Hanna L. Muehlenhoff, EU Democracy Promotion and Governmentality: Turkey and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 2019. xii + 173 pp.

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has always been dominated by liberal policies, however the rise of neoliberal tendencies in European states has been reflected in EU governance as well. The Open Method of Coordination introduced by the Lisbon Treaty is cited as a good example to show neoliberal governmentality in the EU by incorporating many actors such as civil society and private actors into decision-making processes. For Walters and Haahr, such actors should be active participants, because “now everyone is supposed to strive for self-improvement to achieve a utopian goal of becoming a knowledge based economy”1 (p. 21). Neoliberal governmentality of the EU also reveals itself with project funding for civil society organisations (CSOs), thereby empowering them to become managerially oriented, visible and self-sufficient institutions. As various commentators, ranging from Michel Foucault to Milja Kurki to Jens H. Haahr, have suggested, neoliberal governmentality instruments transform civil society organizations to perform like corporations and render them less grassroots. Kurki describes, in particular, a special relationship between neoliberal governmentality and depoliticization over a direct EU instrument called the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). She states that EIDHR creates a depoliticizing influence for CSOs’ work and political positions.2 Hanna L. Muehlenhoff’s book, EU Democracy Promotion and Governmentality: Turkey and Beyond, covers similar territory and raises the question whether the EU’s CSO funding created such a depoliticizing effect by showing “actual influences” on the CSOs in Turkey. In her words, this book “analyzes whether and how the EU’s civil society programs depoliticise civil society in Turkey by integrating an analysis of the EU’s policies and the domestic context of CSO’s” (p. 10). Four key structural issues are significant for shaping Muehlenhoff’s analysis of the Turkish case. First, Turkey’s lengthy candidacy process; second, the concept of Europeanization which occupies a significant place in Turkey’s domestic politics as well as rationalities of domestic political actors; third, a skeptical attitude toward CSOs under Turkey’s authoritarian tendencies; and last, the Gezi protests in 2013, breeding a different form of civil society that demands more rights and democratic change. Muehlenhoff limits her