Regionalization for Turkey: An illusion or a cure?

Abstract:

Recent debate on the reconfiguration of space exaggerates the roles of either economic motives of capitalist restructuring (such as 'competitiveness') or non-economic factors of social and cultural landscapes (for instance 'social capital') or both (as in the literature on learning regions). It generally aligns emerging structures of new scales with regional governance. This has been mainly due to a concentration of the literature on the developed economies at different scales - such as the EU (European Union) at a supranational scale or Baden-Württemberg or Silicon Valley at subnational scales. Relatively little work has been done to understand the relations between different emerging scales and alternative mechanisms of regionalization in developing countries. This paper explores the impetus of state restructuring (namely Europeanization) in Turkey, and argues that at the regional scale Turkey follows a route apart from the implications of 'new regionalism'. By doing so the paper also extends the critique of 'new regionalism' through an analysis of Turkey. The paper also aims to explain how the failure to regionalize effectively is halting the development of the Turkish economy, and what the hollowing-out of the state implies when statism resists a downward power shift while accepting and even accelerating an upward power shift through Europeanization.

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