EU–Turkey Relations

Civil Society and Depoliticization

Özge Zihnioğlu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815378815
• eBook ISBN: 9781351227841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the hidden but ever-present civil society dimension of the EU's policies towards Turkey and uncovers the pitfall of EU–Turkey relations.

It establishes the growing depoliticization of Turkish civil society (in contrast to what the EU's policies aimed for) and engages with the questions of why and how Turkish civil society depoliticized. It discusses how Turkey's retreating democracy, and the intense polarization in Turkish political and social life make rights-based activism more difficult. Finally, this book investigates what implications Turkish civil society's depoliticization bears for EU–Turkey relations, reveals the diminishing leverage of the EU's policies and discusses how this reflects on Turkey's already closing civic space. It explains why and how EU-Turkey relations deteriorated over the last decade, examines the current stalemate, and discusses why civil society matters.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students in the field of EU–Turkey relations, Turkish studies and civil society studies as well as more broadly to NGOs, European studies and politics, and International Relations.

1 Introduction

In 2017, several EU leaders called for a reduction in pre-accession funds for Turkey due to concerns over its deteriorating democracy. Over the past decade, similar measures, and even terminating the accession negotiations, had been proposed, but the accession process remained largely unaffected. This time, however, it looked different. In keeping with the EU leaders’ calls, in late 2017, the European Parliament voted to cut €105 million from the 2018 budget allocated to Turkey. The following year, the Parliament passed a motion to cut another €70 million. Initially, the figures seemed negligible, particularly in comparison to nearly €4.5 billion of pre-accession assistance that the EU allocated to Turkey.¹ This view changed when the EU decided the following year to reduce

€146.7 million from the 2019 budget. However, what is even more significant is the symbolic value of this decision. Pre-accession financial assistance is one of the main instruments of the accession process; a measure against the former is a challenge against the latter.

The European Parliament’s decision did not come out of the blue. The recent wave of tensions had been building between Turkey and the EU since 2016. In 2017, before the calls to cut the EU funds, German Chancellor Merkel had informed the European Commission that Germany would veto an update to the Customs Union with Turkey, due to concerns over Turkey’s rule of law. In justifying her decision to block the talks, Merkel underlined that good ties are linked to respect for the rule of law.

The EU’s political criteria have been one of the most challenging pillars of Turkey’s accession process – even since before its launch. In recent years, this pillar has been overshadowed by increased cooperation between Turkey and the EU on a range of issues. That said, some of these recent developments bring forward the question of whether democratic norms and values have gained more weight again in Turkey’s relations with the EU, and whether there are genuine interests and efforts in the EU to put Turkey’s democratic reform process back on track. This normative pillar of EU–Turkey relations and, in particular, the democratic norm transfer to Turkey are what concerns us in this book.

As we will discuss in the next chapter, several internal and external factors have influenced EU–Turkey relations and facilitated their convergence over the decades. While it is difficult to isolate one factor from the rest, Turkey’s democratic progress has been a decisive issue in the turning of its relations with the EU. Turkey had to meet a long, albeit ambiguous, list of democratic criteria to start membership talks. In just over two years between 2002 and 2004, Turkey has passed eight ‘Harmonization Packages’² that amended over 200 articles of 53 laws, covering a wide range of political reforms. During this period, the EU has successfully used its leverage as a ‘gatekeeper’ to carry through democratic norm transfer to Turkey. In addition, to support its norm transfer efforts, the EU has offered different incentives and benefits, such as financial assistance, in return for Turkey’s actions in line with political conditionality.

Indeed, during this period the EU has exercised considerable transformative power over Turkish democracy. The political conditionality was so predominant that discussions on other aspects of the accession process, such as the legislative harmonization in negotiating chapters, have remained limited to the halls of the state bureaucracy. Turkey’s accession process has come to be perceived as the democratic reform process by the public at large and was championed for the very effect it had on norm transfer.

Soon enough, the EU membership had turned from a target within reach to an indefinite dream and, in the meantime, the EU has lost its transformative power. Today, the EU lacks such influence over Turkey. Even so, the normative side maintains its importance for EU–Turkey relations for several reasons.

