Ketola, Markus
(2011)
Europeanisation and civil society: the early impact of EU pre-accession policies on Turkish NGOs.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Turkey’s European Union (EU) membership aspirations form a critical junction on the
road to further European integration. During the past decade, the role of
nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as facilitators of the accession process has
grown exponentially in relevance. In Turkey’s case, specific policies have emerged to
support this element of the pre-accession process. By targeting NGOs, these policies
aim to Europeanise and democratise Turkish civil society and in so doing prepare
Turkey for eventual EU accession. This logic draws on the liberal democratic tradition
that anticipates democratisation to be a key outcome of NGO support. The thesis
questions the appropriateness of such assumptions, since Turkish NGOs respond to EU
policy in a variety of locally meaningful ways that may circumvent the stated policy
outcomes. The wider the gap between policy and reality, the more space there is for
NGOs to exercise their agency, and more uncertain the Europeanisation processes
become.
The thesis starts out by juxtaposing the European and Turkish perspectives in
turn. The EU approach suggests that NGOs behave similarly across different cultural
contexts and can be called upon to perform a variety of roles deemed useful for the
overall policy process. However, civil society in Turkey has developed along a
different trajectory, fostering NGOs that are highly politicised in their activities and
cultivating social debates that are essentialist rather than compromising in nature. The
latter part of the thesis explores different aspects of this disconnect. The relationships
NGOs construct with each other and with governmental bodies are politicised and lack
the culture of cooperation expected by EU policy. NGOs exhibit different reactions to
EU funding: some embrace it while others pursue it unsuccessfully and grow resentful,
or even reject any external funding outright. These differences lead NGOs to generate
a variety of survival strategies that minimise the impact of EU policy on changing
NGO behaviour where the change is unwelcome by the NGO, or maximise the impact
where NGO and EU interests are mutually advanced. The thesis examines how the
Europeanisation of Turkish civil society unfolds through a policy process that both
affects and is shaped by NGO actors, where the eventual outcomes of EU policy
remain uncertain.
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