Posted on

Understanding the Austrian Psyche I

Vienna, early December 2007.

Vienna - Hundertwasser House

Vienna – Hundertwasser House

It is a anecdote hard to forget, told off the record to a group of visitors from the Balkans by one of the most influential journalists in the country. In the previous government the Austrian minister of defence told this journalist that when he was thinking about whether to send Austrian troops abroad on one particular occasion, he first sought the opinion of the editor/owner of Austria’s largest tabloid, the Kronenzeitung. Only then did he turn for advice to his generals. It was one of several occasions during these two December days when our visitors from the Balkans were surprised: is this how Austria, today one of the richest countries in the world, actually works?

This anecdote might of course be embellished (the only person who would know whether this is how decisions on military deployment are commonly made would be the former minister himself), but what is remarkable is the fact of a minister telling such a story to Austrian media representatives without blushing. The explanation offered by journalists we had invited to explain Austria to their Balkan visitors was this: Kronenzeitung is read every day by 3 million Austrians (out of a total population of just over 8 million, children included), which is the highest coverage of any newspaper in the world in any given country, and this gives it extraordinary influence.

Dear reader, before proceeding with an account of this Balkan exploratory visit to Vienna, let me ask you a personal question and try to make a more general point: how many serious books have you read in your whole life about modern Austria? Let me remove “serious” and broaden my question: how many books have you ever read about modern society in the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Denmark, Portugal? If you belong to the majority of people who would honestly admit that they have not actually read much or anything about any of these proud members of today’s European Union, are you going to do something about this in 2008?

I remember my own shock when I read an excellent book about Switzerland a few years ago (Why Switzerland by Jonathan Steinberg: if there is only one book about Switzerland that you will read, this could be the one). I discovered it by chance perusing the shelves in a bookshop in DC: it was the first book I ever read about this country. The book appropriately starts with the question: “Why should I read about Switzerland, when there are so many other things to read about?”. It then answers this question in the most brilliant way, discussing history, politics, wealth and identity, before it reaches its conclusion, “why Switzerland matters”:

“the dilemma of majority will and minority rights can be overcome by the ingenuity of men. There is nothing startling or very new about these ideas, but it is striking how little they are observed. The Swiss believe that there will always be a political compromise or bit of constitutional machinery that will get round a given difficulty, whether it is the rights of the Jurassiens or conscientious objectors … the Swiss in their lumpish, practical way assert the defectiveness of all government at all times, and they are right to do so.”

The book fascinated me at every step: when it describes how “until recently Swiss Roman Catholics lived in a ghetto”: a Swiss Catholic “might be born in a Catholic hospital, attend Catholic schools from kindergarten to university, read Catholic newspapers and magazines, vote for the Catholic party and take part in Catholic clubs and associations.” When it quotes a Luzerne politician: “For me Switzerland is only of interest as long as the canton of Luzern – this is my fatherland – is in it. If Canton Luzern no longer exists as a free, sovereign member of the Hellenic Confederation, then Switzerland is as irrelevant to me as the lesser or greater Tartary.” The author describes how Swiss federalism in the 1848 constitution was a response to civil war between liberals and “what they must have seen as bigoted, backward Catholic communities”: how the liberals won that war, but then shared the victory: and how the “transformation of religious hatred into religious accommodation owes a great deal to the institutions which 1848 established and, in particular, to two: federalism and semi-direct democracy.” Swiss federalism allowed the Swiss to resolve the religious issue. It embodies their “painful experience of conflict and its resolution.”

I will write about Switzerland, and what this experience might teach the Balkans in particular, on this blog on another occasion. (We have already referred to it in an ESI report on Bosnia in 2004). My point here is a different one: my mother grew up as a stateless refugee child in Switzerland, I grew up in Austria, a neighbouring country, my grandfather comes from a small village in the Austrian mountains very near the Swiss border and I studied European politics in Oxford and Brussels: yet I could get to age 30 without ever reading a single book about one of the most fascinating political experiences in the world. In hindsight, it was this fact that baffled me. And then I realised that it is a rather common condition: very few Europeans – even among the educated who consider keeping up with the course of events a part of their job or identity – know much about the way other European countries actually work. Europeans are blind to their own recent continental experience. And while this does not seem to bother most of us, it also seems awkward to admit it openly.