First, Turkey and the EU cooperate on a wide range of issues including, for instance, migration, energy and the fight against terrorism. Their cooperation in tackling the migration crisis has become the flagship of relations in recent years. The arrangement has survived the low points in relations, as well as Turkey’s occasional threats to end the deal, accusing the EU of not living up to its commitments. However, numerous areas of cooperation fail to bring Turkey closer to the EU. In essence, these areas are contingent upon defined mutual interest and, in return, such transactional ties are often contextual and bound to be temporary. As the context changes, the need for cooperation may cease or require other partners and partnerships. Trade relations may be an exception to this since Turkish and European economies are already integrated through the EU–Turkey Customs Union. But, as it stands, the customs union between Turkey and the EU is limited in scope. It needs to be modernized to meet today’s conditions and remain relevant. All these ties, important as they are, on their own cannot carry EU–Turkey relations into the future. Sound relations and further integration require, not more transactionalism, but the two sides to be bound by common norms and values. This makes the normative side a still crucial part of EU– Turkey relations.

Second, this topic is important for it demonstrates the current challenges of the EU’s political conditionality. The EU’s enlargement policy mainly works with a conditionality mechanism to influence the existing practices and structures in applicant countries. As detailed below, the EU’s political conditionality works through incentives (‘rewards’) to change an actor’s behavior. This mechanism has been a powerful tool in triggering change during Turkey’s candidacy and the early years of its accession process. However, political conditionality towards Turkey has clearly not been effective for some time. Exploring the subject of norm transfer to Turkey will address various related questions, such as if and why political conditionality has lost its relevance and how it can be amended or replaced.

Third, the EU often fluctuates between normative objectives and utility considerations in its external policies. It struggles to balance its democracy promotion efforts with counter-terrorism cooperation, commercial interests, energy security concerns and the like. Turkey presents an interesting case because, on the one hand, the EU is bound to impose ‘strict conditionality’ on Turkey, whose democratic backsliding raises concerns in public opinion across the EU. On the other hand, realist calculations of strategic self-interest also apply to the EU’s relations with Turkey, with which trade relations, cooperation on irregular migration and counter-terrorism dominate the agenda.

Finally, democratic norms and values are under attack in the EU itself. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Fidesz party have been leading the country away from democracy and fundamental rights since 2010. Orbán enacted stringent laws that undermined the country’s checks and balances, and secured its dominance in all branches of government, including the judiciary. He has placed loyalists in once independent public bodies, such as the public prosecutor’s and the state auditor’s offices. Orbán has also cracked down on civil society and attacked universities. He also has increased control over the media. New media laws allow the Prime Minister to appoint his own candidates to lead the country’s media regulators, while strengthening the regulators with more power to fine critical news outlets. More recently, the Fidesz party criminalized aiding undocumented migrants. But Hungary is not alone. Poland’s right-wing governing party, Law and Justice (PiS), has been following Fidesz’s footsteps and mimicking many of its measures since 2015. In 2016, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński said that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had given an example and that they are learning from his example (Kingsley, 2018).

Both countries are heavily criticized in the EU for the sharp decline in their democracy. In 2017, the European Commission decided to activate Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty³ against Poland, which envisages sanctions up to and including suspension of voting. In 2018, this time the European Parliament voted a motion to trigger the same disciplinary procedure against Hungary. While the ultimate sanction of a loss of voting rights is unlikely, as that requires a unanimous vote to go into effect, the Commission is considering other measures, such as tying any new aid to the credibility of the judiciary. Despite all efforts, it seems that the EU cannot forestall the democratic backsliding of Hungary and Poland, whose influence is felt elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. The EU has legitimized its political conditionality in other countries, not least in Turkey, by projecting itself as the champion of democratic norms. The question of how the EU can continue to transfer European norms outside the EU, when those norms are attacked at home, renders the issue of norm transfer to Turkey all the more important.

The current debates and the literature

Turkey’s candidacy to the EU and later the accession process led to a plethora of studies in the 2000s, on various aspects of Turkey’s Europeanization and the accession process. This booming academic interest gradually waned in the next decade with the shift in tide in EU–Turkey relations. Since the early 2010s, a limited number of volumes contributed to debates on Turkey’s Europeanization (Nas and Özer, 2012; Tekin and Güney, 2015), the accession process (Müftüler-Baç, 2016a; Yeşilada, 2013), and the political conditionality (Müftüler-Baç, 2016b) at length. These studies utilized various conceptual tools in examining how the EU and the accession process shape different policy areas, politics and actors in Turkey. But such efforts have been scarce. Another strand in the literature discusses the reversal of the Europeanization in Turkey’s relations with the EU, a process referred by the scholars as de-Europeanization.⁴ These studies demonstrate the slowdown and even reversal of EU-induced reforms, as well as how European norms and values cease to inform public debates in Turkey.

More commonly, the recent literature on EU–Turkey relations reflects the current deadlock in the accession process and investigates ways and means to sustain, if not further, the relations under the present circumstances. In these efforts, ‘transactionalism’ has become the buzzword among scholars and researchers. Transactionalism refers to the efforts to build or sustain the relations on issues based on mutual interests at the time when the relations do not progress towards membership. As such, an important strand of the current literature focuses on one area, or multiple areas, on which Turkey and the EU already cooperate.

