Rationalizing Core-Periphery Relations: The Analytical Foundations of Structural Inequality in World Politics

Abstract

World system theory characterizes world politics as a three-tiered structure of inequality (core, semiperiphery, periphery) which manifests itself along three dimensions: an unequal distribution of global wealth, asymmetrical economic dependence, and political inequality. While this is a plausible description of the international system, world system theory cannot provide a behaviorally-based causal explanation of this core-periphery structure because the theory is wedded to a structuralist or methodological collectivist explanatory framework. As a result, world system theory treats the international system's core-periphery structure as an unproblematic assumption. In order to address this deficiency, this paper presents a rational choice theory in which wealthy and poor states choose core and peripheral positions respectively. Specifically, I argue that when wealthy states strategically interact with poorly endowed states by rendering economic exchanges contingent upon the acceptance of a subordinate status, then a core-periphery structure emerges as the rational outcome under certain conditions. Like world system theory, my analysis identifies an inegalitarian distribution of wealth as one of the necessary conditions for the existence of a core-periphery structure. But unlike world system theory's canonical model, this paper also identifies, as additional necessary conditions for core-periphery relations, attenuated competition within the core for control over the periphery and normal distributions of state preferences with respect to key economic and political values.