Two years later, I was baffled again. ESI was undertaking research on the Dutch debate on Turkey. I joined our researcher in the Netherlands for interviews with Dutch politicians, journalists, civil society representatives. This was a time – in the wake of the van Gogh murder (2004), the rise and then assassination of Pim Fortuyn (2004), and the Dutch referendum on the EU constitution (2005) – when the Netherlands had a rather bad international press. What I had read about, just like every other politically interested European, was a story of crisis, of the failure of multi-cultural democracy, of lack of confidence in aloof elites, of economic decline (in fact by then the Dutch economy was about to recover, as it had after every other “crisis” in previous decades). I had also learned a few other things (in history class in high school) about the Dutch golden age and I knew (from politics seminars) that there was something called consociational Dutch democracy. But had I ever actually sat down with any Dutch friend to ask him or her about how this country had become one of the wealthiest and (by any international standards this was true also in 2006) most liberal in the world? Had I ever read a book about the modern Netherlands? You can guess the answer.

So what I came to discover, even to the surprise of some of my Dutch interlocutors, was not a country in crisis but a remarkable story of a successful democracy in action: what we found in our research concerning the Dutch debate on Turkey was a most impressive process of public debate, involving a large number of people and institutions, in fact shaming most other European countries, where Turkey is either no serious topic at all or is discussed in a most populist manner. For this process of intense consultation the Dutch have a special concept: overleg.

During our research – which lasted a few months – I read every book on the Netherlands (in English) I could get my hands on. I was as baffled as I had been earlier learning about Swiss democracy (and prosperity) discovering the details of this story. Neither the fable of a multiethnic paradise nor the charicature of a naive (failed) experiment of toleration of religious differences explained the reality of this fascinating democracy. One of the authors Icame across then promises his readers: “this book is intended for people who find themselves surprised by the Netherlands and by the Dutch. I do not wish to take away the surprise, because that can be a positive and creative emotion. But if you have some idea of the background to customs and forms of behaviour that appear unusual, bizarre or even scandalous, it may help you to understand them and to respond to them more effectively.”

(This is another book I would recommend you add to your reading list for 2008: Han van der Horst, The Low Sky – Understanding the Dutch. If anybody from the Netherlands has read this, and finds fault with some of its descriptions, please do let me know)

Vienna - Schönbrunn

Vienna – Schönbrunn

Let me turn back from the Netherlands to Austria, another largely unknown country in the middle of Europe. This too is a country full of surprises for any outsider who goes beyond the cliches, some “unusual, bizzarre or even scandalous”. It is the only EU member that other EU member states ever felt compelled to warn about the state of its modern democracy: in 2000, when Joerg Haider formed a coalition with the Austrian People’s Party. This was widely perceived as a shocking development, as if some neo-nazi movement had captured the steering wheel of a European democracy. The reality was different, as it turned out, and media attention moved away, until, a few years later, the German press rediscovered Austria: this time as a model for its successful economic policy and welfare state reform (Austria – the better Germany, was the cover page in Stern magazine). Democracy at risk or a success model to follow: it appears that in the case of small democracies like Austria or the Netherlands it is only superlatives like this which get them any international attention.

Austria is today – by any international standards – a stable democracy, with low unemployment, an extensive welfare state, a rich (and publicly subsidized) cultural life and modern infrastructure. It is more international than ever before. Vienna is today one of the European cities with the highest percentage of foreigners resident. But Austria is also a country where the new Haider, Heinz Christian Strache (having taken over the Austrian Freedom Party he is fortunately not yet an international brand name, although he is trying hard to get there) runs election campaigns with openly xenophobic, anti-Muslim posters, including the silly slogan “Vienna must not become Istanbul”, getting 10 percent of the votes.

It is a country which allowed the vast majority of the large number of Bosnian, largely Muslim, war refugees who came in the 1990s to stay permanently. At the same time, Austria today has an interior minister who supports the expulsion of young Kosovars who have grown up in Austria, speak perfect German and are as “integrated” as any teenager born abroad can ever hope to be (see my previous blog on Arigona: unfortunately it now looks like Arigona will have to leave Austria in summer 2008). Like many European democracies Austrian society today both depends on foreigners and resents them: like no other it benefits from enlargement and rejects it at the same time. A country of paradoxes, then, like every other modern society when one looks closer. Can such a country be explained to a group of critical foreigners in two days of presentations?

