On this day Turkey's Foreign Minister Ali Babacan launched the pilot phase of four different budget flows coming together under the umbrella of promoting cross-border civil society dialogue, during a meeting in Ankara to which all 119 project coordinators had been invited. It is well worth commenting upon in my weekly column.The interesting point is that four segments of Turkish civil society were able to determine their own preferences when it came to which topics they would wish to address -- jointly with at least one European partner, that is. It concerns towns and municipalities, youth movements, universities and professional organizations. I have studied some of the very diverse projects that have been awarded grants.
While one project approaches Turkish and European rural communities -- which most commentators seem to neglect -- in order to bring villagers and their problems into the spotlight, another project seeks to examine the potential of a knowledge-based economy. This underlines the very wide topical scope of the funding that is being made available. What can be more diverse and dissimilar from each other than documenting life in an isolated community of a thousand inhabitants and measuring the impact of intellectual capital on a national scale?
Most important is the fact that Turkish social actors and organizations are in the lead -- and not, as more often than not -- consortia based in Europe, only using Turkish partners as "protective shields" to winning the tender in the first place, claiming local expertise. This time around the tendering process was reversed -- the Turkish Central Finance and Contracts Unit (CFCU) stipulated that only applications coming from within Turkey and those that would be based in Turkey as far as most of the future project management is concerned would be eligible.
A total of 119 projects with an overall volume of 19.3 million euros were awarded grants of up to 90 per cent of total costs. They comprise 41 towns and municipalities, 25 professional organizations, 28 universities and 25 youth nongovernmental organizations. When compared with the original EU Civil Society Dialogue Program for Turkey, which was launched in 2005 with 70 projects totalling 4 million euros, the 2008 version is definitely a quantitative and perhaps even a qualitative improvement. I am wondering how these monies will fit into complementing Turkey's Third National Program on EU Accession, which was launched a few weeks ago.
Turkey's EU membership bid is built upon a large number of baselines. Most of them will be discussed behind closed doors by democratically elected governments and their agencies. These issues constitute a change in the agricultural dimension of the customs union to which Turkey is already a signatory state, solving the Cyprus impasse as introduced last week, pro-active lobbying in all 27 EU member-states and of course a rather long list of items the EU must take care of. Civil society in this process is often named as the final beneficiary. I see it rather as the initial target group; if civil society does not vote in favor of EU accession, there simply will be none. I wish to see Turkish and European citizens actively engage in the EU enlargement process -- what better way than financing that these two neighboring peoples and their civil society representatives can actually meet?
On Sept. 9 something else became clear: It seems that the EU accession process is a government, not an opposition, topic. There was no measurable interest expressed on behalf of the opposition when it came to discussing the Third National Program with the government.
I met with one of the successful Turkish project managers on the fringes of the above-mentioned civil society program launch event. We agreed that the opposition apparently does not appreciate the huge logistical and financial advantages EU accession brings to Turkey, including to its political parties. Needless to say, EU accession cannot be achieved by a single government, as active as it may be; it needs all democratic parties and above all, civil society. Let us see how these 119 projects impact the accession process. The time for evaluation comes in December 2009, as all of them will have finished by then
