Turkey-EU relations through the EU lens: from accession to functional substitution

Abstract

This article builds on the current evolution of Turkey-EU relations through content analysis of the EU's legal documents from 2015 to 2024. Through such analysis, we trace the evolution of different EU institutions’ portrayals about Turkey as well as the issue areas under which the bilateral cooperation had been intensified. We expect our empirical findings to provide new insights to the literature on EU enlargement and External Differentiated Integration (EDI). Based on our empirical findings, we introduce the new conceptual category of ‘functional substitution’ that we consider to best capture the EU's contemporary efforts to reconstruct relations with Turkey.