This was the challenge, for my ESI colleagues and myself, in early December. To be more precise: we asked a group of leading Austrian journalists, pollsters, politicians and diplomats to explain to “Europeanisers” from the Western Balkans (negotiators with the EU, heads of EU integration departments, advisors to presidents) Austrian attitudes to their countries, the Austrian enlargement debate and how it influences policies. The particular paradox we tried to understand is well captured by three facts.

  1. No other country benefited as much economically from the most recent EU enlargement as Austria; no other country is likely to benefit more from further enlargement to the South East.
  2. No other country in the EU today is as skeptical about further enlargement – to the Balkans and to Turkey – as Austria.
  3. While Austrian public opinion has for many years been negative about any enlargement this did not seem to influence Austrian foreign policy in any meaningful way: all previous accession treaties were ratified, almost without opposition, in the Austrian parliament.

What, then, is the relationship between public opinion, politics and economic interest? And is the Austrian enlargement debate paradox something unique to this country, or does it hold lessons that go beyond this case of one small Alpine republic, suggesting wider lessons for the European debate as a whole?

To get (an attempt of) an answer, please read my next blog: Understanding the Austrian Psyche II.

In the meantime, may I ask you for a favor? If you have a favorite book to recommend that explains how different EU members actually work today, please let me know. Best send an email to g.knaus@esiweb.org. I will then promise to read what you recommend and share teh most interesting findings with other readers of this blog. It is one of my resolutions for 2008 that by the end of the year I will have read at least one serious book on every one of the 27 EU member states during this year … (please let me know in particular what the best books are about contemporary Luxembourg, Denmark, the Baltic states, Slovakia, Malta, Belgium and Portugal). And by the end of 2008 I hope to be able to offer my own reading list of best books about every country in the EU today.

Posted on

The good news problem – beyond the wild Balkans (Vienna)

A presentation in Vienna, some 120 people in the House of Music in the first district of the city. We do something risky: talking about recent ESI research, we present success stories from the Balkans: Montenegro, Bosnia, even Albania. The event is organised by Erste Stiftung.

Success stories? In the Balkans? We should have anticipated some bewilderment. The Austrian papers are full with articles about Kosovo (hardly a success by most standards at the moment) and a few about a “terrible crisis” in Bosnia. Recent EU enlargement reports by the European Commission on Macedonia and indeed on the rest of the region are no cause for celebration. Croatia as a possible success, perhaps, but anything further south evokes scepticism here.

Here is the paradox: success stories do not sell well. In a book edited by World Bank economists Robert Picciotto and Eduardo Wiesner (Evaluation and Development, 1998) one author writes that the challenge for development research is to “evaluate situations in which things have gone from being wrong to being right, and document how it happened. We need the examples, the models, the best practice cases.” But this is a World Bank managing director speaking. To be honest, when I hear that a certain country is “top reformer in the world” according to some development bank, that Armenia (which I visited a few times this year) is now a “Caucasian tiger” or that some places are top of the business climate indicator of some evaluator, I am also often sceptical. But this does not mean that there are no success stories: only that one needs to take more time and effort to present evidence when making a positive case.

In his little book on the Progress Paradox Gregg Easterbrook explains the “active preference for bad news” in US public debates through the dictates of fund-raising: money awaits on the extremes of an issue: “most contemporary fund raising turns on high-decibel assertions that everything’s going to hell.” International organisations fund-raising for their annual programs and missions are often subject to a similar temptation. Journalists pitching a story to an editor face the same temptation. It is normal, and it means that stories of real success need to be told in the face of both skepticism and possible indifference.

In the Balkans today it is not hard, however, to define a benchmark to measure progress. In the middle of the 1990s many societies in the region were still part of an early 20th century European world of extreme nationalism, severe economic dislocation, public debates revolving around geopolitics, real and imagined enemies, conspiracies. Speeches like this one were turning points: “Six centuries ago, here on Kosovo field, Serbia defended herself. But she defended also Europe. She stood then on the rampart of Europe, defending European culture, religion, European society as a whole. That is why it seems not only unjustified, but also unhistorical and completely absurd to question Serbia’s belonging to Europe.”

