Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the European Union has focused its attention on moving the Central and Eastern European Countries towards democracy and the market economy, which culminated in the accession of these countries to the European Union on May 2004. With the accession of the ten new members to the Union, the European Union has acquired new neighbors and come closer to the old ones, with whom it had only indirectly interested in. There is a conviction in EU circles that future widening towards these countries is not possible without risking the integration process which the European countries have developed in the last fifty years. In addition to this internal consideration, the new neighbors of the EU, some of which have already declared their membership ambitions, are the countries which the EU perceives it cannot integrate in the foreseeable future because of their social, economic and political underdevelopment. In response to these realities, the Union developed the European Neighborhood Policy. In this thesis, potential of the new neighborhood policy to fulfill its objectives of being second best alternative to membership and its promise in providing a meaningful framework that is satisfactory both for the EU and its neighbors will be analyzed. Additionally, its impact on the European Union&rsquo / s foreign policy in general will be elaborated. It will be argued in this thesis that the ENP has such serious limitations in terms of its formulation, institutions, and its incentives that it will fail to realize its original aspirations.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the adaptation of Turkey to EU research and innovation policies in the light of developments in within their own dynamics, and within the framework of obligations of the accession period. A comparative analysis of Turkish and EU policies is made by pointing out the weaknesses of Turkey, which are supported by related indicators specifying the gap between EU in research and innovation capabilities. In accordance with the findings of the comparison of Turkey and EU, this study attempts to develop recommendations for the reassessment of existing policy tools, and to propose new policy instruments within organizational and institutional infrastructure, implementation and further integration with EU in research and innovation. The evaluations highlight that Turkey is experiencing problems in structuring and implementing its policy instruments, rather than developing policy formulations.

This thesis concentrates on the development of human rights policy of the European Economic Communities(EEC) within its transformation process into a political organization. the assumption underlying this study is that the EEC was established following World War II as a regional solution that would enable the restructuring of Europe on the bases of power, stability, and peace. this thesis deals with enlargement as a security-oriented strategy, while, at the same time, it endeavors to analyze the EEC treatment of foreign policy, peace, security and respect for human rights issues as it completed its economic integration process.

This research study examines the effects of varied text structures and response formats on Turkish university students&rsquo / reading comprehension test performance. More precisely, it deals with investigating the effects of awareness of rhetorical organization on reading comprehension and on testing of comprehension through different procedures. First, a short review of the relevant research on the text structure and response formats and their effects on reading comprehension is presented. Then, the results of a reading experiment are given. In this experiment, four groups of upper-intermediate level EFL students (100 students) read two English passages written in &ldquo / description&rdquo / and &ldquo / cause-effect&rdquo / rhetorical organization formats. Then, their comprehension of the texts was tested through a cloze procedure and a multiple choice test. The tests were carried out on first year university students from different departments at the English Language Department of BaSkent University during the 2006-2007 Academic Year Fall Semester. After the research period finished, the data collected throughout the research period were transferred into MS Excel and SPSS spreadsheets and analyzed using the statistical procedure of the paired samples t-test. Relying on the analysis of the data, the hypotheses formulated for the study were weighed against the results in order to see if they were confirmed or rejected. The study showed significant difference between the varied text structures and subjects&rsquo / reading comprehension test performance. However, there was not any significant difference between the different response formats and the subjects&rsquo / reading comprehension test performance. Finally, the thesis ends with an interpretation and discussion of the results of the study.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between the success of the decentralization schemes and the local capacity by concentrating on the case of Metropolitan Municipality of Diyarbakir. The Local Government Reform in Turkey was built on the argument that local authorities, compared to the central government, are better in providing services in a more efficient and more participatory manner. This thesis argues that such an argument is valid only in an environment where there is a strong local institutional and societal capacity to carry out the given responsibilities and to provide the necessary participatory framework. These issues are investigated with reference to the case of Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality, which is located at one of the least developed regions in Turkey (Southern Eastern Anatolia).

