Anthony Giddens: The Bergama Movement

Anthony Giddens defines globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings ar shaped by events occuring many miles away and vice versa”. Deriving from this description, Kriesi and Della Porta extend the definition to the local resistance movements against “the intrusion of foreign ideas and global problems”. Bergama Movement is a local movement that exceeded and mobilized beyond national borders, organized against a project by a transnational corporation. In this case, the local movement aligned with transnational actors as well as the national government which had transnational alignments that is tying to implement recently introduced neo-liberal policies in

They carried out their mobilization in legal, scientific and political areas. Several court decisions on shutting down the mine operation was taken due to the ongoing struggle of the activists. However the mine was shut down only twice throughout the 22 years of legal struggle. After the second shut down in 2004, the mine was reopened in 2005, and still in function since that time. However the Bergama Movement cannot be seen as unsuccessful, as an example of being a local, grassroots movement that mobilized beyond the national borders. It affected many grassroots environmentalist movements that took place in Turkey afterwards, using the Bergama Movement’s repertoire.

Bergama Movement was consisted of diverse group of people, at the center being the villagers. Villagers were put into the center of the movement as the ones who were directly affected by the gold mine project. Frames of democracy, anti-imperialism and human rights were used as well as the environmentalist discourse. On the international arena they did not keep themselves seperate from the ongoing similar contentions, namely the people who were personally affected by neoliberal policies, hence they were able to attract more support and attention beyond the national

In the case of Bergama movement, this was a contention against the global capitalism during a transformative time in Turkey’s history. Most studies suggest that the nation-state system is constained by the ongoing process of globalization. However this doesn’t mean that the nation-states are now powerless or inapt, even though there exist a tranformation of power. We could see in the case of the Bergama movement, the Turkish state replied the movement’s legal and international struggles by counter-framing and also adopting transnational