L’Adhésion de la Turquie à l’Union Européenne: Une Evaluation Macroéconomique dans la Perspective des Critères de Copenhague

In May 2004, the European Union (EU) has experienced the greatest enlargement in its history with the accession of ten new countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Yet Turkey is an associate member of the European Economic Community since 1963 with the Ankara Agreement and a privileged trade partner of the EU since 1995 with the implementation of a customs union, has again seen his candidacy excluded from this enlargement process. The European Council in December 2004 has finally decided to endorse the opening of negotiations with Turkey, which began in October 2005, negotiations that may lead or not to future membership. I argue that the fact that Turkey has been excluded from the last enlargement because of essentially political and cultural reasons. In this sense, I conduct a macroeconomic comparison between Turkey and the new EU member states and the two acceding countries (Romania and Bulgaria) and try to discover the extent to which Turkey is different from the new member countries regarding the Copenhagen economic criteria.