RISING NATIONALISM AND THE EU ACCESSION PROCESS

Nationalist feeling has been rising and support for Turkish membership of the European Union has been falling as conditions that led to a decline in levels of nationalism at the end of the 1990s have changed. The rocky path of the accession process since 2004 and an extended domestic political atmosphere of polarization and crisis have further provoked nationalist feeling and transformed much of it into anti-EU feeling. Global economic troubles and the prospect that EU negotiations could be suspended over the AKP closure case could lead to further increases in levels of nationalism.