001) Therefore, as the date for the

membership approached, the domestic adoption costs were replaced by the benefits. So much

so that even when the opposition PDSR and Iliescu returned to power and DAHR was no

longer included in the coalition, they signed a cooperation agreement. (Ram 2003:28) Point 8

of this Agreement stipulates that

“[t]he two political parties shall continue to grant priority to the protection of national minorities, institutional and legislative development of their issues. The conditions to secure the right to freely express the preservation and development of ethnic identity shall continue to broaden for all Romania citizens belonging to national minorities, in order to manifest themselves in areas of cultural, religious, educational and public life. Special attention shall be granted to the issues of minority communities in the localities where their proportion is small compared to the majority population.” (Constantin 2004:4)

Considering the background of the relations between these two political parties, this

agreement and the admittance of the above was a breakthrough in Romanian political life

which was in most parts caused by the EU membership prospect as the non-compliance

became more costly than compliance.(Schimmelfennig 2005b:147) This was mainly

motivated by the fact that Iliescu and PDSR understood that the loss of power back in 1996

was in part caused by the shift in the power base as the actors within the party assessed the

costs and benefits of resisting against the EU process and turned towards accommodating the

EU demands, and lastly the leaders saw that they could come to power without any repressive

policies. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:145) Last but not least, this time PDSR was alone in the

government without making any coalitions with nationalist parties; therefore, costs of

compliance were perceived to be much lower in 2000 than in 1996 for PDSR. (Ibid.)

Furthermore, there occurred no reversal in the already improved minority situation as the EU

and NATO membership became a central goal for the government. (Ram 2003:38)

Meanwhile the EU accession intensified with the increased demands on improving the

situation of the Roma people. (EU Commission 2000a) Despite the previous incident with the

ruling out of the Emergency Ordinance, which was resolved in 1999 again with respect to the

upcoming Progress Report, government issued another Emergency Ordinance in 2000 on

Preventing and Punishing all forms of Discrimination that was passed as Law no.48 in 2002.

(Ram 2009:185) This was considered one of its kinds as it incorporated quickly the 2000 Race

32

Directive regarding discrimination in order to respond to the criticisms from Commission

with respect to the situation of the Roma. What is more, with this Romania became the first

EU accession country in CEE to adopt such a comprehensive anti-discrimination law. (Ibid.)

Furthermore, in 2001 a ‘Governmental Strategy for Improving the Situation of the Roma’ was

adopted before a National Agency for Roma was established in 2004. All of these Roma-

focused developments and initiatives by the government required considerable amount of

money and staffing; yet the government did not eschew from enacting these. As a concluding

remark, it can be rightfully argued that EU was instrumental in bringing government attention

to the situation of the Roma despite the costs incurred upon these governments. (Ibid., 188)

Additionally, the compliance coincided with the establishment of credible EU and NATO

membership conditionality for Romania; so much so that even the return of authoritarian

political forces did not result in a reversal; on the contrary, domestic costs were calculated to

be lower than non-compliance costs when the high material incentives was on offer.

(Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:149-150)

Table 1. External incentives model on Romania5

YearsDeterminacy of

Conditions

Size and Speed

of RewardsCredibility

Adoption

Costs

1989 – 1993 - (low) - (low) + (high) + (high)

1993 - 1996 - (low) - (low) - (low) + (high)

1996 – 2000 - (low) + (high) + (high) - (low)

2000 – 2007 - (low) + (high) + (high) - (low)

Interval 4.B – Current situation of minorities in Romania

Before the EU, it was unimaginable to see a minority party in the government, but DAHR is

now a regular political force within the Parliament and even a coalition member. Hungarian

minority can have education in their own mother tongue even attend a university in Hungarian

language although it is private for now. In the places where the Hungarians constitute at least

5 Original table by Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:134; modified by the author by the findings derived from the analysis part.

33

20% of the population, the street names, signs and other marks are in Hungarian. What is

more, the local governments employ staff who can speak Hungarian in order to smooth the

daily lives of the minorities. The confiscated properties of the Hungarians were also restituted.

Yet, the law is not restricted to Hungarians; there are other minority groups such as Csergos

who also benefit from the introduction of these laws thanks to the EU. Before the EU

conditionality, the situation of the Roma people was not even in the agenda of the

government. Daily discriminations at employment, school, housing and health care was part

of the life of the Roma, yet now with the Strategy on Roma and several institutions and

Councils established to address the problems Roma encounter alleviated their situation. (Open

Society 2002:481) All in all, although there are some persisting problems with regard to

Roma people, the general condition of the minorities has significantly improved over the last

15 years due to the EU accession process. (MRGI-Romania Overview)

34

5 Analysis II – Turkey

Interval 5.A – Minority situation and relations with the EU prior to conditionality

Despite the definition of minority by Capotorti which was more or less internationally

accepted, it is aptly uttered by Yilmaz (2011) that in Turkey minority means “non-Muslim”

citizens. (Yilmaz 2011:10) Minorities in Turkey had been decided with the 1923 Lausanne

Treaty in which merely non-Muslim citizens which is specifically limited to only Armenians,

Greeks and Jews, were granted minority status. This conviction is derived from the historical,

political and ideological factors which date back to Ottoman Empire’s Millet system.6

Moreover, the treaty specifically indicated that “only the Greeks, Armenians and Jews were

allowed to benefit from the effect of minority provisions. Turkish-Muslim peoples, whatever

their ethno-lingual and sectarian differences, were totalized under an imagined unity of

national category.”(Soner 2005:294) Therefore, the minority regime does not include

Assyrians, Kurds, Alevis, Lazs, Circassians or others. Yet, the three recognized non-Muslim

minority groups, though not fully implemented, have the right to education in their own

language, right to establish their own social institutions and right to exercise their own

religion freely. (Lausanne Treaty, Article 40) What is striking is that even the Lausanne

Treaty is not implemented to its full extent (Oran 2007), because Turkey has the approach of

the principle of equality prioritized over the principle of difference in addressing the

minorities. (Toktaş 2006:490) This means that Turkey applies the universal citizenship, it

addresses “all citizens as single unified and as an equal subject category” (Ibid.)

