Summary: | The main question that this research attempts to tackle is whether the Turkish accession to the EU will threaten or not the cohesion of the EU. This question is answered in the framework of: 1) The evaluation of the Turkish accession to the EU, especially through the relevant EU decisions and the Turkish political, economic, social, military and institutional reality. 2) The various theories of International Relations (Realism, Structural Realism, Functionalism, Neo-Functionalism). What I try to do is examine the structural changes which could occur as a result of the Turkish accession to the EU. Therefore, my aim is to analyse the EU -Turkey relations in the context of the EU Enlargement taking into consideration the policy of the US, which is the dominant actor of the international system in the current era. This study attempts to investigate and identify the factors influencing the policy of the EU on the Turkish accession to the European Union and vice versa. These factors constitute, in fact, variables upon which a model of EU cohesion can be based in order to find out whether the European system -as defined on legal, institutional, economic, military and social level- can be threatened or not by Turkey or even other new member states.
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