The importance of values in predicting Turkish youth's opinions about the European Union in light of the Copenhagen Political Criteria

Abstract

The enlargement process of the European Union may be regarded as one of the most important social projects of human history in that it is trying to unite several nation-states under a "European identity." As a historically and culturally "distant" candidate, Turkey has been asked to meet a set of expectations referred to as the "Copenhagen Criteria," requiring a series of large-scale reforms to the infrastructure and superstructure of the country. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to relate Turkish people's opinions on the criteria to their values, hypotheses based on Schwartz's model of values were tested. Schwartz's Personal Values Questionnaire and a questionnaire measuring opinions on the criteria and the Union were completed by 368 Turkish university students. Factor analysis of the opinion items yielded five factors: reduction of military influence in civil life, scepticism towards Europe and the European Union, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights, and lack of transparency in public institutions. Regression analyses showed that values and nationalism were powerful predictors of opinions whereas the effect of religiosity was limited only to the prediction of a preference for the reduction of military influence in civil life. Preference for openness to change values were successful in predicting variance in three of the five criteria: The more the participants favoured these values, the more they supported the improvement of human rights and liberties, the improvement of minority rights, and regretted the lack of transparency. Self-transcendence values were also positively related to support for the same three criteria together with a preference for reduction of military influence. As for nationalism, the results showed that this variable was related negatively to reduction of the military influence, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights; and positively to scepticism.

Group heterogeneity and tolerance: The moderating role of conservation values

“…Attributing high importance to self-transcendence and openness-to-change values has been found to be positively correlated with tolerance towards Arabs among Israeli Jews. The reverse correlation was found for conservation values (Sagiv & Schwartz, 1995; see also Kuşdil & Şimşek, 2008). Similarly, a study of 19 European countries (based on the European Social Survey) showed that valuing self-transcendence is positively related to and valuing conservation is negatively related to support for immigration (Davidov, Meuleman, Billiet, & Schmidt, 2008).…”

The Values and Attitudes Towards TEU in a Cross-Cultural Sample

“…SDO did not significantly correlated with any type of values in the present study. However, there were several indications that nationalism correlates with values in previous studies in Turkey (Hortaçsu & Cem-Ersoy, 2005;Kuşdil & Şimşek, 2007). As for the associations between Schwartz's values and other key variables, Gürşimşek and Göregenli (2005) reported that participants with higher scores on traditionality power and conformity were seen to have higher scores on system justification.…”

“…In this historical respect, cultural, regional and religious differences and occasionally conflict have characterized Turkish-European relations. Thus, the main dimensions of differentiation between Turkey and Europe are differences with respect to EU criteria concerning economy and human rights and cultural/religious differences reflected by the history of conflict (Hortaçsu & Cem-Ersoy, 2005;Kuşdil & Şimşek, 2007). The last two decades were characterised by political and social reforms in Turkey since accession negotiations started in October, 2005.…”

The Development and Current State of Youth Research in Turkey

“…However, according to Şen et al (2005), discourses of moral degeneration (articulated by a perceived threat to Turkey's culture and lifestyle) and nationalism (expressed by a perceived threat to the unity and integrity of the nation and the state) are the two main underlying characteristics of Euro-scepticism. Similarly, other studies show that social and personal values, such as ethno-centrism and patriotism, together with nationalism and religiosity, are the most effective predictors of young people's views on the EU (Hortaçsu and Cem-Ersoy, 2005;Kuşdil and Şimşek, 2007).…”