Strategic Learning: How the Turkish National Police Used Twinning to Prepare Itself for the Planned New Border Agency

Turkey’s EU accession negotiations are making slow progress. In particular, the fading credibility of Turkey’s EU membership perspective has undermined the conditionality strategy of the EU. Outside the formal setting of accession talks, twinning projects are a tool to keep Europeanization processes in Turkey on track, but have so far attracted scant scientific interest. Based on the principle of partnership, these projects aim to induce domestic change via persuasion and social learning. However, this case study of a twinning project concerning the training of the Turkish National Police (TNP) reveals that the interaction was characterized by strategic rather than social learning. The TNP used the twinning project to improve its standing in the power struggle over the structure of the planned new border agency. This finding indicates that, rather than being an efficient tool of external governance, twinning projects are offering an opportunity structure for domestically defined policy goals and strategies.

Case study findings cannot easily be generalized as the outcome greatly depends on the agency of the involved actors. However, the predominance of strategic learning despite the favourable scope conditions for social learning that existed in this project indicates that the potential for social learning may also be limited in other twinning projects, suggesting that the aim of using twinning as a tool for fostering change via persuasion and socialization may be overambitious. Factors which may have been expected to promote social learning, such as the focus on uncontroversial training topics and the high professionalism both sides ascribe each other, were apparently unable, in particular at the project management level, to trigger persuasion-socialization dynamics.