Factors affecting Turkey's candidacy to EU and improvements towards the future

Abstract

Turkey’s forty-year struggle for integration with Europe has reached an important phase with her being given a date for the initiation of the negotiations. How did Turkey, after many failures until then, manage to obtain the status of candidate country all of a sudden and how did the negotiations for full membership begin? Answering these questions will not only enable us to understand our recent past but will also help us to shape the future on an accurate basis, comprehending the present in an accurate way. This study aims at finding the answers to the questions above with a historical and comparative approach and puts forward the findings and analyses on such a basis. Therefore, both inside and the outside factors will be analyzed with regard to the geopolitical and geo-strategic situation of Turkey.