EXPECTING THE SAME RESULTS FROM DISSIMILAR LEGAL TEXTS: AN ASSESSMENT OF ASSOCIATION AGREEMENTS OF TÜRKİYE AND GREECE.

EREN, T. Mesut

This article compares the association agreements of Greece, which signed the first association agreement with the European Economic Community (EEC), and Türkiye, which subsequently signed a similar agreement. It has been argued for a long time that the Ankara Agreement was inspired by the Athens Agreement. This article tries to reveal that although the aims and purposes of these agreements are similar, they diverge considerably when examined closely, both in spirit and wording. The argument of the article is that the Athens Agreement was prepared from the very beginning by the EEC to bring Greece to full membership as quickly as possible. But the Ankara Agreement with Türkiye appears to be a derivative agreement very similar to the Athens Agreement, but it has different important clauses and a deliberately weakened regulatory power. As a result, the Ankara Agreement, which is still in force and forms the legal basis of Türkiye's relations with the EU, neither had the proper content to carry Türkiye into full membership at the time it was signed, nor it is not meaningful in this context to expect same results from the legal texts that differ in this way. This paper attempts to prove this assertion.

GREECE; EUROPEAN Economic Community; EUROPEAN communities; MEMBERSHIP in associations, institutions, etc.; CONTRACTS; EUROPEAN Union membership; ARGUMENT

Ankara Review of European Studies (ARES) / Ankara Avrupa Çalışmaları Dergisi (AAÇD), 2024, Vol 23, Issue 1, p101

1303-2518

Academic Journal

10.32450/aacd.1344921