Whither synchronization?: The European Union transport policy and Turkey

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1505268 (Table of Contents)

This thesis mainly aims to identify opportunities and challenges for bolstering EU – Turkey cooperation on transport policy. The identification of the possible areas of cooperation is important since the accession process of Turkey has been stalled for seven years. By identifying opportunities and challenges in specific areas, the EU reform process in Turkey can be again revitalized. Focusing on transport policy, this study examines a central puzzle: why Turkey adjusts certain EU policies and technical standards while being reluctant to adopt in others. To explain the variance in the harmonization of EU policies, the Europeanization theoretical frameworks in the accession process are examined. And this study clearly shows that existing Europeanization approaches are not helpful in the Turkish case. It, then, suggests that this puzzle would be tackled by using novel theoretical framework which is borrowed from Public Policy literature developed in the United States. From this a pair of related hypotheses are developed mainly suggest that distributive policies will be more easily adopted than redistributive policies in candidate countries. To test them, two policy cases one with predominantly distributive implications and the other with mostly redistributive implications are selected and processed. The main findings of this study are as follows: first, Turkey has mostly been successful in adopting of EU transport policies with distributive impacts. Secondly, synchronization of transport policies with redistributive impacts, however, has been less promising, especially without a full membership perspective.