Center-Periphery Relations (Federalism) Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The center-periphery relations of interdependence are of the utmost importance for the understanding of politics in modern social life. This relationship not only refers to local and national contexts but extends to the international level as well. There is a center, or central zone, that impinges in various ways on those who live within the ecological domain in which the society exists. According to this diffusions approach, the relationship to this central zone constitutes membership in society.

Such a relationship ought to be analyzed from the double perspective of centralization and peripheral accentuation. Center and periphery have often been considered in terms of subordination of the latter to the former. Likewise, a double dimension between horizontal and vertical relationships has been drawn when referring either to the strict geographical dimension or to a system of functional interaction. In the latter, a set of key decision-making powers form the center and the periphery is composed of participants in the interaction system who have the least influence on the central group and on the decision making. The relations of dominance and dependence are not restricted to their political forms but can also affect economic and social dimensions.

Theories of ethnocentrism and internal colonialism have stressed those abilities of state cores to implement programs of national assimilation over peripheral areas. William Graham Sumner coined ethnocentrism as the technical name for which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled down and rated with reference to it. Applied to territorial politics, ethnocentrism manifests in the disregard shown by the state core toward the economic development of the periphery.

Internal colonialism is viewed as a structure of social relations based on domination and exploitation among culturally heterogeneous groups within the state. Accordingly, the superordinate, or center, seeks to stabilize and monopolize its advantage over the subordinate, or periphery, by means of policies aimed at the institutionalization of a stratification system (e.g., developmental priorities given to cities to the detriment of resource-extractive rural areas). This is labeled as cultural division of labor and produces a reaction heightening cultural or ethno territorial distinctiveness in both core and periphery.

Modernization theory has pointed out that both processes of state formation and nation-building were accelerated by the development of industrial capitalism in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. The enforcement of one central authority on peripheral regions or subordinated political groups, often socially and culturally different, seemed to be necessary. But, contrary to what was originally suggested, such centralization has often provoked a periphery accentuation and a subnational mobilization in quest for local autonomy.

In some industrial advanced democracies, political entrepreneurialism and clientelism in center-periphery relations have aimed at consolidating the territorial bases of power distribution and the preservation of channels of influence between central and local elites (e.g., Italy’s First Republic until 1992). Often such power arrangements have been articulated by means of informal and “behind-the-door” arrangements, whereby subnational political actors have sought to secure their resources by means of sustaining political elites and parties at the central level. These exchange mechanisms have come increasingly under pressure to comply with the democratic principle of accountability in the intergovernmental relations between the central administration, the regions, and the local authorities. Multilevel governance is, therefore, increasingly shaped by the formalization of administrative arrangements, aimed at a more efficient planning and policy making, particularly in decentralized polities. The polycentric nature of many states and supranational political entities, such as the European Union, has provoked apparently divergent developments. Thus, if new economic policies have allowed for monetary centralization and a growing harmonization of single-market policies, the quest for policy decentralization also claims a political redistribution of powers according to the subsidiarity principle (decisions to be taken supranational only if local, regional, or national levels cannot perform better).

At the international level, Immanuel Waller stein has put forward the world-system approach that emphasizes a global rather that a state-centric perspective. It has been argued that since the sixteenth century, a capitalist world system was gradually formed having some European nations as core countries while other countries became subordinated and provided cheap labor and raw materials. Later on, other semi peripheral countries (e.g., the postcolonial United States) achieved some degree of industrialization and were less dominated by the economies of the core. This world-system approach has been criticized by its overriding analytical focus on the market and its emphasis on the over determination of the economic upon other political and social factors.

Bibliography:

Mény,Yves, and Vincent Wright, eds. Centre-Periphery Relations in Western Europe. London: Allen and Unwin, 1985.
Rokkan, Stein, and Derek Urwin. Economy,Territory, Identity: Politics of West European Peripheries. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1983.
Shils, Edward. Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. Vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
The Modern World-System.Vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press, 1980.
The Modern World-System.Vol. 3,The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1989.