East European Quarterly, XL, No. 4 December 2006 EU ENLARGEMENT CONDITIONS AND MINORITY PROTECTION: A REFLECTION ON TURKEY'S NON-MUSLIM MINORITIES $ule Toktaý Isik University, Istanbul Introduction As part of enlargement towards the East, Turkey was accepted as a candidate country in 1999 at the Helsinki Council Summit and started accession negotiations on the 3rd of October in 2005. The start of the ne- gotiations has been the result of long, difficult and complicated relations between Turkey and the EU. There had been several drawbacks and turning points, yet Turkey's westernization policy, which is one of the strongest hallmarks in Turkish foreign policy dating back to the Ottoman Empire times, had always had an upper hand in Turkey-EU relations (Aydin, 2003). In other words, the only direction that Turkey has fol- lowed is that of the West. It is in this context that the start of negotiations was not so unexpected despite concerns over the timing by some of the EU member states. 1 At the same time, the same process cannot be inter- preted as Turkey being ready for EU membership or having got Euro- peanized 'enough' since there are strong areas of resistance in Turkish politics and Turkish polity in general that may prove to be the short- coming for a possible full membership in the short-term. One can argue that the issue of minority protection and minority rights is one of the resistance points among some others such as the resolution of border conflicts with Greece and the Cyprus conflict (Oniý, 2003). Turkey applies universal citizenship as the basic tool in governing its state-society relations and every Turkish citizen is entitled to the same sets of rights and liberties which are protected by the Constitution (Toktaý, 2005). By the same token, group rights or differentiated citizen- ship is an uneasy concept in Turkish politics. Although Turkey was founded in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, one of the most multi- cultural and multiculturalist governments in history, with the introduction of the Republic in 1923, it followed one nation-one state understanding formulated as Republicanism (Keyman and igduygu, 1998). The Turkish nation-building process involved cultural homogenization and the intro- duction of a super culture at the expense of differences among the society. 489