The dominant view in the literature on civil society is that civil societal actors are significant and indispensible components of emerging as well as consolidated democracies. This panel will critically scrutinize the prevalent assumptions in the literature on the relationship between civil society, state, and democracy.
Central to our endeavor will be the insight that civil societal actors may or may not endorse democratic values and that the way they frequently pursue their particularistic interests does not leave much room for accommodation, mutual tolerance or a successful modus vivendi with their adversaries. In some instances, incumbent elites choose to selectively tolerate or even empower some actors in the civil society at the expense of others which, in turn, renders the relationship between civil society, state and democracy all the more problematic. Adopting a broad and inclusive definition of civil society, the panel aims to probe the following questions: In what ways do civil society actors strengthen or weaken democratic practices, especially in the MENA region with its Islamic Muslim majorities? When and how do particular types of actors in civil society support authoritarian policies of the state or engage in authoritarian practices themselves? How does the incumbents' relationship with different components of civil society affect the nature of the civil society on the one hand and the democratic character of governance on the othere Under what conditions and to what extent do civil societal groups have positive effects on democratizationo What role do religion and religious identities play in determining the attitudes of civil societal actors and their impact on democracyc In trying to address these questions, this panel aims to illustrate and understand the complexity of the relationship between civil society, state and democracy by looking closely at the case of Turkey in comparative perspective.
This paper scrutinizes the assumption that civil society has a positive relationship with democracy. Comparing the ways in which different business networks in Turkey mobilize religious solidarity to construct market relations I argue that business groups may have divergent effects on the consolidation of democracy. For this study I will compare two predominant devout bourgeois networks in Turkey: the Fethullah Gulen Network and MUSIAD. This paper shows that Gulen network follows an expansionist strategy and use market relations to proselytize the society whereas MUSIAD prefers a non-expansionist strategy and an accommodationist approach to the market. This divergence, I contend, has significant implications for understanding the role devout business plays in the consolidation of democracy in Turkey. I suggest that the ways in which devout bourgeois networks connect religion and market have diverging implications for the compatibility of religion (Islam) and democracy, for while the first type undermines tolerance and pluralism, the second type strengthens tolerance and contribute to pluralism. In this respect, the paper challenges the expectation that business and markets have a natural positive impact on the consolidation of democracy by claiming that the relationship is rather complex and can take different forms.
Civil society organizations are a crucial part of democratic systems. They function as mechanisms that often enhance governmental accountability and pluralism, and contribute to democratic consolidation in the process. Consequently, it is crucial for us to assess the conditions under which ruling elites respond to civil society demands.
This paper will study the case of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) as an example. Although the AKP has adopted most of the EU's democratic membership criteria, it has consistently resisted the EU's demands to involve civil society in policy-making. The party has also ignored most civil society organizations (especially labor and professional organizations)' legitimate democratic demands. In contrast, it has been relatively cooperative with big business associations. What accounts for this variation? How much of this variation is due to these organizations' differential resources and political opportunities versus AKP's own political calculations and agendas These questions provide the focus of the paper.
As Maria Todorova (1996) has observed, legacies have shelf lives. Certainly, the imprint of the Ottoman Empire on the dozens of successor states is increasingly faint, not least because countries across the region underwent vastly different post-Ottoman trajectories. Yet, all post-Ottoman countries were also constutited in the face of a common problematique, namely, how to manage the challenges and opportunities of the encounter with European modernity. This paper suggests that the programmatic answers which intellectuals and statesmen developed vis-a-vis this dilemma have tended to fall along a spectrum of westernism to nativism. That is, some figures have advocated unequivocal engagement of (their reading) of ideas and institutions emanating from western Europe and the 'West', whilst others have called for syncretic or highly selective engagement or, indeed, outright resistance (Fisher Onar and Evin, 2010). By conceptualizing debates across the region in this fashion, we may be able to capture convergence and divergence in both the form and the substance of debates over 'western' values and pratices whilst eschewing an essentialist reading of those debates. This paper will accordingly apply the frame to recent debates over democratization, a process which is both trumpeted by the EU and the United States but also undermined by a range of western policies towards the region. The focus will be on recent debates related to democratization in Greece, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt.