By the same token, minority rights granted to other groups of minorities has never

been an easy concept considering the nation-building process that involved a cultural

homogenization. (Ibid., 489) The dominancy of universal citizenship gives the relationship

between the state and the society a unique form that a supra-identity which is Turkishness is

used at the expense of different identities within the society which are called sub-identities

(Oran 2007:50-52) Moreover, any ethnic identity other than Turkishness, which is the official

rhetoric that strictly excludes ethnicity, is considered as a threat to the survival of the state.

(Lundgren 2007:37) This attitude towards minorities resulted in the assimilative policies

towards the groups and the denial of their existence other than the recognized minorities.

6 For more information on minority regime in Turkey, see Baskın Oran (2007) “The Minority Concept and Rights in Turkey: The Lausanne Peace Treaty and Current Issues” in Zehra Arat (ed.) Human Rights in Turkey, University of Pennsylvania Press.

35

(Grigoriadis 2008:33) In the 2007 Report of MRGI on Turkey, it is said that “Turkish

Constitutional scheme ‘solves’ the question of minorities without ever addressing it. There is

no reference in the Constitution to the word ‘minority’, not even the Lausanne minorities.”

(MRGI 2007:10)

This narrow definition of minority remnant of the post-World War I era, as time

passed, started to become more problematic. Especially after 1980s Kurds became more

vociferous in demanding rights and applied to violence, and the inevitable clash between the

state and the Kurds intensified in the 1990s. PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) operations,

terrorist attacks, forced evacuation of villages became everyday news during the 1990s.

(Grigoriadis 2008:31) The word ‘Kurd’ was a taboo in every corner of daily life in Turkey.

Even though for the first time a politician, President Özal, uttered that his grandmother was of

Kurdish origin, this did not halt the establishment of an emergency rule in the South-east

region in Turkey which was continuously criticized by the EU as this meant a limitation in the

use of basic human rights and the further restrictions and suppressions to expressing different

backgrounds. (HRW 1995) The first part of the violent conflict between PKK and Turkey

lasted until 1999 when the leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured, and PKK announced a

ceasefire. The denial of the Kurdish identity and the language became more conspicuous

when several deputies in the Parliament attempted to take oath in Kurdish in 1991 but four

deputies of the DEP (Democratic Party) were apprehended by the removal of their immunity.

In the midst of escalated violence, in 1995 pro-Kurdish political party, HADEP (People’s

Democracy Party) got approximately 1.2 million of votes, yet its members were arrested and

the party was shut down in 2003. During this time, Kurdish issue in Turkey has been

dominantly viewed from the economic and security terms by the elites. (Öniş 2009:8) Also,

with respect to freedom of religion in Turkey, the mid 1990s witnessed violent attacks on

Alevis apart from the daily difficulties. (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada 1995)

Therefore, 1990s were marked by the human rights violations, denial of identities and violent

clashes in the country.

Against this background, Turkey applied for EU membership in 1987 and was rejected

in 1989; yet, Turkey’s relation to the EU dates back to 1963 Ankara Association Agreement.

A turning point in terms of EU conditionality happened in 1995 when the European

Parliament froze the relations with its Turkish counterparts in response to the imprisonment of

eight DEP parliamentarians for separatist propaganda and aiding illegal Kurdish insurgent

36

groups and EP officially postponed the signing of the Customs Union (CU) agreement.

(Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:104) Thereafter, Turkey had to pass its first amendment package

to the 1982 Constitution to be able to sign the CU agreement in December 1995. (Ibid.) The

Parliament weeded out the anti-democratic articles. Turkey then became a part of the CU in

January 1996. However, in the absence of any credible membership, EU was not powerful

enough to “generate a deep commitment to reforms on the part of the Turkish political elites”.

(Öniş 2009:22) Then again in 1997 Luxembourg European Council, Turkey was not granted

an official candidate status which led to resentment in the political circles in Turkey until

1999 Helsinki Council.

Box 2. EU demands from Turkey on minority issues 7

5.1 Determinacy of Conditions

Reiterating the hypothesis, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) put forward that the

clarity of the rules increases the possible impact of the EU on the target country. Although it

is acknowledged by several authors (Toktaş 2006; Schwellnus 2006a) that the EU applied

differentiated pressure across target countries depending on the perception of the minority

group as problematic and security relevant or not; the monitoring mechanisms have been the

same for Turkey as with Romania. Within the short-term priorities of the revised 2008

7 For a more comprehensive and chronological list of EU demands on minority issues, please see Annex Table 4.

EU demands on the improvement of minority situation are addressed via Regular

Reports and the priorities set within the Accession Partnerships, as well the Council

Conclusions and the Parliamentary Reports. Yet, the specific list of demands can be

found under the Accession Partnerships. The main issues that are addressed within the

Accession Partnerships are The Regular Reports, in the same line, brought forward the

need to broaden the application of the restrictive understanding of the Lausanne Treaty,

ensuring broadcast and education in languages other than Turkish, the situation of the

Kurdish community, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the need to sign and ratify

certain international treaties including the FCNM and ECRML and removing the

reservations to UN ICCPR Article 27, problems with respect to the property rights of the

non-Muslim minorities, freedom of association, compulsory religious courses, and

worship places.

37

Accession Partnership, the first item under the minority rights section is salient with respect to

the absence of a common European standard and the borrowing norms from other

international organizations.8 As mentioned above, the short-term political priority in the

Accession Partnership referred to the signing of FCNM by the CoE which Turkey has

refrained from, and subsequently to the best practices of the Member States which can be

taken as an example.

Schwellnus, hereby, suggests that “explicit, repeated and concrete demands are likely

to be followed than general principles.” (Schwellnus 2006b:324) He points out that it is

natural to expect divergent outcomes in the field of special minority rights where EU does not

have a common standard and relied on borrowed standards, and it is much more likely to see

convergent outcomes in the field of non-discrimination where EU has an elaborate set of

rules. (Ibid., 325) Toktaş (2006), furthermore, puts forward that Turkey is the palpable

example of such behavior because putting the implementation of minority rights as a

condition in the sense of granting cultural rights becomes problematic due to the fact that

Turkey leans on the practices of France and -to some extent- Greece. Turkish government,

therefore, asserts that it is a unitary state and claims that everyone is equal as citizens despite

the fact that this creates problems in addressing the minorities. (Toktaş 2006; and Yilmaz

2011) In that regard, the mixed internal practices of the EU may culminate in mixed policy

choices within target government as the EU does not have an established coherent minority

standard.

