Transnational corporations, state and classes in Turkey: the rise of new forms of dependent development in global automotive value chains

Is dependency theory dead as an explanation of underdevelopment in today’s global economy? Has the rise of new economic powerhouses and an increasing share of higher value-added manufacturing in the global south cast the notions of subordination, peripherality and dependence into the dustbin of history? Today, a broad consensus answers these questions in the affirmative. In stark contrast to this commonly-held contention in the current development discourse, this study aims to bring these notions back to critical development studies by offering an up-to-date and analytically valid conceptualisation of dependency in today’s global south. Taking the historical-structural dependency perspective as a point of departure, the study revisits and builds upon the notion of dependent development by drawing on a set of conceptual insights derived from Schumpeter’s theory of innovation, Global Value Chain analyses and a class-relational articulation of the developmental state. In doing so, the study shows how core-like and periphery-like activities have clustered in time and space, leading to polarisation in today’s global economy, and how new forms of dependency have been spatially re-produced along hierarchically-structured global value chains through the interplay of transnational corporations, states and classes. Based on this framework, the study then explores the limits and prospects of capitalist development and its implications for wider society in today’s global south. With occasional references to cases of dependent development in Latin America and East Asia, the study examines changing dynamics and rise of new forms of dependency relations in Turkey and the Turkish automotive industry. Adding a sense of change and movement, the study shows how dependent nature of Turkish capitalist development has concretised and taken new forms along automotive value chains through shifting configurations of class forces and state-society relations, and their manifold interactions with the world economy, from the early years of modern Turkey to the present.