Re-scaling and Globalizing EU-Turkey Bilateral Relations in the Changing Global Political Landscape.

• Author: Dal, Emel Parlar

Introduction

Turkey's geostrategic location in the Middle East and Asia, combined with its shared border with Europe, position Turkey as a key and unrelinquishable partner of the European Union (EU). Indeed, despite the worsening of relations between the EU and Turkey due to their growing divergence on several issues, each side makes efforts not to allow their relations to deteriorate beyond a certain point, because what unites the two is much stronger than what divides them. It is undeniable that scale, broadly conceptualized as "the geographical structure of social interactions" (1) can provide a broader understanding of this mutual interdependence between Turkey and the EU and of their current and future interactions. Neil Brenner employs the concept of 'scale' for the assessment of global political interactions, (2) and proposes that geographical scales can provide a new framework to understand the social and material organizations of international politics, and the hybrid process of these interactions. Similarly, geographical scales are defined by Neil Smith as changeable historically, and he conceptualizes geographical scales as products of social activity which are historically mutable and where social forces compete and cooperate. (3) For Smith, scalar descriptions of global politics helpfully encompass both cultural and identity-relevant connotations. (4)

In the current state of the literature, few studies have used case studies to apply the scalar politics. There is also a void on this issue when it comes to EU-Turkey relations. In illustration, Ezgi Guner underscores that Turkey's pivot to taking an interest in Africa should be seen from the perspective of a multiscalar project, since the Turkish government with the active support of NGOs has constructed a legitimate space for Turkey's interactions with the African continent through the positive re-scaling of Turkey's national representation as a philanthropic Muslim donor and through the re(making) of a Turkish model of Islam and the construction of economic partnerships. (5) In his analysis of the process of cross-border reterritorialization in Europe from a multiscalar viewpoint, with a special focus on the establishment of the transborder region in the Romanian-Ukrainian-Moldovan borderlands, Gabriel Popescu argues that, although these spatial social interactions, produced through contentious bargaining between the regional, national and local scales, highlight the transnationalization of cross-border regions beyond the Westphalian state-centric territorial model, they remain largely modelled by territorial considerations. (6) Another interesting study analyzing China's Belt and Road Policy through the lens of scalar politics, argues that this initiative resulted in the territorial remodelling of the Chinese state and the geographical construction of new scales grounded in trade cooperation, flows of capital and international infrastructure construction; (7) and that it is leading to a reterritorialization of China's state power through the creation of new international organizations, and the re-scaling of the importance of certain large cities as agents of this project and the production of more interaction space for China. (8)

Given this background, by putting scale and (re)scaling at the centre of its analysis, this paper intends to fill the existing void on scalar politics in the literature and to grasp the scaling process of EU-Turkey relations from historical, political and social perspectives. It also seeks to reimagine the space of social interactions and networks between the EU and Turkey in ways that could help surpass their long-standing areas of contention and increase the focus on areas of cooperation and common interests between the two actors. It will also investigate in which issue areas the EU and Turkey can reproduce their new geographical scale and re-contextualize their relationship in an age of multiple, systematic uncertainties in global politics.

On the other hand, an assessment of EU-Turkey relations from a scalar perspective provides innovative critical ways to approach the connections and interactions between Turkey and the EU, beyond rigid and state-centric territorial boundaries and the stalled negotiation process. It provides new venues for examining how both the EU and Turkey construct and reconstruct their scalar interactions through social discourses, and how these discursive processes of perpetual scale remodelling led to the homogenization or differentiation of their identity, to cooperation or conflict, and to the harmonization or de-harmonization of their interests.

Similarly, the relevance of socially constructed scales in EU-Turkey relations is exemplified by the regular qualification of Turkey as a "buffer zone," a "bridge" between the West and the East (9) and a "transition country" that can contain migrants fleeing conflictzone countries to reach Europe. In this regard, the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal, aimed at containing migrants transiting Turkey, is an illustration of how scaling matters in the assessment of EU-Turkey relations, in both concrete and social terms. From this stance, this paper aims to provide an alternative critical reading and assessment of EU-Turkey bilateral relations through the lens of global (re)scaling, which can be defined as the spatial configuration of social and inter-state interactions.

In doing so, this paper will first overview the existing theories on scale and re-scaling with reference to their use in Political Geography and International Relations (IR). The second task of this paper will be to examine the relevance of scale in EU-Turkey relations from historical, political and social perspectives. In the third part, as a first step, this paper will investigate whether the EU and Turkey can redefine and reconstruct a new EU-Turkey space. As a second step, it will try to assess whether globalizing EU-Turkey relations by reinforcing cooperation in new issue areas is possible given the presence of new global policy areas such as climate change, sustainable development and changes in trade & economics.

Scale and Scaling of Global Politics in IR

While space and spatiality are specifically dealt with in the discipline of Geography, academics have also increasingly started to investigate the role of space in international politics. (10) IR as a discipline is particularly interested in inter-state relations, which denote the relations between geographically delimited states across the globe. Traditional IR has been generally criticized for its state-centric stance and extensive focus on territoriality, which leads to their omission of the characteristics of geographical organization in world politics. (11) Agnew conceptualizes space as the spatial setting where economic and political interactions occur (12) and 'spatiality' as the representation of the effects of space. (13) Lambach highlights the importance of space in understanding key dimensions or issues of global politics and international relations such as 'transborder migration, regional (dis)integration, the shift toward a multipolar world, capital mobility, pathogenic networks of contagion, or the US 'pivot to Asia',...". (14)

Scale is a form of spatiality that is implicated in and shapes contentious political and social interactions; it can be conceptualized as "the geographical structure of social interactions" (15) or as the spatial configuration of social and inter-state interactions. Neil Brenner employs the concept of 'scale' to aid in the assessment of global political interactions, (16) and advances the idea that geographical scale can provide a new framework to understand the physical and social structures of international politics, and the hybrid process of these interactions. He defines the term 'politics of scale' (17) from a singular perspective as "the production, reconfiguration or contestation of some aspect of socio-spatial organization within a relatively bounded geographical arena--usually labelled the local, the urban, the regional, the national and so forth", (18) and from a pluralist view as " not only the production of differentiated spatial units as such but also, more generally, their embeddedness and positionalities in relation to a multitude of smaller or larger spatial units within a multitier, hierarchically configured geographical scaffolding." (19) Politics of scale should be considered as relational, contested and power-struggle politics where actors interact with one another to 'legitimize or challenge existing power relations'. (20) Through these struggles and social interactions, new scales are created, recreated and even hierarchized, which is called a rescaling process. (21) Leitner argues that the manipulation of authority and power relations lies at the core of scaling politics and that the scalar process is not an uncontested one, but rather encompasses several struggles, negotiations and conflicts among various actors, with each trying to remodel the spatial authority and power. (22) The scalar process is sometimes referred to as the 'jumping of scales' (23) to connote the process of spatialization of politics through the active mobilization of political strategies of empowerment or disempowerment. (24)

The term 'scale' is sometimes considered as the geographical extension of political action and 'scalar relations' as the interactions between territorially connected entities on the globe at different levels. (25) Analyzing these interactions from a scalar standpoint is crucial to understanding the perpetual redefinition and re-planning of spaces, (26) as well as the complex interactions and changes taking place within several spaces. (27) The production and reproduction of spatial scales is not a fixed process, and rather occurs in a process of constant constitution, transformation, redefinition and contestation of specific scales, (28) whereby processes of...