EU–Turkey: Integration without Full Membership or Membership without Full Integration? A Conceptual Framework for Accession Alternatives

Abstract The EU accession aspirations of the de jure E uropean country T urkey remain a highly contested issue. Due to the national preferences and mainly socio‐cultural resentment in some EU Member States and due to its limited integration capacity, the EU offered A nkara a discriminatory ‘full membership minus’. The current EU law and the various paradigms of ‘differentiated integration’ do not only provide the spatial, temporal and thematic scope for a conceptual framework on accession alternatives, they also limit it. In this context, the gradual integration/membership concept could be an interesting option for both parties. The depreciation of full membership in the case of T urkey has weakened the EU conditionality policy in general. On the other hand, ‘external’ flexibilization can help to overcome deadlock by allowing the M ember S tates and accession candidates such as T urkey to co‐operate at different levels of integration.