AB'nin Türkiye'deki Sivil Toplum Örgütlerine Finansal Desteği: Gezi Süreci Sonrası Siyasi Alanın Daralması mı?

Abstract

This study investigates the EU’s stance on post-Gezi civic engagement, which is based on alternative alliances and against the anti-democratic extremes of state power. Using a Gramscian perspective, the paper underlines the fact that before the protests, Turkey’s civil society had been politically socialized by the help of EU financial assistance as a sign of an ideology of consent. That is, the EU has focused on liberal-democratic cooperation with civic organic intellectuals, based on the conviction that civil society is the engine for social and political transformation. However, even though civil society organizations have strengthened their catalysing role and become a new counter-hegemonic political space since the Gezi protests, it is argued that Turkey’s normative distance from the EU and the pragmatic links between the EU and Turkey over refugees have led the EU to reduce its financial relationships with Turkey’s rights-based civil society.

The Politics of Building Civil Society in the South Caucasus: A Historical Overview of Georgia and Armenia

“…Considering Marx`s beliefs about civil society, Gouldner (1980, p.356) says "the social structures of civil society were not independent entities generating bourgeois society but were, rather, forms in which bourgeois society had emerged; that is, they were the products rather than the producer of the bourgeois class". Gramsci's concept of civil society is an integrated part of the state and does not identify it in the sphere of freedom, but rather in that of hegemony (Bal, 2022). Regarding this perspective, civil society is an area where the ruling class maintains, extends, and reinforces its power over societies by non-violent means (Buttigieg, 1995;Bobbio, 1988).…”