Also as Sadurski put forward, if the target states had very little to emulate, this gives

target states a chance to manipulate or interpret the norms and rules along with their own

minority track and they would not bother in undertaking such reforms. According to Sadurski,

the clarity, coherence and the compelling nature of European norms are missing in the field of

minority rights (Sadurski 2008:211), and therefore, this can lead to indifference on the target

state that the reforms will not be thorough, not address the real problems or create issues

during the implementation. This is the case with Turkey that the reforms often do not result in

real change. (MRGI 2007:3) Therefore, although Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier claim that

Reports provide a solid mechanism which provides feedback and a structured guidance to 8 “Ensure cultural diversity and promote respect for and protection of minorities in accordance with the ECHR and the principles laid down in the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and in line with best practice in Member States.” in 2008/157/EC: Council Decision of 18 February 2008 on the principles, priorities and conditions contained in the Accession Partnership with the Republic of Turkey and repealing Decision 2006/35/EC

38

target countries removing the confusion and the lack of law in the minority rights, Turkey

appears to pursue the path of ‘not bothering’. (Toktaş 2006)

The Reports on Turkey, in the sense of repetitiveness, are more determinate than

Romania as they talk about mainly the same issues such as the problems Kurdish community

encounter, language rights, and property rights. Yet, the selectivity problem which Sasse

suggests can also be seen in the Turkish case. Until 2001, the Kurdish problem was one of the

main concerns in the Reports, but afterwards, other minority problems also started to come to

the fore including unrecognized minority groups, and discriminatory practices. (Yilmaz 2011)

What is more, the determinacy of the conditions started to increase especially after 2005. The

Reports started to become much more detailed and specific measures were asked to be

undertaken to address the problems minorities encounter daily.

5.2 Size and Speed of Rewards

In spite of the size of reward which is full-fledged membership, Grabbe (2006) addresses the

time distance between the ultimate reward of accession and the moment at which adaptation

costs are incurred. Furthermore, although Steunenberg and Dimitrova (2007) seem to stand on

a different place in the spectrum compared to Grabbe (2006) in terms of the indeterminate

time approach to the membership prospect, they all claim that ineffectiveness of EU

conditionality mainly stems from the inappropriate speed/timing. Steunenberg and Dimitrova

(2007) suggest that the timing of EU conditionality is of great significance considering the

acute decrease in its effectiveness when the accession date is set, as the infinite time vision no

longer holds. They, therefore, propose that EU conditionality has an expiration date and the

closer the applicant gets to the accession date, the less active it becomes with regard to

implementation of reforms.

Although, according to Grabbe (2006) EU may provide the applicant with intermediate

rewards such as aid, and funding for programmes, she underlines the bluntness of

conditionality and maintains that EU membership conditionality is like a …mallet that can be

used only at certain points in the process to enforce a few conditions at a time rather than a

scalpel to sculpt individual policies (Grabbe 2001:1026). This is the case in Turkish accession

process that each time the EU moves a step further in accepting Turkey as a future member,

the reforms on democracy, human rights and minority rights protection followed that step. For

example, when announced as a formal candidate in 1999, Turkey embarked upon serious

reform attempts and also before the negotiations were opened. (Yilmaz 2011) Usul (2011),

39

similarly and more, points to both the size and the speed of the reward, and adamantly claims

that if the reward is something smaller and other than membership, and if the date to be a

member does not seem to be decided upon soon by the Commission, then the effectiveness of

conditionality decreases sharply as the applicant countries act reluctantly to implement

necessary reforms upon the unclear prospect of membership, which also leads the reader to

question the credibility of conditionality that will be taken up in the next section.

The discussions about the ‘Privileged Partnership’ of Turkey to the EU are fiercely

rejected in Turkey and it also curbs the enthusiasm of the Turkish authorities to carry out the

reforms that are needed. (Euractiv 2009) What is more, the proposition by the President of

France, Nicolas Sarkozy that Turkey should be part of the Mediterranean Union rather than

becoming a full-fledged member of the EU has been reciprocated with anger and

discouragement in Ankara. (Goldirova 2007) As Vachudova suggests the will in applicant

countries to “satisfy intrusive political and economic requirements” increases with the greater

benefits of the membership. (Vachudova 2005:108) Along with the discussions above, the

perception of the size of the benefit shrinks as the date of accession becomes bleaker; thus, the

reforms decelerate as the incentives start to be unconvincing.

The negotiations with Turkey were opened in December 2005; yet they are open-

ended to the extent that even the possible opening dates for some chapter are not determined.

(Ugur 2010:968) What is more, eight trade-related chapters were provisionally closed until

Turkey lifts the restrictions against Cyprus and the negotiations which are designed to last

until 2014 will not be completed unless they are opened again. (Schimmelfennig 2008:931)

Therefore, the speed for rewards, hitherto, has been slower compared to Romania.

5.3 Credibility of Conditionality

With regard to capabilities and costs of the EU, credibility of conditionality for Turkey has

been high as Schimmelfennig et al. (2005) asserts. First of all, in terms of interdependence,

Turkey is economically dependent on the EU as it ranks Turkey’s primary trade partner. (EU

Commission Trade) Therefore, the asymmetrical interdependence between the EU and Turkey

is as high as Romania. What is more, as stated above, it is not only the trade relations but also

EU’s ability to withhold the reward and be less interested in giving the reward of membership

increases the credibility of conditionality, but then again, this increased significantly after the

European Council gave candidate status to Turkey in 1999. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2005:34)

The credibility of conditionality or the promise of membership herein is significant for the

40

reforms to take place on sensitive issues in the sense that between 1999 when Turkey was

considered as a formal candidate and 2005 when the accession negotiations started, the

reforms in Turkey took an unprecedented shape, so much so that, even the issues including

Kurdish identity, broadcasting in languages other than Turkish and expansion of freedom of

association began to be regarded as normal when these were primarily taboos in Turkish state.

Yet, a part of the reason why the reforms slowed down after 2005 can be explained by the

uncertainty attached to the negotiations which will be explained further below.