In this thesis it is aimed to explore the new social policy agenda, in which the role of local governments as policy makers has been increasing. In this respect, the contemporary Turkish local government system, and social policies of the municipalities are analyzed by drawing upon the European Union&rsquo / s approach on the social policy in the urban context. Within this framework, the social policies of the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality are studied.

This thesis will examine national/multi-national/international research andeducation networks of the some countries in context of innovation systems,and then Turkish case will be discussed. The developed countries are thepioneers of research and education network efforts, developing andundeveloped countries were integrated to the global research networks.Although Turkey has a lot experience in academic networking, its NREN(ULAKNET) should adapt itself to the global trends(i.e. direct fiber access,IP/DWDM networks, very demanding applications like grid), and networkingand supercomputing requirements in national innovation policies should berevised accordingly. Turkey can acquire some benefits from the globalinnovation policies and practices in order to improve its research networkinginfrastructure.

This thesis aims to explore the Transdniestr conflict in Moldova by examining the involvements of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Russian Federation in their attempts at finding a working solution to this conflict. The thesis focuses on the reasons for the emergence of the Transdniestr conflict, the initiatives for the settlement of this conflict, and the causes, as of today, why the conflicting parties and the mediators have not been successful in reaching a working settlement. Contrary to the line of thinking on this conflict which suggests that the conflict has its roots in domestic factors in Moldova and Transdniestr such as ethnicity, socio-economic underdevelopment and the weakness of democratic institutions, this thesis argues that the primary reason behind the persistence of this conflict is international. It is the radically different definitions of the conflict by the OSCE and the Russian Federation that makes the conflict very difficult to solve. Russia tends to value the Transdniestr region as a geostrategic tool for maintaining its influence over post-Soviet Moldova and its neighbourhood. Since the involvement of the OSCE in this conflict limits Russia&rsquo / s capacity to use the Transdniestr region as a geostrategic tool, it becomes extremely difficult to alter the status quo that contributes to the existing impasse rather than to its opening of new avenues for the peaceful settlement of this conflict.

This thesis study analyzes the construction of a common national self, which bears the characteristics of a dominant male figure, over the mirror image of the other nation&rsquo / s women. It is believed in this thesis work that without examining the complex gender relations and gendered identity politics within national projects, it is not possible to understand the concept of nation. Accepting that nation is an -imagined- product of modernism and gendered identity construction takes place in the core of the creation of nation, it is believed that novels constitute an appropriate field of analysis because of their imagined structure and because their subtexts enable the researcher to focus on the identity production. The cases of Greece and Turkey as two nation-states that construct their national selves over the reflection of the other provide a proper base for a comparative analysis. The main aim of this thesis, in this context, is to come close to the understanding of nations and the oppressive gender relations within the nation-states focusing on the creation of the male national common identity.

With the 1980s, as a result of economic and financial deregulation policies, housing finance systems in most countries have had great transformations and have become market-oriented. Recently, in Turkey, a draft law was submitted to the parliament which can be regarded as an attempt to integrate housing finance to capital markets through the establishment of secondary market for housing loans extended by commercial banks. In this thesis, it is aimed to evaluate the role of housing loans extended by commercial banks on housing finance in Turkey, to assess the prospective legal regulation in terms of lenders and borrowers of housing loans and to discuss the anticipated impacts of this scheme to the commercial banks, the housing loans and borrowers within the context of global trends in housing finance. For these purposes, housing files extended by commercial banks have been examined and in-dept interviews have been conducted with interviewees from commercial banks, Capital Market Board and Housing Development Administration. As a result, it is found out that the role of housing loans extended by commercial banks is very limited in housing finance in Turkey and only high income groups can access these loans. Moreover, it is explicit that the housing finance scheme in the draft law is entirely market-oriented and targets the middle and upper income groups. On the other hand, such a policy orientation is quite problematic and paradoxical in that / the housing problem in Turkey is most dramatically felt by the lower middle and low income groups.