Abstract:

There are important interregional differences of Turkey compared to both European Union countries and within herself. Although various policies were implemented in order to eliminate interregional differences and develop underdeveloped regions in the Republican period, they were unsuccessful.With the full membership process in the year of 1999, a new period has begun regarding the regional policies of Turkey. In this process which is called the Europeanization of regional policies, there have been legal arrangements such as The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) Frame Agreement; institutional arrangements such as Development Agencies and delegating local administrations. Moreover economic aid has been provided to prepare Turkey for using the Union’s Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund In general, as the membership process has been limited to a narrow space as fulfilling the duties given by the Union and getting financial aid in return, there has not been any remarkable progress and there has been an excessive expectation on what the Union funds are capable of. The excessive cost of downloading and implementing the acquis has been ignored. Thus, in establishing regional policies the classical approach of ‘downloading’ should be abandoned considering the different dimensions of the concept of Europeanization in order to remove the blockage in the process

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