This is, of course, the famous Kosovo speech of Slobodan Milosevic in 1987. It is easy to forget how present the notion of “Europe” was in this type of rhetoric. But the “Europe” evoked by Serb nationalists in the late 80s and early 90s was a different one from the Europe of consumers, functional integration, a style of politics based on compromise, a continent where people can also make a rationale choice not to be too concerned about politics. It is the Europe of the early 20th century, a Europe that Mark Mazower called a “dark continent”.

The main theme of the presentations of my colleague Kristof Bender, Erion Veliaj from Tirana, Alida Vracic from Sarajevo and myself in the House of Music was that during the past decade Bosnia, Montenegro and Albania have changed fundamentally. They are becoming part of modern Europe: a continent in which both war and anarchy have become inconceivable. This is part of a wider transformation: all the Balkans today were very different from the Balkans in 1997. In 1997 Bulgaria was on its knees, Montenegro feared a civil war, Albania was in anarchy, Bosnia was divided by three armies, intelligence services and police forces and by extreme nationalism. None of this is the case today.

Following the presentations there are questions. Many reveal scepticism. The representative of an aid organisation wonders whether what we describe as changes in some parts of Bosnia might be different in others. A person who worked on war crimes in the village of Ahmici (which we also refer to in our talk) was startled by our description of inter-ethnic relations in Ahmici. After the presentation I see an Austrian soldier in uniform shaking his head, noting that “there is a difference between theory and practice.” As if a story of positive change is “theoretical”, whereas a story of stagnation and pessimism is practical.

Probably if we had said that across the Balkans a few things improve, huge problems remain, and overall the region’s development is disappointing, there would have been little skepticism. News of stagnation is easily believed. But the debate would have ended there, and the remarkable changes that we are discovering through our field research would not become a topic of debate. If one of the results of challenging conventional wisdoms is that people might be motivated to get in a bus or car and check out the new realities in the Balkans themselves, we would have achieved our objective …

Posted on

Talk in Vienna – Erste Foundation/House of Music – “Still the Wild Europe? Rethinking the Balkan experience 1997-2007”

Where is the Balkans heading on the eve of the Slovenian presidency and intense discussions whether there should be an “Adriatic enlargement” of NATO in 2008? Do Europeans – including Austrians – fully grasp how much the region has changed?

ERSTE Stiftung and ESI jointly organised a public discussion hosted by the Haus der Musik in Vienna where Kristof and I presented new ESI research on Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The presentation included clips and the trailer of the most ambitious TV documentary project on the region undertaken in the recent years: a 10 part documentary to be broadcast on 3sat in early 2008.

This was followed by a panel representing a new generation of Balkan activists: ESI analyst Erion Veliaj (until recently MJAFT, Albania) and Alida Vracic (Populari, Bosnia) discussed realities and myths about the Western Balkans.

Gerald Knaus, Alida Vracic, Erion Veliaj, and Kristof Bender

Gerald Knaus, Alida Vracic, Erion Veliaj, and Kristof Bender
View of the audience

View of the audience
Posted on

Talk in Vienna – Still the Wild Europe? Rethinking the Balkan experience 1997-2007

Where is the Balkans heading on the eve of the Slovenian presidency and intense discussions whether there should be an “Adriatic enlargement” of NATO in 2008? Do Europeans – including Austrians – fully grasp how much the region has changed?

ERSTE Stiftung and ESI jointly organised a public discussion hosted by the Haus der Musik in Vienna where Gerald and Kristof presented new ESI research on Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The presentation included clips and the trailer of the most ambitious TV documentary project on the region undertaken in the recent years: a 10 part documentary to be broadcast on 3sat in early 2008.

This was followed by a panel representing a new generation of Balkan activists: ESI analyst Erion Veliaj (until recently MJAFT, Albania) and Alida Vracic (Populari, Bosnia) discussed realities and myths about the Western Balkans.

 

Gerald Knaus, Alida Vracic, Erion Veliaj, and Kristof Bender
Gerald Knaus, Alida Vracic, Erion Veliaj, and Kristof Bender
View of the audience
View of the audience
Posted on

How criminals rule Bosnia

 

There is no end to the alarming news coming from Bosnia. This is beginning to alarm me too.

