Introduction

Abstract

Civil society plays an intrinsic part in the European Union (EU) enlargement process, making Turkish civil society an important actor in Turkey’s pre-accession process for EU membership. This book aims to capture some of the main characteristics of this relationship between the EU and Turkish non-governmental organizations (NGOs),¹ and in so doing develops the following overarching argument. First of all, EU civil society policy, by its very nature, employs an external agenda for reform that rarely accommodates the nature of the domestic socio-political environment. Secondly, NGOs do not passively accept this agenda but operate as autonomous agents, often circumventing and resisting the aims and objectives of the externally conceived programme of civil society support. As such, the book intends to highlight the importance of informal domestic rules and norms that determine how NGOs choose to internalize the agenda introduced by EU civil society policy. Ultimately this interplay between the external and internal means that the outcomes of EU civil society funding in Turkey are inherently unpredictable.