Europeanization of turkish subnational administrations

INTRODUCTION

This research seeks to examine the political effects of Europeanization in Turkey with special reference to changing territorial relations between three administrative levels: supranational, national and subnational. This is analytically captured by the students of multi-level governance. In examining the EU’s regional and structural fund policies, particularly through its principle of ‘partnership’, the MLG scholars have offered a multi-level and multi-actor paradigm including both vertical and horizontal dimensions on the system of EU governance (Hooghe & Marks, 2001; Bache, 2008). While the vertical dimension highlights the importance of interactions across different levels of actors or institutions, the horizontal dimension refers to the participation of public authorities, private actors and third sectors to problem-solving mechanisms (Benz & Eberlein, 1999). Given its official candidate status to the EU since the Helsinki Summit of 1999, Turkey has unsurprisingly been exposed to the impact of Europeanization in the context of regional policy and structural funds. This impact has challenged the long-established centralized system of Turkish governance and led to the need for a set of reforms in order to adapt its regional policy in line with EU standards (e.g. the adoption of the NUTS system and the creation of regional development agencies).

Although several reforms adopted in Turkey have brought about horizontal change in administrative space as well as vertical change through different territorial tiers since it met with the EU adaptation process in 1999, this research is less concerned with the change in the horizontal dimension than it is in explaining the change in the vertical dimension. With regard to change in the vertical dimension, the research proposes a distinction between changes ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ the national jurisdiction. For the former case, given the EU’s redistributive and regulative nature, there is a direct and top-down effect of Europeanization: providing resources, a new set of rules, and procedures for the formulation and implementation of regional development policies and structural funds (Paraskevopoulos & Leonardi, 2004: 316). Here, EU norms and conditionality play a significant role in the very emergence of regions as functional units of territorial self-governance within applicant states, in some instances acting as a catalyst for the domestic reform process (Brusis, 2002: 553). As for the latter case, beyond conditionality, the pressure to establish effective institutional frameworks and strategic objectives that facilitate engagement in the EU has shaped territorial groups’ behaviour both during the accession process and since their respective nation states have become members of the EU (Moore, 2008b: 213). At this point, the effect of Europeanization is rather indirect because the EU only creates opportunity structures in terms of informational, strategic and ideational spheres and provides passive leverage for subnational administrations (SNAs). It is entirely dependent on the organizational capacity (i.e. finance, experts and leadership) of a given SNA to exploit these opportunities.

A vertical change beyond the national jurisdiction is, however, centrally important for this research in order to examine the interplay between the process of Europeanization and mobilisation of SNAs from Turkey. By making such a distinction, this research addresses its main question of how the process of Europeanization has changed the behaviour of SNAs in Turkey and mobilized their interests within a broader political game across the EU arena. The main reason for choosing Turkey as an empirical focus is to demonstrate the extent to which direct and indirect effects of Europeanization can lead a candidate country with long-standing centralization, weak subnational administrations, no history of regional governance and comparatively low EU membership credibility to shift towards a multi-level modality. More importantly, there is little research into the impact of Europeanization on SNAs in Turkey and their activities vis-à-vis EU matters (discussed below).

To explore EU activities at subnational level, a burgeoning literature has emerged around what has been termed ‘subnational mobilisation’ (Hooghe, 1995), ‘territorial representations’ (Moore, 2008a), ‘third-level politics’ (Bullmann, 1997), and ‘the growing engagement of subnational governmental actors with the institutions and process of EU policymaking’ (Jeffrey, 2000). Despite these apparent differences in language, the analytical frameworks that such studies draw on are generally similar. All of these refer to the growing number of contacts established between subnational actors in Europe and the European institutions in order to pursue economic, political and cultural activities through using different ‘extra-state channels’ in Brussels (Hooghe, 1995; Jeffrey, 2000). The research, nonetheless, prefers to use the term ‘subnational mobilisation’ in order to hold consistency throughout the thesis.

Before outlining in more detail the basic ideas and arguments to come in the following chapters, a brief conceptual clarification is necessary. To begin with, the research sticks to the narrow definition of a subnational administration as a politico-administrative unit below the central level. By the concept of subnational mobilisation, a collection of processes is meant which progress from greater awareness of European legislation, growing willingness to search for European finance, networking with other European local authorities and experts, direct lobbying of Brussels institutions, and the influence of EU ideas on subnational policy making (John, 2000). The research describes these processes from four stages of subnational mobilisation (discussed below). The usages of subnational mobilisation here by no means refer to any ethnic or ethno-cultural activity beyond the national jurisdictions.

Although a number of articles and books on Europeanization and multi-level governance with reference to subnational mobilisation in EU member (and candidate) states have been published, the wider analysis of the secondary literature illustrates that there are still important aspects of analysis that need further investigation, particularly for the applicant states. Accordingly, the analytical interest of this research is triggered by the following theoretical and empirical observations.