The road of Turkey to EU membership

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to delineate the economic and political aspects of Turkey’s EU membership. The main finding is that although Turkey has made great strides towards EU membership concerning the economic criteria through its economic reform, there has not been made the same progress in the political field because of major obstacles described in Chapter 3. Turkey’s economic profile is provided in Chapter 2 through comparisons to other already EU or EU pre-accession countries in basic economic figures, in which Turkey’s dynamic in many cases is obvious. Chapter 4 summarizes the main points of the recent Turkey’s progress in economic and political terms, which confirms that Turkey has still a lot to do (especially in the political field) in order to reach full EU membership.