In December 1999 during the Helsinki European Council summit Greece consented to the Turkish candidacy for EU membership in what has been greeted as a remarkable shift in Greek policy towards Turkey. The argument of this thesis is that the so-called "Helsinki strategy" constituted the culmination of Greek Prime Minister Simitis' attempts to pursue what he referred to as the "communitisation" of Greco-Turkish relations. Simitis believed that Greece should allow Turkey to develop its relations with the EU within a framework of EU rules for Turkey's behaviour towards Greece. According to the former Prime Minister, if Greece could establish such rules at the EU level, the EU would assume responsibility for ensuring Turkey's compliance. The argument emphasises the causal significance of domestic sources of foreign policy and leadership style in particular. "Communitisation" was an internal, pre-conceived task, to the completion of which Simitis remained unequivocally committed throughout the period under investigation even in the face of severe constraints and evidence that challenged the necessity of the task. The argument was tested against three alternative explanations that incorporated all the explanatory variables discussed in the literature, including shifts in Greece's relative power position, the increasing economic costs of Greek policy, an external shock that demonstrated policy failure and the establishment of relevant EU foreign policy practices. Empirical testing of the four alternative explanations was based on process-tracing their observable implications for three dimensions of the policy making process: the definition of the policy problem the Helsinki strategy was intended to address, the alternative courses of action Greek foreign policy makers considered and finally the manner in which they were assessed. The theoretical framework constructed to resolve this empirical puzzle can be fruitfully applied to the study of several EU member-states' foreign policies, thus advancing the theoretically informed empirical study of foreign policy.

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Explanations of the enduring Greek-Turkish rivalry found upon neorealist and neoliberal assumptions, undercut by epistemological limitations, have been repeatedly falsified by empirical evidence while culturalist accounts emphasizing the centrality of prevailing norms related to identity and ethnocentrism fail to predict social change. An alternative explanation relying on a thick rational choice approach focusing on the two states‟ domestic scenes and exploring their interaction with interstate bargaining is offered. Methodologically, two analytic narratives of their institutional evolution are constructed by identifying key actors, mapping out their incentives and exploring their strategic interaction. Two policy shifts, namely the Greek Helsinki strategy and the Turkish acceptance of the Annan Plan are selected to explore domestic mechanisms of preference formation and expose the limitations of alternative accounts. In the Greek case the impact of international diplomacy on policy equilibria through its linkage to domestic institutional structures is explored, while in the Turkish case policy equilibria are contingent upon the relative success of anti-Kemalist collective action. These policy equilibria inform negotiators‟ utility functions during interstate bargaining. The thesis, emphasizing the analytical importance of parallel exploration of domestic sources of foreign policy and interstate bargaining, strives to model the interaction over the Aegean Sea dispute using negotiator preferences exposed by the analysis of two shifts on issues only indirectly related to the Aegean Sea dispute. The thesis focuses on two normative constructs, rigidity and Kemalism, as informal institutions which define available strategies on all issues of bilateral interest. Overcoming problems with assigning preferences, the approach demonstrates how the two states are unable to communicate honestly under incomplete information, in order to switch from a non-cooperative to a cooperative equilibrium, despite domestic institutional change. Although realist accounts predict the difficulties with international cooperation, this approach offers a more realistic image of the bilateral relation and is able to account for a broad range of policy shifts.