The capabilities aspect of the EU, however, still brings along the discussions with

regard to the costs that may be borne onto the EU by the potential Turkish membership, as the

opponents claim that Turkey’s accession could carry with it the problems including the

critical weight that Turkey will possess in the decision-making mechanisms due to its huge

population surpassing many member states, the poor population compared to EU standards,

enlarged territory neighboring troubled region, the large farm sector that may destroy the

Common Agricultural Sector and the ‘enlargement fatigue’ which according to some requires

more deepening than widening. (Grabbe 2004:2) What is more, the same issues were reported

within the Commission Document called “Issues Arising From Turkey’s Membership

Perspective”. (EU Commission 2004c) For that reason, the credibility of conditionality in the

case of potential Turkish membership to the EU may decrease as these envisaged costs,

though most of them are not proven but some of them refer to the aspects such as geography

or population that a country cannot change quite easily, send the signal to Turkey that as long

as these costs persist, the candidacy stage that Turkey is in right now will be hard to take

forward.

The differentiation principle was relevant for Turkey almost all the time. Turkey was

not able to satisfy the conditions in time of the four other Central European countries were

listed as formal candidates and the start of the negotiations took five years after the

declaration of its candidacy unlike Romania. Although the differentiation principle or the

threat of exclusion increases the credibility of conditionality, Smith (2003) asserts that

alienation from the accession process may eventually isolate some states and therefore reduce

EU’s leverage on these as it decreases the chance for the state to “proceed quickly with

painful or controversial reforms”. (Smith 2003:124) One clear example of this is that when

the EU refused to include Turkey as a formal candidate state at the 1997 Luxembourg

European Council, and declared that Turkey needs to do more reforms inter alia on human

41

rights and minority rights protection even though it did not rule out the candidacy for the

future.

Nevertheless, the credibility of conditionality increased when Turkey was given

candidate status in 1999 at the Helsinki European Council Summit. Although the membership

‘carrot’ created the pull that Turkey responded with more thorough reform efforts and

introduced the National Programmes for the Adoption of the Acquis (NPAA) in March 2001,

the effect of the differentiation principle or ‘work at your own pace strategy’ (Christensen

2009:4) is still visible in the EU’s approach to Turkey. So much so that, even in May 2010

Council Summit Conclusion document, EU reaffirms that “the pace of negotiations depends

notably on Turkey’s progress in addressing opening and closing benchmarks as well as the

requirements of the Negotiating Framework.” (Council of the European Union 2008:1)

With regard to Turkey’s reception of signals, Vachudova (2001) explains that if the

prerequisite for the EU membership is to meet domestic requirements by implementing the

reforms dictated by conditionality and if this assumption happens to be overlooked by

violating the meritocracy principle, the governing elite in poor, distant and populous states

may legitimately doubt that the EU will not keep its deal even if they fulfill the rigid

requirements. (Vachudova 2001:33) Taking up where Vachudova left, Usul proceeds that EU

conditionality is largely credible when ceteris paribus its application relies on the meritocracy

that for the candidate states the reward should be attainable as long as they satisfy the

stipulated conditions. In other words, Turkey’s place in the membership queue should

correspond to the progress it has made toward fulfilling EU requirements. (Vachudova

2005:112) In the case of Turkey, merit-based approach has become further controversial

because meritocracy increases the credibility of the promises but this was damaged by the

introduction of changes within the conditionality by the additional and much stricter

conditionality compared to previous enlargements. (Pridham 2007a) Furthermore, the debate

within the EU circles about the different identity Turkey carries poses another question to the

validity of the meritocracy principle from the Turkish authorities, as in theory “any state that

can prove itself European and that can meet the requirements is considered a credible future

member.” (Vachudova 2005:116; emphasis added)

The reaction to Turkish membership actually complicates the credibility of

conditionality as the consistency is undermined by the different signs coming from the

different sources within the EU as mentioned above. After all, even though the Commission

42

prepares the agenda for the future enlargement and continues negotiations with Turkey, it is

the leaders of the member states that ultimately will show the green light to the candidate.

Accordingly, Pridham (2007) and Schimmelfennig (2008) claim this inter-institutional

diversity does actually puzzle the candidates and lead to incongruous practices of reforms. As

seen above in the Romanian case, EP maintained pressure over the Commission with respect

to the enlargement fatigue and in the Turkish case, the “opposition to full membership by key

member states such as France and Germany reduced the credibility of the incentives.”

(Schimmelfennig 2008:931) Pridham (2007b) and Usul (2011), therefore, note that the push

and pull dynamics of the conditionality have been compromised by extending the

conditionality beyond the end of negotiations by increasing uncertainty over eventual

accession. The open-ended nature of much tougher conditionality increased the uncertainty

over the eventual membership and thus this has distorted the power and prestige of the EU

conditionality. (Pridham 2007b:468; Usul 2011:57)

Pridham (2007a) puts forward that changed nature of conditionality undermines the

meritocracy principle and thus the credibility while at the same time increasing the

Commission’s leverage over candidate countries via the newly extended conditionality

mechanisms which stand for the ability to halt accession completely against the background

of “enlargement fatigue” or “absorption capacity”. (Pridham 2007a:465-7) Furthermore,

Pridham (2007b) discusses that the increase in the instrumental power of the Commission

does not immediately yield to compliance on the candidate side. It is seen in the Turkish case

that despite the opening of negotiations, due to the increased inconsistent signals from the

Union and the resulting belief in a dimmer membership in the post-2005 period, Turkey has

suffered from the signs ‘reform fatigue’ that is the hesitation to push forward for the

implementation and enforcement of the EU reforms. (Patton 2007:340)

In terms of parallel conditionality factor, unlike Romania, Turkey has not had any

other international organization that put conditions upon her to improve minority records as

Turkey has already been a member of the CoE, NATO and OSCE for decades. In the 2002

Regular Report, Commission suggested Turkey to cooperate with OSCE High Commissioner

for National Minorities, (EU Commission 2002b:43) which was followed by the OSCE visit

to Turkey. Although not comparable to Romania in terms of the impact of parallel

conditionality, Turkey’s permit to the OSCE visit for the first time in January 2003 was a sign

of the increased credibility. (Ibid. 2003:38)

43

What is more, with respect to the fourth sub factor, because the EU did not grant

candidacy status to Turkey until Helsinki Summit 1999, there were asymmetries in

information as the EU did not develop sophisticated mechanisms to monitor democracy and

human rights records in Turkey. (Usul 2011:2) To that end, even though the Commission was

producing annual reports on the developments in Turkey, they were mainly sporadic and

conjectural pressures from the EU and this reduced the credibility of conditionality until 1999.

