Greek-Turkish Relations: The “Helsinki Moment” in Greece’s strategy to turn the EU into a catalyst for conflict resolution
Greek-Turkish Relations: The “Helsinki Moment” in Greece’s strategy to turn the EU into a catalyst for conflict resolution

Author(s): Panayotis J. Tsakonas
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Recent History (1900 till today)
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Greek-Turkish; Helsinki Moment; Greece; EU;
Summary/Abstract: In the late 1990s Greece undertook a significant reform initiative vis-à-vis Turkey, the neighboring state which has been considered as Greece’s major security threat since the mid- ‘70s. Greece’s reform initiative –which attempted to alter the very logic of Greek-Turkish relations—reached its institutional climax at the Helsinki ΕU Summit of December 1999, when Turkey was granted candidate status after Greece’s decision to lift its long-lasting veto. Was this paramount foreign policy shift the result of a rational recognition of Greece’s new strategic needs and priorities, of a more in-depth ideational change related to a collapse of the traditional – and reigning – orthodoxy about how to deal with the ‘threat from the east’, and of the effects of the force of Europeanization on foreign policy formation, or of a combination of all the above?

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