Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper, introducing a novel conceptual framework to Europeanization studies, explores the impact of EU-ization/Europeanization on the politically mobilised civil society organizations (CSOs) in Turkey. Analytically, it develops a clear distinction between EU-ization as a domestic process of legislative, institutional and policy engineering aiming at alignment with the EU's body of law and institutions, and Europeanization as a wider socio-political and normative context. Europeanization exists as a context to the extent that the European norms, values, institutions are incorporated into the public narratives by domestic political/societal actors. In that respect, the paper first investigates how and in what ways the EU-required reforms (EU-ization) on the freedom of association and assembly have changed the political/structural conditions where politically mobilized CSOs operate in Turkey. Secondly, it explores how the CSOs react to and make use of the EU/European context (Europeanization) to increase their influence and to promote their political agenda. In this sense, the study examines how often and in what ways the CSOs make references to European norms, values and institutions to justify their deliberative positions and also to counterbalance the arguments put forward by other civil societal actors. This study focuses on the CSOs that are actively involved in the debates concerning the rising Kurdish identity claims in Turkey. It is suggested that the Kurdish question has constituted the major axis of civil society involvement in public debates in the country since the 1980s.