Abstract:
The EU has long recognized the importance of civil society organizations for European integration. In parallel with this, the urge for their Europeanization in the candidate countries, meaning their increased role in matters relating to the accession process, and thereby to the liberal-democratic transition of the respective society has been prevailing. The related EU policy draws from the liberal-democratic tradition that links civil society with democratization process. The EU displays one of the most vivid examples of this civil society policy during Turkey’s accession. As part of its policy, the EU has increasingly been providing various instruments to civil society organizations since the official announcement of Turkey’s candidature in 1999. In this respect, this dissertation aims to understand the interaction between the EU and the civil society organizations in Turkey as well as how these organizations are instrumentalized during the accession process. Accordingly, this dissertation problematizes the EU civil society policy and questions how well it fits the Turkish context. This problematization begins with delineating the EU policy for Turkish civil society organizations by looking into official documents, setting out the method and instruments employed by the EU and discussing their wider implications such as the legal and institutional changes. The in-depth interviews conducted with civil society organizations as well as experts and public officials working with these organizations help to identify the predicaments and their reasons emerging during the implementation of this policy. This reveals not only the discrepancy between the expectations and the outcome regarding the EU civil society policy, but also that the civil society organizations are autonomous agents interacting with various dynamics. On the other hand, the domestic socio-political conditions relevant to contemporary Turkish civil society that would relate to its reaction to the EU policy are also analyzed. This dissertation establishes the inappropriateness of the EU civil society policy in the Turkish context and challenges the very definition of civil society adopted by the EU. In doing so, this dissertation offers to go beyond the problematic of democratization which has been the focus of most academic work on this subject.