However, with the prospect of membership, the content of the Reports has transformed into a

more detailed and inclusive tool to induce changes in the field of minority rights. Although

many international organizations have been providing information to the Commission about

the developments in Turkey including CoE, Human Rights Watch, and Minority Rights

Group International, the informative aspect of the credibility of conditionality is impaired by

the lack of consistency and inherent problems within the EU bodies. Several scholars (Grabbe

2006; Moravcsik & Vachudova 2003; Pridham 2007b; Usul 2011) criticize the discrepancy

between the practice and the rhetoric seriously and assert that this damages the reputation of

credibility of conditionality because of the fact that the internal technical issues creates a

distrust and leads to reluctance within the Turkish governing actors. Furthermore, as it is

demonstrated above that the EU conditionality is hindered by the incoherent practices

particularly in the sphere of minority rights by obligating the candidate countries to strictly

comply with the Copenhagen Criteria of ‘respect for and protection of minority rights’, while

some of the already member states have not shown commitment to the these norms.

(Moravcsik & Vachudova, 2005; Grabbe 2006)

5.4 Veto Players and Adoption Costs

Also, as Schimmelfennig (2008) shows high political costs combined with lack of a credible

membership prospect leads to non-compliance as in the case of Turkey, which will be

elaborated in detail below, as long as the EU demands linger on a particularly sensitive

national identity issue. However, it is not only the impact of lack of membership that

influence the non-compliance, but Schimmelfennig (2008) concludes that if the EU comes up

with demands that are likely to create significant political costs, in this case losing the next

elections, target governments will eschew from implementing them.

Turkey has never been an outright authoritarian regime like Romania, yet the illiberal

tendencies of the elites, paternalistic overtones of the military have always been a part of the

political life. Despite these, Turkey from the day it was founded constantly identified itself as

44

Western and becoming a part of the Europe has been a deep-seated foreign policy objective.

(Avci 2006: 67) Therefore, at the first sight the adoption costs should be lower when the issue

at hand is the long-awaited membership to the Europe; however, combined with the historical,

ideological and political characteristics, adoption costs in minority protection have been, by

and large, high for Turkish elite. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006) Hence, overall except MHP

(Nationalist Movement Party) almost all the political parties and the actors especially the

Kemalist elite were supportive of the EU accession process. (Ibid.: 100) Yet, as in 1997,

when EU did not announce Turkey as a candidate and required the fulfillment of demands that

touched upon the existential questions of impinging on Turkey’s national security (Tocci

2005:76) like Cyprus and the campaign against the Kurdish people doubled with its human

rights record, the coalition government including DSP (Democratic Left Party) and ANAP

(Motherland Party) of that time told in a press conference that “[t]here will not be a political

dialogue between Turkey and the European Union”. (International Herald Tribune 1997)

However, it should be noted that the demands from the EU came at a time when the costs of

compliance with minority rights were perceived very high as Turkey was in a war with PKK

and it was considered that granting any special rights would weaken Turkey’s security and its

unitary state-structure. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:103; Tocci 2006:76) Furthermore, PKK

declared its ambition to establish an independent socialist republic ‘Kurdistan’ and this was a

straightforward threat to the unitary state principle. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:103)

Moreover, exacerbated by the Sevres Syndrome,9 extension of cultural rights was believed to

lead to territorial secession of the Kurdish people and therefore would disintegrate Turkey

further as other minorities would also demand the same rights. (Toktaş and Aras 2009-

2010:715)

Therefore, until the capture of Öcalan and granting of formal candidacy status to

Turkey by the EU, the adoption costs were very high, not only because the actors regard a

possible a adoption as a loss in their power, but also the realization of these demands were

perceived to undermine the state itself. For this reason, the period between 1995 and 1999 was

no equivalent to the dramatic changes happening in Romania due to the domestic political

considerations and high costs. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:105) When Öcalan was captured

9 Sevres Syndrome, i.e. fear of disintegration, in Turkey is the belief in the legacy of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, when Western powers divided the Ottoman Empire to control units. Therefore, any demand from a Western source pointing to the red lines of Turkey has met with suspicion as Western powers might sponsor hostile neightbours or ethnic minorities to dismember Turkey. (Tocci 2005:76; Oran 2007:52-53)

45

in March 1999 and called upon PKK to refrain from violence, renounce terrorism and

advocated political, non-violent political solution to Kurdish problem, an era of armed

conflict and separatist threat mitigated. (Ibid.) Therefore, the domestic adoption costs to

change the minority regime started to become lower. What is more, the launch of accession

process in December 1999 transformed the negative dynamics. As the EU membership

prospect become realistic and the conditionality gained effectiveness, political parties acted as

rational actors and responded to the EU. (Avci 2006:64) Yet, it should not be forgotten that

the domestic conditions were favorable as armed conflicts decreased to a great extent and the

public was very supportive of the reforms necessary to fulfill Copenhagen political criteria

which would have been unthinkable a year ago. (Çarkoglu 2003:173)

It is striking to see that even the nationalist party MHP was one of the coalition parties

to amend the Constitution for the sake of the EU. This Constitutional Amendment or the first

EU reform package of 2001 is still the most comprehensive constitutional reforms done in

Turkish political history. (Ergin 2010) Furthermore, the EU requirements on signing and

ratifying the UN Conventions were realized in 2000. (EU Commission 2000b) When the EU

issued the Accession Partnership, the coalition government quickly prepared the National

Programme (NPAA) in 2001 to show how it will harmonize its policies with the EU. Yet, the

adoption costs prevented the government from including the complete EU requirements in

NPAA; on the contrary, the requirements were watered down by the actors as some of them

were seen as too demanding on issues of national sovereignty. (Avci 2006:69) The

enthusiasm over the EU membership for MHP however lost its significance later on as the EU

requirements addressed critical issues including the abolishment of death penalty and Kurdish

language education. MHP became the staunchest opponent of the EU reform demands as

death penalty would directly influence the decision for Öcalan and the teaching in Kurdish

would contradict the party’s ideological stance. (Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:106) Yet, the

second reform package passed in the Parliament before the elections in November 2002 lifted

restrictions on the use of ‘non-Turkish mother tongues’ including and foremost Kurdish in the

field of education as well as broadcasting, even though the implementation of this faced

resistance by the authorities soon. (Ibid.) MHP tried to block the passing of this package and

voted against it but could not prevent the adoption. The leader of the party Bahceli later

voiced that he did not believe in the EU accession process and the other coalition parties were

deceiving the public. (Hürriyet Newspaper 31/10/2002) Thus, the credible membership

46

perspective triggered unprecedented reform process in Turkey after 1999 as the adoption costs

decreased.

