TURKEY TOWARDS THE EU: IN-BETWEEN STATE CENTRICISM AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE Murat Okçu, Hüseyin Gül and Murat Ali Dulupçu Suleyman Demirel University, Turkey Correspond to Associate Prof. Dr. Hüseyin Gül, the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, 32260, Turkey Fax: ++90 246 237 0920 E-mails: murpek@iibf.sdu.edu.tr, gulhuseyin@yahoo.com, mdulupcu@yahoo.com Paper for the 6 th European Urban and Regional Studies Conference 21-24 September, 2006 Denmark Abstract Turkey and Turkish governance have entered a critical period and path after the EU Summit on 17 th December 2004, in which European Council decided on the basis of a report and recommendation from the Commission that Turkey fulfils the Copenhagen political criteria and the EU will open accession negotiations with Turkey without delay. It is not to exaggerate to say that the decision made on 3 rd October 2005 about the opening of the negotiations between Turkey and the EU has and will have a strong impact on the position and the role of the EU and Turkey in the 21 st century, and the style of the administrative reform in Turkey. In fact, this process has already stimulated the motives of reform in Turkey. However the question about Turkey’s readiness and fitness for the EU in terms of its governance still remains to be unanswered. The central perspective to this question should consider a set of interrelated concepts that triggering each other: Europeanization, European Administrative Space and Multi-Level Governance- which has been either disregarded or insufficiently mentioned particularly in the literature on Turkish Governance and Turkey and the EU relations. Despite the continuing discussion, these concepts are regarded as the base of the development of administrative structure in both EU and national levels. Turkey will also have to systematically take these concepts into account in its efforts to reform the governance structure at different levels. The recent agenda of restructuring Turkish governance includes a series of ‘horizontal’ change (and re-scaling) in administrative space. However, insofar as the negotiations proceed, one can assume that a ‘vertical’ change will be occurred in administrative space in the long-run. In this process, the interactions and interdependencies among trans-national, supra-national, national, sub-national and local actors will correspondingly increase. Naturally, it can be expected that the reciprocity among different levels and actors raises some questions about Turkey’s conceptualization and contextualization of Europeanization, European Administrative Space and Multi-Level Governance: How ready are both Turkish society and administrative structure for involvement of the NGO’s in policy designing and making? How will Turkey’s unitarian state structure influence the steps towards the adaptation of multi-level-governance in Turkey? More importantly, how will the embedded state-centred historical-social-cultural and economical understanding challenge the efforts to run negotiations and harmonization of Turkish administrative system with European Administrative Space? In this context, this study aims to analyse the steps taken by the Turkish government, policy makers, and bureaucrats towards multi-level, multi-tier system of European governance, and possible resistance from traditional Turkish bureaucracy. It also discuses the implementability and the acceptability of multi-level-governance approach in traditional statist Turkish governance system, and reforms taken by the Erdoğan Government. Lastly, it is argued that the main challenge for Turkish governance is stemmed from the dilemma between standing on state-centricism and realising a change toward Multi-Level Governance. Key Words: Multi-Level Governance, Europeanization, Turkey, Public Administration 1