On 20 November The Times reports on Bosnia under the title “Outnumbered and in the dark: on patrol in badlands of the Balkans.” The article describes a remote border crossing between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro and presents it as “the first line of defence against contraband and criminals reaching Western Europe.” The author continues: “drugs are smuggled from Afghanistan through Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and then into Italy, Germany and on to France and England.” Women from Eastern Europe are “trafficked through Bosnia, many ending up working as prostitutes in English cities.”

This seems strange. Why would anybody in the EU even think that the border between two small countries, one of which has only been independent for a bit over a year, in a thinly populated area in the middle of the Balkan mountains, would be the best place to intercept drugs from Afghanistan travelling to consumers in London or Paris?

Upon reflection, a layman like myself might have even more questions. Why would an East European woman (a Moldavian or Ukrainian, for instance) consider getting into the EU by coming to Bosnia first? Is it not much more convenient to go to or via Romania? Why would a prostitute from East Europe go to Bosnia if her real destination was the UK?

Reading articles like this – and there is no shortage of them – I always wonder about sources. I know some this author did not use: Croatian authorities, for example, who share the longest border with Bosnia, confirm that the number of people caught by them crossing illegally from Bosnia has actually fallen substantially in recent years. The 2006 US State Department’s (annual) report on human trafficking also ranked Bosnia in the same category as Greece, Japan and Slovenia. In the section on “International Best Practices” it even commends the efficiency of Bosnia’s Anti-Trafficking Police Force.

Does the Times know something that neither the Croat nor the US authorities (nor the Bosnian authorities, who publish an annual organised crime report) know about?

I expand my search: perhaps there is something about the nefarious influence of the Bosnian underworld and its tentacles in the UK in the 2004 book Gangs – a journey into the heart of the British underworld by the Observer’s crime correspondent Tony Thompson? Thompson looks at 13 types of crime, from cocaine smuggling to kidnapping and gun running. The list of gangs operating in the UK that he describes reads like a small United Nations: Spanish, Colombians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Irish, Danes, South Africans, Sikhs, Pakistanis, Russians, Chinese …

I check the index: there are references to Albanians (in the chapter on people smuggling); there is one reference to Croatia (as a country through which drugs travel). But between the entry for “Booze fighters” and that for “Bourne, Christopher Tuffy” (an English robber) I do not find any reference to Bosnia. Perhaps the Observer has missed something too?

In fact, I quite like Thompson’s book. Ever since I first read it I remember a passage where he quotes a cocaine smuggler, Rick, who explains to him that “a lot of the stuff I deal with comes in via Ireland. There’s a lot of going on over there because the Irish navy consists of something like two rubber dinghies and one of those inflatable bananas. There’s so much coastline, they just can’t patrol it all. It’s absolutely wide open.” It changed my image of the Irish coast (where I have never been): I had thought of it as merely wild and interesting, but now I see it as a very dangerous and wide open gap in the defence of the things that are dear to me. I wonder how it compares with the border between Bosnia and Montenegro. And when the Times last wrote about the Irish borderlands.

But there is one obvious difference between Ireland and Bosnia today. In Ireland there is no European Union Police Mission (EUPM). This makes it easier to write an article about organised crime in Bosnia: one does not even need to talk to any Bosnian institutions who have fighting it as part of their job description: institutions like the state-level State Border Service (now State Border Police), the State Information and Protection Agency (SIPA), the Interpol office, the state-level Ministry for Security or the integrated intelligence and security agency (obavjestajno-sigurnosna agencija). In Bosnia one is conveniently provided with all information on especially organised tours for journalists, and it is done by English speaking “Europeans”. One EU police office offers precise data: “Figures show that 50 tonnes of heroin were smuggled from Afghanistan to the West through Sarajevo in 2006, but officials seized only 72 grams”. This, we learn, is “shameful.” Another EUPM official explains that Sarajevo is “controlled by organised crime bosses.”