The elections in 2002 brought the pro-Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party)

to the government and the previous ruling parties could not even pass the 10% threshold to

get in to the Parliament. Until 2005, the compliance was high with the EU and costs were low

and this term may be described as the ‘golden-age’ corresponding to the early years of AKP

government. The reforms accelerated during the AKP government so much so that four

harmonization packages were passed in the Parliament and most of them were concerned

about the minority rights. (Öniş 2009:23) For instance, in line with the EU demands, the

remaining states of emergency was lifted, amnesty was granted to 5000 Kurdish fighters, the

notorious Article 8 of Anti-Terror Law was abolished, giving Kurdish names to children was

permitted, and the bans on broadcasting in ones mother tongue was lifted. (Schimmelfennig et

al. 2006:107-8) However, the other veto players including Kemalist bureaucracy rendered

some of these developments ineffective in practice such as broadcasting in Kurdish. (Ibid.)

Moreover, government did not expand the restrictive interpretation of Lausanne Treaty

despite the constant criticisms from the EU. (EU Commission 2005b:35) Also, Turkey did not

sign FCNM and ECMRL as signing of these would mean the admittance of the principle of

difference on the contrary to entrenched political principle of equality. Recognizing other

minority groups could also bring back the Sevres Syndrome; therefore, the perception of

threat and costs in making changes in expanding minority groups and granting rights therefore

has never lost its momentum.

The positive developments with regard to the minority rights came to a halt after 2005

when the negotiations started as being open-ended. The reforms were demanded by the EU in

short or medium term to meet the priorities in Accession Partnerships yet the actual delivery

of the benefit (membership) became blurry. (Tocci 2005:78) This increased the compliance

costs while decreasing the non-compliance costs. For instance, EU demanded the lifting of the

reservations to UN ICCPR and ECSC because the groups outside the scope of Lausanne

Treaty do not have the right to have education in their mother tongue; but these demands go

unheard by the political elites. (EU Commission 2010:32) Despite the early improvements

with regard to usage of other languages than Turkish, restrictions remain in using non-Turkish

languages in political life or contacts with public services. (Ibid.: 34) These EU requirements

are costly to fulfill for the political actors as the Article 3 of the Constitution which states

47

“[t]he Turkish state, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is

Turkish” is an irrevocable provision meaning that it cannot be amended under any

circumstances. (1982 Constitution Article 3&4)

Henceforth, the credible membership prospect combined with favorable domestic

conditions led to some changes in the minority regime in Turkey in early 2000s. However,

when the credibility declined and the EU requirements started to go beyond what Turkey was

able to address these demands under a wider framework of changes in human rights and

individual rights in terms of elimination of discrimination and freedom of religion, the

reforms regarding minority policies slowed down.(Toktaş & Aras 2009-2010:717)

Table 2. External Incentives model on Turkey10

YearsDeterminacy

of Conditions

Size and Speed

of RewardsCredibility

Adoption

Costs

1987 – 1999 - (low) - (low) - (low) + (high)

1999 – 2005 - (low) + (high) + (high) - (low)

2005 - 2011 - (low) - (low) - (low) + (high)

Interval 5.B – Current situation of minorities in Turkey

Although the attitudes towards minorities have considerably progressed over the past 10

years, critical problems still persist especially with regard to the Kurdish population, attitudes

towards non-Muslim minorities and the Roma people. (MRGI Turkey Overview) Turkey still

has not signed FCNM and ECMRL and does not recognize any minority group other than the

ones mentioned in the Lausanne Treaty. Kurdish people, for the first time since 1991, were

elected to the Parliament by running as independent candidates due to the 10% threshold

hurdle. Their demands to right to education in mother tongue and regional autonomy have

been rejected, but an acceptance of the existence of the Kurdish people within the public has

grown dramatically. The trials of the murders of non-Muslim minority members including

Hrant Dink, and Priest Santoro showed weak signs of justice, yet the public was more

vociferous to the events than before. (MRGI Turkey Overview) Overall, the situation of the 10 Original by Schimmelfennig et al. 2006:99, modified by the author by the findings derived from the analysis part.

48

minorities has met the attention of the state and the public and has –to a degree- improved

compared to 10 years ago but the crucial problems are still waiting to be addressed soon.

6 Assessment of Findings

The analysis parts above demonstrate that both Romania and Turkey faced the unclear

conditions put forward by the EU, but the countries response to the demands formed

individually depending on their domestic political constellations. Briefly, there was no

variation between the two cases with respect to the determinacy of conditions factor. This had

the same effect on Romania and Turkey due to the EU’s internal shortcomings of addressing

minority rights uniformly. Yet, although Romania had similar claims that of Turkey during

the early 1990’s in terms of the unitary notion of the state and reluctance to grant collective

minority rights to Hungarian community, the EU accession process has changed this

perspective and Hungarians and other minorities have been entitled to receive education or

public service in their mother tongue. Turkey, on the other hand, continuously maintains that

the state treats its minority groups as equal without prioritizing one or another and thus, the

principle of equality is claimed to be a better way of addressing the needs of these culturally

distinct groups. Therefore, it can be claimed that combined with Turkey’s strict minority

treatment history, the absence of a common EU law on minority rights protection in the Union

level provided a loophole for Turkey to excuse herself from adopting rules and signing

international treaties.

As for the second variable of the size and speed of rewards, Romania had better terms

compared to Turkey; and despite the one-year delay option in the accession date, she had a

rather visible date for the reception of reward. Also, compared to Turkey, the accession

process lasted shorter with negotiations only lasting six years. For Turkey, the size of the

reward crystallized during the first half of 2000s, yet after it was specified that the

negotiations are open-ended and the size of the reward was said to be minimized by offering

Privileged Partnerships instead of full-membership, the size and speed of rewards factor

rendered the EU conditionality ineffective.

