Positive agenda for Turkey-European Union relations: what will it bring or what will it take?

September 2013 marked the 50 th anniversary and the golden jubilee of the Turkey-European Union (EU) relations and October 2013 will mark the 8th anniversary of Union's decision to launch formal negotiations with Turkey toward full membership. Commissioner launched this new positive agenda for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy Stefan Ellie and the Turkish Minister for European Affairs and Chief EU negotiator Egemen Bagis in Ankara on 17th May 2012. Commissioner Fine indicated that areas in positive agenda would include legislative alignment, visas, mobility and migration, Customs Union, foreign policy, political reforms, fight against terrorism, enhanced energy cooperation and increased participation in people to people programmes. The idea and the aim of the agenda was to keep the accession process of Turkey going not to replace it as expressed both by the two sides and in order to achieve this working groups containing experts from the Commission and their counterparts from Turkish ministries focusing on eight negotiation chapters namely on "Judicary and Fundamental Rights" and the others were established. So, in this paper the "positive agenda" between Turkey and the European Union will be examined and the future of this attempt will be discussed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).