The author of the Times article apparently did not see much value in quoting any Bosnians: after all, as European police officers (who are quoted extensively) explain to him, Bosnian crime bosses in any case control corrupt police officers, prosecutors and judges. The population treats criminals as heroes. And police chiefs, prosecutors and judges in the cantons “have all grown up with the criminals they are meant to prosecute.” There is, one European police officer notes, “corruption from the bottom of the judicial tree to the top.” Somebody even says that “only a third of judges were beyond being corrupt.” Two thirds of Bosnian judges corrupt: that is shocking indeed. It also sounds familiar. Was this not the number quoted, wait, it was 7 years ago, just before a huge international judicial reform mission was deployed in Bosnia, which then proceeded to fire every judge and prosecutor in the country only to have them reappointed later by an internationally-led commission?

In fact, with so much bad news there is only one good thing to report from Bosnia: the fact that there is – and has been since 2002 – a European police mission. As we learn, “officers from around the world have been brought in to try to help local people get on top of things, but their mandate runs out in two years time and they face an uphill struggle.”

It is probably an interesting coincidence that the Times article (and other similar articles in other European papers) appeared on the very day that an EU press release could announce the good news: the EU had decided on the 19th of November “to extend the mandate of the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 31 December 2009 … the Council also recognised that the police mission’s aim to establish a sustainable, professional and multi-ethnic police force …. has not yet been achieved.”

And it is to be hoped that this mandate never runs out. Perhaps one could also send an EUPM to the Irish Atlantic coast?

Or would that be too expensive? After all, the cost of EUPM in Bosnia (with 200 internationals at the moment) is not negligeable: 12 million Euro plus the 200 salaries of the foreigners. But given the apparent success of this mission, whose job it is to advise and help Bosnian law enforcers, this may well be worth it.

PS: One more note about drug smuggling and Bosnia. You might hear a figure quoted in international speeches (recently even by a leader of the opposition in a big EU country) . This figure was often used in the past by international organisations, including the OHR, in briefings about Bosnia: “According to Interpol assessments, 80 percent of the Western European heroin market is supplied via the Balkan route which goes through BiH.”

This sounds alarming, until one reads the original Interpol quote:

“Two primary routes are used to smuggle heroin: the Balkan Route, which runs through southeastern Europe, and the Silk Route, which runs through Central Asia. The anchor point for the Balkan Route is Turkey, which remains a major staging area and transportation route for heroin destined for European markets. The Balkan Route is divided into three sub-routes: the southern route runs through Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy; the central route runs through Turkey, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and into either Italy or Austria; and the northern route runs from Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania to Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland or Germany.”

In fact, according to Interpol there is no country in the region, including Austria and EU members Bulgaria and Romania, which is not along a primary drug smuggling route. Perhaps an EUPM should be sent to every country along this route?

Posted on

Talk in Barcelona – CIDOB Breakfast meeting – “Kosovo, Serbia and the future of the Balkans”


Barcelona – Museum of Modern Art (next to Cidob) Narcis Serra (president of Cidob)

At the invitation of Cidob, the leading foreign policy think tank in Catalonia, and its president Narcis Serra, former Spanish minister of defence and deputy prime minister, I give a breakfast presentation on the future of the Balkans in the wonderful old building Cidob occupies in the centre of Barcelona, close to the new museum of modern art.

The content: an overview of recent developments in Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina and discuss what is required for successful Europeanisation and eventual EU accession of the whole region in 2008.

See also the entry Las Ramblas in November (Barcelona)

Posted on

Talk in Berlin – Frauenrechte in der Türkei nach dem zweiten AKP-Wahlsieg: Scharia oder EU-Standards?

I presented ESI’s research on recent economic and societal trends in Turkey, in particular the rapidly changing reality of Turkish women at an event jointly organised with the August Bebel Institut, the AK Frauenpolitische Bildung im Bildungswerk Berlin der Heinrich Böll Stiftung, and the Berlin Istanbul Network Kultur-Wissen-Stadt (BINKWS).

Inn this presentation, I talked on Turkey’s potential for accession to the EU, social and economic developments, the recent (legal) revolution of women’s rights, the German debate about Turkey and the role of the military. I also pointed out that these changes cannot only to be attributed to AKP’s legal reforms but are part of a wider democratisation process of Turkish society at large.

Berlin Radio Multikulti covered this event: “Has AKP’s view of women changed?” (Turkish only).

Berlin Istanbul Network Kultur-Wissen-Stadt August Bebel Institut 
Heinrich Böll Stiftung