Email this citation. However, many obstacles to Turkish EU membership remain. These include domestic political and economic factors, relations with Greece, and some discomfort with the prospect of the inclusion within the EU of an Islamic country.
Security considerations may have played a considerable part in securing Ankara's EU policy objective. However, the demise of the cold war has offered Ankara regional alternatives to the pursuit of a European destiny.
Greater Turkish involvement in its immediate neighbourhood might contribute to a distancing between Turkish and European security perspectives, paradoxically providing another potential obstacle to Turkish EU membership.
NATO membership and strategic sponsorship by the United States were seen as vital, both by Ankara and by its western allies, for a country that lay on the southern flank of the Soviet Union, controlled egress from and access to the Black Sea, and linked Europe to or insulated it from the oil-rich and crisis-prone Middle East. European attitudes to Turkey were less exclusively focused than American on strategic factors Buzan and Diez, Viewed in this light, the Helsinki decision is noteworthy, and requires explanation and analysis.
Does it reflect a genuine desire and consensus on the part of the existing membership to embrace Turkey as one of their own? Might the Helsinki decision be seen more as a legacy of the cold war than as a response to current and likely future post-cold war circumstances? These are the questions to which this article will address itself. It was a similar perception that had encouraged the government of President Ozal, only recently emerged from the military regime established in , to apply for full Turkish membership in Greece, a member since , was well-placed to lobby against Turkey from inside the Community and, assisted by the European Parliament and some of the member governments, it was not until that it became possible for the EU to negotiate a customs union with Turkey, which came into effect on 1 January The negotiations for a customs union agreement with Turkey had, however, been controversial and politicised [Kramer, b: 61], and by the time if its signing there was some ill-feeling on both sides.
