Does Candidate Status Matter? “ Unpacking the Relationship Between Europeanization and Conditionality in Turkey and Serbia”

Abstract: Europeanization as a crucial insrument for democrtatization process in target countries requires gradual complaince with EU membership conditions where conditional positive incentives (ultimately EU membership) in return are offered as rewards to acceding countries. Provoked by conflicts at domestic level, the current setbacks in Europeanization proceses of several countries (here is Turkey and Serbia), however, put a query on the effectiveness of conditionality strategy. This thesis seeks to answer a highly related question to this debate :Does candidate status matters? And to what extent it matters? Unpacking the relationship between Europeanization and conditinality, I argue that it is less the candidate/membeship status per se that matters but rather the unfavourable domestic factors, high costs of compliance, existence of domestic veto players and, the failure of the countries to include the civil society actors in the transformation process, that account for the limited impact of transformative power of EU and for low level of compliance in Turkey and Serbia. The empirical analysis of two cases reveals that credible accession conditionality is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition of EU success in promoting reform process. In order to be effective it has to be accompanied by favourable domestic conditions. As a conclusion, this thesis points out that European actors must take into account of the cultural filters of target countries and loopholes in the Europeanization process and recognize that “one size does not fit all” but rather domestic factors matter.