In terms of the credibility of conditionality, threat of exclusion worked well on

Romania as this triggered more comprehensive reforms by the government. Romanian

accession to the EU, in spite of the discussions, was not perceived as costly as Turkish

accession and these costs were presumed to be absorbable regarding importance of the

49

stability in the region. However, a probable Turkish accession would, among other things,

stretch the EU’s geography and connect it to more unstable regions. Moreover, Romania’s

other foreign policy objective NATO also put forward similar conditions before the

membership, whereas Turkey did not have any other organization that could push the reforms;

conversely, the debate about ‘turning to East’ or ‘Axis Shift’ has taken place several times

during the past five years which indicates that although Turkey does not have an alternative to

the EU as it has been the key objective of the Republic, she may find other channels in the

foreign policy to prove her regional role as a bridge between the West and the East. What is

more, the opinions of leaders of the EU Member States blocking the road to the EU have

curbed the enthusiasm within the circles of the Turkish elites as they have become tired of

knocking on the door for years. Yet, it should be noted that during the first half of 2000, the

credibility of conditionality was so high that the governments of this era made several

unprecedented reforms which were even hard to speak of solely because of the increased

prospect of full-membership. It can be argued here that while the threat of exclusion worked

well on Romania to induce reforms, the promise of membership is a better instrument to

prompt Turkish authorities into enacting or amending laws with regard to minorities.

The fourth variable which is the veto players and domestic action costs has a central

role in determining the effectiveness of the EU conditionality. The veto players in Romania

in the beginning of the accession process hesitated to take up actions that might have ended

their political careers or altered the country’s way of handling the minorities; however, the EU

accession became dominant to the domestic concerns and the requirements were fulfilled by

though initially pro-Western actors, then continued by the nationalists themselves. Contrarily,

Turkish veto players have never been assimilated into the EU accession wave although MHP

took part in one of the most comprehensive constitutional amendments of the Republic’s

history, the rhetoric they employ never transformed into a pro-EU one even at the peak of the

heightened membership prospect period. Apart from this, changing the long-lasted experience

of addressing or not addressing the minorities has also perceived to be a high cost, and

because the minority issue was inherent to the founding treaty of the Turkey, making

amendments to it has always been a sensitive aspect of the political culture. Yet, even these

delicate matters were addressed between 1999 and 2005 with a unique speed. These

exceptional developments then can be accounted for the decreased costs and increased EU

credibility linked to heightened membership prospect, but when the credibility decreased

50

again after 2005, EU’s leverage or pull lost its effect on the actors in Turkey to trigger

reforms and that exceptional process slowed down.

Therefore, the EU conditionality on minority rights has been successful in Romania

because the factors above were existent especially the credibility of the membership prospect

was in place so much so that this undermined the power of the veto players who initially

opposed the reforms. Whereas in Turkey, faced with an unclear membership prospect,

decision-makers avoided undertaking reforms on minority policies because of the high

adoption costs that required weeding out the root laws or altering them. Also, from a different

perspective, it can be argued that when the Berlin Wall was demolished, Romania started to

transform itself and at that time, both the example and the objective was the EU, so even

though the Constitutional rights granted to or the laws passed for the minorities were done

reluctantly or without any intention to follow up the implementations or the will to pursue an

improvement in the conditions, these developments later on helped form a base during the EU

accession process as Romania did not have to start from the lowest level but in fact already

had several laws and regulations on which more elaborate and comprehensive laws can be

built by the directives coming from the EU, CoE and OSCE. Kelley (2004) contends that

“new and less-established democracies will be the most receptive to external human-rights

obligations. This assumes that the governments in office consider their interests aligned with

external actors and norms, and they think they will benefit from locking them in.”(Kelley

2004:48) What is more, as Checkel suggests, transitions facilitate the receptivity of states to

external ideas and actors as these create “windows of opportunity for external actors”

(Checkel 1997; quoted in Kelley 2004:48) For that reason, compared to Turkey, it was easy

for the EU to forge relatively vulnerable Romania into a consolidated democracy by linking

minority issues to membership and tackling with the myriad of domestic influences. Whereas

in Turkish case, even the Constitution belongs to a military coup era and the minority

practices are the remnants of the post- First World War period. Turkey could not, and to a

great degree, did not want to catch up with the developments on the minority issues. The

concern has mainly been the secessionist movement in southeast region and the indivisibility

of the country which itself actually maltreated even to its recognized minorities. Therefore,

although the external incentives model is a helpful model which explain the macro level

impact of the EU policies, its coverage is limited to the extent that where the domestic

political considerations, historical legacies, policy traditions are deep-seated and the defenders

51

of these are not convinced of the future benefits they will receive from the EU, the reforms

that are necessary are hindered by the perceived costs such as loss of part of territory, or loss

of control in some policy areas. As long as the actors in Turkey regard any development in

minority issues a potential cost, then they will eschew from adopting any law that can

empower minority groups.

7 Concluding Remarks

<<At no time in history have sovereign states voluntarily agreed to meet such vast domestic requirements and then subjected themselves

to such intrusive verification proceduresto enter an international institution. >> (Vachudova 2001:7)

In light of the analyses above, we can argue that external incentives model is an applicable

model that explains the developments in Romania in terms of the success of the EU in

breaking the power of the nationalist elites and overcoming the communist legacy. As for the

research question, the external incentives model showed that ultimately it is the actors within

the target countries determining the success of the conditionality depending on their

perception of the costs. It can, therefore, be concluded that EU conditionality on minority

rights was successful in terms of triggering positive changes in the minority policies because

the membership prospect was credible to the extent that the veto players gave up the

resistance vis-à-vis the benefits attached to EU membership. However, in the case of Turkey,

external incentives model lacked a crucial variable that is the resonance of the EU demands

on the veto players within the country vis-á-vis an unclear reward. Turkey is a hard case in

terms of its deep-seated political culture towards minority issues and the strong resistance

towards minorities. Adding to that, the long-lasting war between PKK and the state has

critical implications in the eyes of the public whose weight in the decision-making bodies

becomes salient especially during the election period. For example, even though it was AKP

that implemented most of the reforms in granting broadcasting rights and private schools in

