This work aims to provide an alternative analysis of the regional economic integration and development projects of two peripheral capitalist spaces – Mexico and Turkey – within the specific spatiotemporal conditions in which their modern peripheral capitalist spatiality has been conditioned and re-structured. Both Mexico and Turkey undertook very similar regional integration projects that emerged almost simultaneously and, more significantly, in conjunction with the neoliberal restructuring processes that unfurled during the early 1980s. In the Central American region, Mexico initiated the ‘Plan Puebla-Panamá’ which subsequently evolved to the ‘Proyecto Mesoamérica’, now including Colombia, aiming to ‘create’ an integrated region with a high level of economic development on the basis of procuring sustainable and orderly functioning free market economies. With strikingly similar objectives, Turkey planned and materialised regional integration projects such as the organisation of the ‘Black Sea Economic Cooperation’ in the Black Sea and Trans-Caucasus region and other sub-regional projects such as the ‘Levant Project’ in the East Mediterranean. This work argues that these regional integration projects have to be defined and analysed within the multiscalar neoliberal restructuring processes, in which the global capitalist spatiality has been re-territorialised – and resisted – on different socio-spatial scales. The uneven geographical development and its constant reproduction is recognised as the determinant factor of these regional integration projects, in which the Mexican and Turkish peripheral capitalist spatiality was first reconfigured and integrated into the centre through their incorporation into the NAFTA and European Customs Union. Subsequently, conditioned by the current neoliberal rescaling of the peripheral capitalist spatiality, the peripheral capitalism extended towards the ‘marginal’ spaces in their immediate geographies in the form of sub-regional integration and development projects. Therefore, this work presents the examination of the specific spatiotemporal processes as the only meaningful theoretical framework to analyse these regional integration projects, in which the uneven development of the peripheral capitalist social relations in Mexico and Turkey have been formed, reconfigured and extended.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:606265 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Erol, Ertan |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14110/ |
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