Reflection of the state in the Turkish Red Crescent: From modernization to corruption to reform?

Abstract

Globalization and the growing interconnectedness of people, spaces, and problems is perhaps most evident in environmental issues and responses to such issues at the global level. This is as true for artificial disasters such as natural disasters which create humanitarian crises whose effects go far beyond national contexts and borders, as the tsunami disaster in Asia has most recently shown. The Asian tsunami was unprecedented in terms of geographical scope and the number of people affected.1 The international response to it has also exceeded the response to other humanitarian crises.2 Disasters of such scale and international scope evoke global responses accordingly. As the international community acts to mitigate the effects of such disasters, they form a part of a set of global forces, which has recently been termed global civil society. This analysis starts from the broader question of how global forces interact with the national/local context and vice versa but, first and foremost, aims to show how an organization is deeply rooted in the national context and reflects the contours of the state. In the meantime, it aims to raise the question of how such an organization can be part of global civil society and to think about the ways the national and the global contexts are intertwined. Although it is less ambitious in this latter aim, it is nevertheless crucial to draw out the links between national and global contexts because the investigation of those links remains limited despite an innovative and ever-expanding literature on globalization. As such, the importance of identifying those links is underlined. The situation of the case under investigation, Turkish Red Crescent (here referred to as Kizilay), is interesting in this sense because it is a member of a large international NGO, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), but, at the same time, it is an organization that is very much affected by ties emanating from the particular national context it is embedded in and especially shaped by the nature of the state in Turkey.3 In fact, the argument of this essay is that Kizilay very much reflects the characteristics of the state, so much so that the very identity of the organization as civil society has become questionable. As such, Kizilay received its (rather large) share of criticism directed at the state after the devastating earthquake in 1999 in the Marmara region of Turkey for its ineffectiveness in organizing aid and providing relief services as well as the corruption that permeates the state and organizations