A CRITICAL APPROACH TO EU DEMOCRACY PROMOTION (THE CONSTITUTIVE EFFECTS OF CIVIL SOCIETY FUNDING ON STATE-CIVIL SOCIETY RELATIONS)

Democracy promotion practices are based on three problematic assumptions about civil society. Firstly, civil society consists of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and contributes to democratization; secondly, civil society is generally "good"; and thirdly, civil society and the state are two separate spheres opposing each other. The European Union also employs this view of civil society in its democracy promotion policies. By funding NGOs, the EU aims to empower NGOs to take on a self responsible role in pushing the state to introduce democratic reforms. As MiljaKurld's (2011) study of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) shows, this is a part of the EU's neo-liberal governmentality, a concept developed by Foucault Employing this governmentality, the EU ignores that NGOs do not always oppose the state. I argue for a more heterogeneous and critical understanding of civil society based on Gramsci's considerations of the "integral state". According to him, civil society and the state are not two separate spheres but instead are both affected by the same ideological struggles that crosscut both spheres. A hegemonic ideology incorporates both the civil and the political society. Thus, I argue that by giving funding to specific civil society organizations, the EU exercises governmental power over the respective country and (re)constitutes the relationship between civil society and the state situated in specific ideological cleavages. This enables us to assess the consequences of NGO funding by evaluating their position towards the hegemonic discourse and the state in the respective country. The suggested approach offers a more complex understanding of the interactions between international funding and the domestic context of NGOs in particular. Moreover, it changes the way that we analyze NGO activities especially in their complex relations to the state.