BEYOND SENDER-RECEIVER MODELS: TURKEY’S EUROPEANIZATION WITHIN WORLD SOCIETY Paper presented at the EUSA Biennial Conference, Boston, US, March 3-5, 2011 [First Draft: Please Do not Cite without Author’s Permission] By Didem Buhari-Gulmez PhD candidate in Politics & International Relations Royal Holloway, University of London When a scholarly article mentions Turkey‟s Europeanization, one can quickly notice an overemphasis on the European Union‟s conditionality on candidate countries as a determinant factor, either in terms of actual pressures –„carrot and stick‟ mechanisms- or in terms of providing new norms. These studies wrongly conceive of Europeanization as a „sender-receiver‟ process whereby Turkey is reduced to a passive receiver of the „EU messages‟. I find at least three interrelated limitations in this type of approach. First of all, these models misleadingly ignore the processes through which the exogenous messages are perceived, translated, adopted or rejected by domestic actors. Second, it is generally forgotten that the exogenous messages that are propagated by the EU are not purely European in character. They are rather universalistic, which implies their -at least, theoretical- applicability throughout the globe. Finally, there is an unfortunate tendency to overlook the global cultural processes underlying the interaction between the EU and the candidate country, Turkey. By benefiting from the World Society theory (Stanford School on Sociological Institutionalism, see Buhari-Gulmez 2010) led by John W. Meyer, I will study Turkey‟s Europeanization from a macro-sociological perspective, which focuses on the world cultural environment that informs and legitimates the models carried by the EU as well as Turkish actors‟ responses towards the EU pressures. To this aim, I will study the EU-led reforms in