‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’: Cores, peripheries and peripheral nationalism at the core and periphery of the world economy

Abstract

In the past several years social scientists have elaborated ‘core- periphery models’ of political change. Such models sought to overcome the nation-state and ‘whole-nation’ bias in comparative research. In these models cores and peripheries are distinguished by three characteristics: a set of attributes for each, characteristics of exchange relations and characteristics of interaction patterns. Central to these models is a territorial structuring of political behavior in which cores and peripheries form geographical contexts for politics. Thus, spatial relations between cores and peripheries achieve significant explanatory power with diffusion processes from the core to the periphery and the peripheral reaction to these playing a key role in accounting for political behavior in each. One such political manifestation is peripheral nationalism, defined as an emotive reaction of cultural defense against the diffusion of economic, political and cultural dominance from the core. This paper examines three explanations for the rise of peripheral nationalism in late nineteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century Argentina, marking two sites in the core and periphery of the world system. The results demonstrate similarities in social origins of peripheral nationalism at both sites as the product of the economically and culturally marginal middle strata threatened by the expanding influence of the core. However, the research also supports the hypothesis that at the periphery of the world economy during times of economic contraction the economically and culturally marginal lower strata may be mobilized into mass movements. The research concludes that both within-nation-state and global core-periphery dynamics provide concepts for understanding political behavior.