The construction of railroads, highways, pipelines, tunnels, and bridges is a result of an imagined construction of regions and in return helps solidify such imaginations. Critics of the role of technological advancement in fostering social, economic, political, and cultural integration between centers and peripheries argue that many such projects remain as political dreamscapes instead of serving as successful examples of transregional integration. Nevertheless, new political dreamscapes give way to new client networks from the European peripheries, solidified by real material networks of energy and transport. Currently promoting itself as a bridge and energy hub between Europe and Asia, Turkey champions such infrastructural developmentalism. This article examines how some political dreamscapes of energy-transport infrastructures, which are imagined to connect Eurasia to Europe via Turkey, relate to their actual construction. At a time when hopes for Turkey's political integration with its surrounding regions have waned, I critically interrogate whether economic integration by means of material infrastructures for energy and transport can substitute for political forms of integration. Keywords Energy; Infrastructure; Regionalism; Transport; TurkeyThe construction of railroads, highways, pipelines, tunnels, and bridges may arise from a specific imagination of integrated or networked regions. They may also create or intensify real regional networks and integration-albeit often in nonlinear, contradictory ways. Currently promoting itself as a bridge and energy hub between Europe, Asia, and the Levant, the Turkish government champions infrastructural integration to further its position as strong trade partner and political ally of states in these regions. Turkey's economic and politicocultural policies toward former Soviet "Turkic" Republics, its imperial history in the Middle East and North Africa, and, more recently, its pending membership in the European Union (EU) are seen by political and economic elites from the greater region as opportunities. Nevertheless, as in imperial, colonial, and modernizing times alike, tensions and conflicts are inherent in infrastructural regionalism as a project, not the least because infrastructure development is seen both as an all-inclusive solution and as an all-pervading problem (Edwards et al. 2009:365). This article looks into infrastructural regionalism, or region building by means of infrastructural development projects, in Turkey, where large-scale infrastructures currently mediate the exchange of energy commodities (human labor and fossil fuels) between sources from its East and markets to its West.The study of infrastructure is important from an anthropological perspective because infrastructure materializes energy flows in ways that make power struggles and economic inequalities apparent. Here I explore several energy-transport infrastructure projects, including one subsea tunnel and several pipelines, which I take as materialized power, to chart region-building effor...

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At a time when European integration faces many crises, the efficacy of public policies decided in Brussels, and in member state capitals, for managing the everyday lives of average Europeans demands scrutiny. Most attuned to how global uncertainties interact with local realities, anthropologists and ethnographers have paid scant attention to public policies that are created by the EU, by member state governments and by local authorities, and to the collective, organised, and individual responses they elicit in this part of the world. Our critical faculties and means to test out established relations between global-local, centre-periphery, macro-micro are crucial to see how far the EU's normative power and European integration as a governance model permeates peoples' and states' lives in Europe, broadly defined. Identifying the strengths and shortcomings in the literature, this review essay scrutinises anthropological scholarship on culture, power and policy in a post-Foucaultian Europe.

Turkey's Europeanisation, which began in 1959 and climaxed in 2005 with the opening of membership negotiations with the European Union (EU), has gradually turned into a death spiral, while those who were mandated with facilitating Turkey's EU membership bid gained more recognition, status and power. Taking this paradox to its centre, Diplomacy and Lobbying During Turkey's Europeanisation introduces to its reader the intricate backstage negotiations conducted by formal and informal actors of Turkey's Europeanisation through the corridors of power. Honing in on the role of diplomats and lobbyists during negotiations over Turkey's contentious EU membership bid, now stalled, which drove this candidate country both closer to and farther from the EU, the book presents the everyday actors and agents of Turkish Europeanisation, what their work entailed, which interests they represented, and how they did what they did. Turkey's Europeanisation saga presents a unique opportunity to understand how interstate actors negotiate their interests; what 'common interests' look like from their historically and culturally contingent perspectives; and what happens when actors work for their private, professional, public, personal or institutional interests, even when those interests may go against their mandate. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels, I argue here that public, private and corporate actors voicing economic, political and bureaucratic interests from all corners of Europe sought access to markets and polities through the Turkish bid instead of their mandate of facilitating Turkey's EU accession. Although limited progress was achieved in Turkey's actual EU integration, diplomats and lobbyists from both sides of the negotiating table contradictorily reaffirmed their expertise as effective negotiators, earning more recognition, status and power.