One such area is trade relations and economic integration. These studies inevitably focus on the Customs Union between the EU and Turkey. They analyze the EU–Turkey Customs Union, explore its impact on the respective economies, and the gains it produced in the past 20 years (Aytuğ et al., 2016; Togan, 2015). The accelerating negotiations between the EU and the USA for a free trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), in 2015 and 2016, also triggered discussions on the constraints of the Customs Union and different scenarios for its modernization (Altay, 2018; Erzan, 2018; Kirişci, 2015; Long, 2016; Ülgen, 2015). Others argued that the Customs Union’s modernization could help spark economic growth on both sides and help preserve the EU–Turkey economic engagement (Ülgen, 2017), while its negotiations could restore the EU’s conditionality over Turkey and once again create a constructive momentum (Kirişci and Bülbül, 2017; Hamilton, 2018; Zihnioğlu, 2014). Considering that the EU–Turkey Customs Union entered into force even before Turkey’s candidacy, deepening trade and economic relations is seen as a solid ground to further relations. In addition, regional and global developments also make this topic more attractive. On the one hand, the US President Donald Trump’s protectionist economic policies have led to what many see as a trade war and threaten European economies. On the other hand, many fear that the UK’s planned leave from the EU, Brexit, will cause some major trade disruption in Europe.

The EU’s migration crisis in 2015, followed by the EU’s efforts to manage the crisis in collaboration with Turkey brought the migration issue high on the agenda in EU–Turkey relations. The Joint Action Plan (2015) and the Statement (2016) between the EU and Turkey, and, in particular, the action points to re-energize the accession process sparked both scholarly and policy debates. Scholars discussed the deal made by the EU and Turkey with its advantages and limitations (Cherubini, 2017; Lehner, 2018; Rygiel et al., 2016), how the deal is framed in the Turkish political scene (Demirsu and Müftüler-Baç, 2017), proposed alternative ways for cooperation (Kirişci, 2016). Other scholars investigated how the migration deal impacted on EU–Turkey partnership on irregular migration (Dimitriadi et al., 2018) and more broadly EU–Turkey relations in general (Ott, 2017).

Several scholars approach functional cooperation in a more holistic way to analyze its implications over EU–Turkey relations. They investigate not only trade and migration, but also energy, the fight against terrorism and even foreign policy. Aydın-Düzgit and Tocci (2015) work with three analytical lenses to understand EU–Turkey relations: Turkey as an enlargement country, as an EU neighbor country and as a global actor. The authors unpack the implications of different areas of cooperation according to each analytical lens. Müftüler-Baç (2017) looks into areas of functional integration and investigates whether alternative models of integration beyond membership are possible. Kirişci (2017) on the other hand, analyzes EU–Turkey cooperation based on Turkey’s broader relations with the West. To sum up, the current literature, both those focusing on individual cases of cooperation and also those broader studies consider, explain and analyze the transactional aspects of EU–Turkey relations beyond the accession process.

This book takes a different angle from the transactionalist approaches to EU– Turkey relations and focuses on the hidden but ever-present civil society dimension. In doing so, the book offers an analysis of the limits of socialization through the EU’s empowerment of civil society actors in the domestic contexts. The EU’s strategy of transnational reinforcement through triggering a debate in the domestic context by empowering civil society actors is based on the logic that civil society actors are well-entrenched and have sufficient access to policy-makers. These assumptions appear void in the context of Turkey. For civil society actors to facilitate social learning, they should also have intensive interactions with their European counterparts. Additionally, such an external connection should be legitimate in domestic contexts. This then links back to the legitimacy of the norms that the EU seeks to promote in third countries – in this case, Turkey.

This book has three pillars. First, it establishes the growing depoliticization of Turkish civil society. It shows the gradual diminishing of critique and contestation in civil society and the tendency among civic organizations to move away from discourse and activities that challenge the policies and practices in their area. While doing so, it explains its transformation and depicts its current picture. It shows that most civic actors have become less political and only certain groups continue rights-based activism.

Second, this book engages with the questions of why and how Turkish civil society depoliticized. This book suggests two main reasons behind this. First is the overall political environment in Turkey. The book discusses ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The recent history of EU–Turkey relations
• 3 Current issues and challenges in EU–Turkey relations
• 4 Revisiting Turkish civil society
• 5 Changing landscape of Turkish civil society
• 6 EU civil society support in Turkey
• 7 The impact of EU funds over Turkish civil society
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: list of interviewed civil society organizations
• Index