Kurdish language, and embraced the Kurdish people during the election process, whereas

after the elections it transformed into an almost ultra-nationalistic one by saying “the ones

who are not happy in Turkey should leave” referring to the Kurdish people. (Evin 2008)

Out of the findings of this research, it can be inferred that under the ripe

circumstances, an international organization can actually outpower the veto players and the

nationalist forces within the countries where minority issues are considered as sensitive and

dangerous to touch by offering material incentives mostly in the form of a credible prospect

52

of full-fledged membership that in the end would compel the aspiring states to meet the

requirements in order to achieve that membership. As long as the target states believe that

they will become a member or receive rewards and most importantly, the tangible domestic

political costs are lower than the benefits at the end of an assiduous process of reforms and

changes, as demonstrated above, they will comply with the preconditions and will not try to

circumvent the conditions as they will be aware that the conditions are attached to a

comprehensive monitoring system. Yet, in order for the monitoring system to be efficient, the

rules that the international organization require from the target state must be clear, applied

uniformly for all the other member states and candidates and set down properly that target

countries can have an example to emulate and also cannot have an excuse not to transpose or

implement the rules.

With a strong external incentive which target state believes that it will acquire the

wished benefit at the end of a long road of complying with the requirements, international

organization can undermine the power of veto players which usually depend on the

manipulation of the public, transform a country and can help consolidate democracy. Of

course, this theory is relevant as long as the actors are assumed to be power maximizers, the

reward is credible and tempting in size provided that the conditions are clear and the states do

not have an alternative to that international organization. Also, when there is an asymmetrical

interdependence between the organization and the target state, when the adoption and

implementation costs do not exceed the expected benefits out of that international

organization and when the benefits or the rewards are credible to the extent the target state is

certain about the future as long as it plays according to the rules, then the domestic political

situation, historical legacies and the political culture all of which that impede the alleviation

of the minority issues can be overcome. Because the benefits will increase the societal

salience of that organization while at the same time reduce the power of the actors that stand

against the changes which are necessary to acquire that benefit. Therefore, from a macro

level, in order to convince the target states governments or key actors to adopt and implement

rules, organizations should assure them first and foremost of the size and the certainty of the

benefits they will receive afterwards.

53

8 Annex

Table 3. Main minority problems covered within the EU Commission Regular Reports on Romania

Issues

Regular Reports from 1997 to 2005

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Language Rights (e.g. education, administration etc.)

- - - + + + + + +

University in Hungarian language - - - - + + + +

Hungarian minority + + + + + + + + +

Roma people (e.g. discrimination; socio-economic problems)

- - - - - - - - +/-

Data on the Roma people (e.g. population, unemployment etc.)

- - -

Institutional Framework (e.g. staffing, funding etc.)

- - - + -

Strategy for Roma - - + +/- +/- - -

Other minorities (e.g. Csango minority)

- + +

International Treaties + +

* (-) stands for the negative developments or the lack of developments at all.

* (+) stands for the positive developments or the improvements in the situation.

54

Table 4. Main minority problems covered within the EU Commission Regular Reports on Turkey

* (-) stands for the negative developments or the lack of developments at all.

* (+) stands for the positive developments or the improvements in the situation.

Issues

Regular Reports from 1998 to 2010

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

International Treaties - - - - - +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

Language Rights (Removal of the bans on education, broadcasting

etc.)

- - - - +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

The Kurdish Issue (e.g. expression of identity,

representation)- - - - - - +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

The socio-economic problems in Southeast region (e.g. emergency situation; IDPs; Village

Guards System)

- - - +/- - +/- +/- +/- - - +/- +/- -

Non-Muslim minorities (e.g. Problems of property, Khalki seminary etc.)

- - - - - - - +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

Restrictive Interpretation of Lausanne Treaty (e.g. difference in treatment

between various groups)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Cultural Rights - - +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-

Association & Assembly Rights

- + +/- - + +/- +/- +/-

Religious Rights (e.g.problems of Alevis, worship places, etc.)

+/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- - - +/- +/-

Discrimination (e.g.Roma people)

+/- +/- - - - - - - - +/-

55

9 Bibliography

Articles and Books

Andreescu, Gabriel (2001a) “Romania in the Council of Europe: Individual Rights, Discrimination and Special Measures” Papeles del Este, Vol.1 (2001), pp.1-11, Retrieved from http://revistas.ucm.es/cee/15766500/articulos/PAPE0101120013A.PDF.

Andreescu, Gabriel (2001b) “Universal Thought, Eastern Facts: Scrutinizing National Minority Rights in Romania” in Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski (eds.), Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, New York: Oxford University Press

Avci, Gamze (2006) “Turkey’s EU politics: Consolidating democracy through enlargement?” in Helene Sjursen (ed.), Questioning Eu Enlargement – Europe in Search of Identity, New York: Routledge.

Barnes, Ian and Randerson, Claire (2006). “EU Enlargement and the effectiveness of conditionality: keeping to the deal?” Managerial Law, Vol.48, No.4, pp 351-365.

Börzel, T.A. and Risse, T. (2000) “When Europe Hits Home: Europeanization and Domestic Change”, San Domenico European University Institute, Working Paper RSC, No.2000/56.

Çarkoglu, Ali (2003) “Who Wants Full membership? Characteristics of the Turkish Public Support for EU Membership”, Turkish Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.171-194.

Constantin, Sergiu (2004) “Linguistic Policy and National Minorities in Romania” Noves SL. Revista de Sociolingüística, Retrieved from http://www6.gencat.net/llengcat/noves/hm04tardor/docs/constantin.pdf.

Csergo, Zsuzsa (2002) “Beyond Ethnic Division: Majority-minority Debate about the Postcommunist State in Romania and Slovakia” East European Politics and Societies, Vol.16, No.1, pp.1-29.

De Witte, Bruno (2002): “Politics Versus Law in the EU’s Approach to Ethnic Minorities”, in Jan Zielonka (ed.), Europe Unbound – Enlarging and Reshaping the boundaries of European Union, London and New York: Routledge

Drzewicki, Krzystof (2008) "The Enlargement of the European Union and the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities", in The Protection of Minorities in the Wider Europe, Marc Weller, Denika Blacklock and Katherine Nobbs (eds.), Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

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