Against Participation: A Critique against the European Union's Project of Rendering Civil Society Fit in Neoliberalism

Lunch seminar with Acar Kutay. Acar Kutay recently defended his PhD dissertation, "A Critical Assessment of the European Commission's Civil Society Discourse and Social Platform of European NGOs", at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Dr. Kutay is affiliated with the Eurosphere project at the University of Bergen.

Opponent: Marybel Perez, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Politics, UiB.

Abstract:
I will criticize the common understanding of civil society participation, which finds it necessary for democratization. By focusing on the European Union's recent interest of incorporating civil society into European governance, I will suggest that the notion of participation has been politically redefined in such way to fit in neoliberal norms, e.g. the dominancy of the market and efficacy. This argument challenges the main promise of ‘good governance', which claims replacing the sclerotic bureaucracy with a more democratic and innovative regime by sharing sovereign power with extra-political actors, including civil society.

Though, as I will argue, civic society is not a ‘thing', a natural entity, which is ‘out there' and waiting to be incorporated into the governance mechanism ‘as it is': rather, it is formed, manipulated and guided by political programming. Given this, I refute participating due to two reasons. In its current usage, participation corresponds to a political project of transforming the ethos of voluntarism in civic action with managerialism.

Second, it misdirects the interests and the desires of the people by creating a fantasy as if they could make a change through participating. On the contrary, the current definition of participation can be seen as a strategy of absorbing - if not utterly abandoning- the critique and opposition by giving responsibilities to social actors in governance settings. This is not, however, confined with the EU, but shows significant parallels with the policies of the World Bank and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.