The Consequences of Ambiguity: Designing and Implementing the ESSN

The stated purpose of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) was to contribute to meeting the basic needs of the most vulnerable refugees in Turkey. In the context of this book’s argument, we ask whether it achieved this goal but also whether and to what extent it contributed to extending elements of market citizenship to forced migrants. We conclude that while the ESSN’s CT program made a limited contribution to meeting basic needs and empowering displaced persons as consumers, other elements of market citizenship, or even “denizenship,” are lacking. With regard to its explicit targets, the effectiveness of ESSN was limited by the ambiguities of its design, linked to the different priorities of the agencies involved, which exclude some vulnerable persons from the program. More broadly, very limited access to the formal labor market remained an obstacle to fuller market citizenship.

Introduction: Citizens, Markets, and Turkey

The concept of citizenship is typically divided into distinct components. Following the pioneering work of T.H. Marshall, we focus on social and economic citizenship. We ask in particular whether the “basic equality of membership” at the heart of Marshall’s definition of citizenship can be advanced by market-centered policies such as social cash transfer, even in cases such as that of forced migrants in which political or civil elements of citizenship are not present. Contemporary Turkey provides an ideal setting in which to investigate this question.

Does Cash Transfer Promote Market Citizenship?

The most obvious conclusion of this book is that there is no single Turkish experience. Nor can we reach definitive once-and-for-all conclusions about the impact of CT as an instrument of social assistance. Comparison among our cases highlights variables grounded in local conditions and policy design that help determine the outcome of CT projects, and whose relevance extends far beyond Turkey. Among these are human and financial resources, but also of the capacity for local knowledge. When these allow consistent and appropriate targeting, CT can provide an important step in the direction of inclusion and equality in a market context. It would be misleading, however, to believe that this instrument on its own is sufficient. At the core of market citizenship is the dignity conferred not only by paying one’s own way, but also by earning one’s own way: CT instruments work best as a complement to, not replacement for, access to the official labor market.

Origins and Consequences of Market Citizenship

In this chapter, we establish the historical context needed to understand the place of cash transfer in contemporary market-enhancing social policy. To this end we outline the circumstances that led to the establishment of the twentieth-century regime of “industrial citizenship,” to growing criticism of it, and finally to the rise to prominence of a competing model, labeled (largely by its opponents) as “market citizenship.” We pay considerable attention at each step to the social and philosophical debates that surrounded this evolution, trying to understand not just how one citizenship regime was challenged and partially replaced by another, but why.

Cash Transfer with Turkish Characteristics: Two Local Examples

Having discussed the emergence of cash transfer (CT) as an instrument not only for economic assistance but potentially for inclusion in a market-centered society, and the policy environment of contemporary Turkey, we now bring these together through examination of two case studies of CT programs designed and implemented at the local level. By proceeding in this way, we are explicitly eschewing any claim to providing a universal treatment of social policy, or even of CT programs, in contemporary Turkey. Rather, we consider these cases with a view to highlighting the elements that seem most closely tied to particular outcomes, and then to generalizing these in the form of hypotheses applicable beyond Turkey.

The Turkish Context

In Chap. 2, we traced the emergence of a new and controversial model of citizenship centered on the market. We turn now to the national case that is the focus of this book, Turkey. The central question of this chapter is whether the transition to a market-based model of citizenship much studied in Europe and North America can be applied to countries like Turkey, typified by late industrialization and a distinct social welfare model. To this end, we consider the evolution of the operational content and context of social and economic citizenship in Turkey. In a final section, we expand the scope of reflection to discuss the situation of migrants, and the evolution of the Turkish “incorporation regime.”

Cash Transfer and Humanitarian Assistance

In this chapter, we turn our attention to cash transfer (CT) as an instrument of humanitarian assistance for forced migrants in Turkey. We first consider the emergence of CT as a priority instrument for humanitarian assistance in the twenty-first century. We then sketch the political background of humanitarian assistance in Turkey for persons displaced by internal conflicts in Syria focusing in particular on the EU–Turkey agreements that led to the establishment of the Facility for Refugees in Turkey (FRiT) in 2016. In a final section we focus on the establishment as part of FRiT of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN), the largest humanitarian CT program ever established by the European Union. We discuss in particular the program’s institutional complexity and the resulting risk of ambiguous consensus and conflicts of interest among the agencies involved in its design and implementation.