Turkey's long road to EU candidacy: Is Turkey a European state

This work intends to contest the European identity of Turkey as an EU candidate state. For this purpose, firstly the historical evolution of the European identity will be discussed. It can be argued that the EU's identity has been constructed against its own past or that a liberal interpretation of the enlightenment values makes the EU's identity. Turkey's EEC membership application dates back to 1959. Until recently, Turkey had not made serious progress for EC/EU membership, and it was not considered as a candidate state until 1999. Turkey's failure can be explainable by the economic and political obstacles which Turkey faced until recently. After the EU's 1999 decision granting Turkey candidacy status, the Europeanization of Turkey has been accelerated significantly. As a result Turkey has caught up with the universal standards for democracy and human rights set by the EU Copenhagen Council in 1993 known as the Copenhagen criteria.