How not to Globalise IR: 'Centre' and 'Periphery' as Constitutive of 'the International'/Uluslararasi Iliskiler Nasil K

• Author: Bilgin, Pinar
• Position: Regional International Relations and Global Worlds: Globalising International Relations

Introduction

In the 1970s, distinguishing between 'centre' and 'periphery' was offered as a key move by critical scholars who sought to move away from totalizing conceptions of the international which, at the time, prevailed in the study of world politics. (1) Typical of totalizing approaches to International Relations (IR) is a failure to consider the ideas and experiences of other constituents (be they states, social groups or peoples) while mistaking their own (particular) ideas and experiences for the whole. In the 2000s, scholars who adopted de-centring as a strategy for globalising IR (2) have embraced the notions of 'centre' and 'periphery' to highlight structural inequalities between North America and Western Europe and the rest of the world in the production of knowledge about world politics. (3) In doing so, however, de-centring IR scholarship has portrayed the 'periphery' as if it is a new entrant to the 'international'. There is an internal logic to such a move; if we're seeking the periphery's perspective only now, then presumably it was not present in the constitution of the international. That said, such a presumption is not in the spirit of globalising IR, which views the periphery as the 'constitutive outside'. (4) The periphery is 'outside' by virtue of having been left out of those mainstream narratives that the centre tells about the international; it is also 'constitutive' because those ideas, practices, and institutions that are typically ascribed to the 'centre' have been co-constituted by centre and periphery in toto.

The notion of 'constitutive outside' was offered by cultural theorist Stuart Hall in discussing how "the whole process of expansion, exploration, conquest, colonisation and imperial hegemonisation...[has] constituted the 'outer face', the constitutive outside, of European and then Western capitalist modernity after 1492". (5) IR scholars David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah have concurred, noting that such "refusal to recognise how the non-West and non-modern are already integrated as constitutive forces within the West and the modern is precisely how the colonial comes to be externalized". (6) But then, Blaney and Inayatullah's conceptualization of 'constitutive outside' goes beyond Hall's insofar as they understand constitutive dynamics not only in terms of the periphery providing bodies and lands whose labour and riches were usurped by the centre (I), or an/the 'other' to centre's 'self' (II), but also as thinking actors who have shaped ideas, practices and institutions of their own and those of the centre (III).

Where de-centring approaches capture the exploitative and self/other dynamics between centre and periphery (I and II), they overlook the co-constitutive dynamics behind the ideas, practices and institutions of centre and periphery (III). Furthermore, de-centring approaches typically portray those ideas, practices and institutions as having autonomously developed by 'Europe' and or the 'West'. It is by virtue of overlooking periphery as co-constitutive of those ideas, practices, and institutions that make up the international that de-centring approaches have allowed totalizing conceptions of the international to remain unscathed.

The first part of the paper revisits the 1970s' centre-periphery approaches that sought to do away with totalizing conceptions of the international, and recovers their notions of 'centre' and 'periphery'. Part two highlights the limitations of the de-centring approaches of the 2000s that have not always been attentive to the critical concerns of earlier theorisations about 'centre' and 'periphery'. The final part of the paper underscores the need for studying the periphery as 'constitutive outside'.

Revisiting Centre-Periphery Theorising of the 1970s

Centre-periphery approaches are most familiar to students of IR in the writings of Latin America's Dependency School and the World-System scholarship. Norwegian Peace Research scholar Johan Galtung, who did not belong to either school, utilised the same notions when fleshing out his 'structural theory of violence. Let us consider the notions of 'centre' and 'periphery' as found in these three bodies of work.

The Dependency School emerged as the culmination of years of dissatisfaction and debate in ECLA (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America) circles regarding the limitations of modernization and under/development accounts in IR and Economics. These ideas found their first sustained formulation in the writings of Latin America's scholars who sought to locate their experiences in the world economy and offered an explanation in the form of a hierarchical conception of the international comprising a centre and periphery. (7) In Dependency School's conception, 'centre' and 'periphery' were not delineated in spatial terms, as with the First and Third World (the Second World being an ideologically distant cousin of the First). (8) Nor did they conceive of the international as structured around nation-state economies, some at the centre and others at the periphery. Rather, Dependency School thinking was an attempt to do two things to begin with: First, to highlight that, in the Latin America context "global market forces, not domestic ones, have determined national economic development or underdevelopment" (9)--a process that Andre Gunder Frank neatly captured as the "development of underdevelopment". (10) Second, the Dependency School underscored that global market forces have multiple actors pursuing their agenda in multiple places. Some of those who pursue the agenda of global market forces are located in the so-called 'Third World. And some of those who resist the said agenda can be found in the so-called 'First World. Hence Cardoso's reminder that "if the initial studies of dependency possessed any novelty, it certainly was not the affirmation that dependency exists, but it was rather the characterization and search for an explanation of emerging forms of dependency". (11)

Accordingly, Dependency School thinkers designed research "to characterize a 'transnational capitalism' and to estimate its effects, not only on the peripheries, but also on the very centre of capitalist economies". (12) Writing on the reception of dependency thinking in the United States, Cardoso noted that he was not surprised by the way the ideas of the Dependency School seemed to resonate among scholars in the U.S., for he thought "it explained more accurately certain changes occurring in Latin America, while certain changes in the countries of the centre itself (above all the U.S.) beginning in the 1960s, brought out the inadequacy of the assumptions of structural-functionalism". (13) Cardoso elaborated in the following way:

"The protest of American blacks, the war in Vietnam and the movement in opposition to it, the counterculture, the student movement, the feminist movement, etc, all demanded paradigms that were more sensitive to the historical process, to social struggles, and to the transformation of systems of domination. In such a perspective, analyses of dependency correspond better to this search for new models of explanation, not only in order to comprehend what is happening in Latin America, but also what is happening in the U.S." (14) What came across clearly in Cardoso's writings was an awareness of the experiences of the periphery at the "centre of capitalist economies". This may appear surprising in that, years later, the "Global South' was offered as a 'new' notion to capture the so-called "new geography of production" and the presence of a first world in the Third World and a third world in the First World. (15) Yet, in Cardoso's telling, the notions of 'centre' and 'periphery' and 'emerging forms of dependency' were developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the Dependency School to do just that. Put differently, while their empirical focus remained limited to Latin America, the set of ideas developed by the Dependency School offered a novel conception of the international as a hierarchy comprising a centre and periphery. That said, this novel conception was not proposed as an alternative to mainstream IR's conception of the international as anarchical, but rather side-stepped it. For, centre-periphery approaches were interested in what happens amidst anarchy. Hence their focus on hierarchy within, between and beyond states.

A second body of work theorizing centre-periphery dynamics is found in Immanuel Waller-stein's World-System approach. In a key article introducing World-System analysis, Wallerstein noted that he took Frank's analysis of 'development of underdevelopment' in Chile as a starting point and extrapolated to the rest of the world: "capitalism involves not only appropriation of surplus-value by an owner from a labourer, but an appropriation of surplus of the whole world-economy by core areas" and that "capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world economy and not of nation-states. (16) As such, the international, conceived hierarchically, was the unit of analysis for Wallerstein. (17)

Writing around the same time as Dependency School and World-System scholars was the Norwegian Peace Researcher Johan Galtung, who incorporated the notions of centre and periphery into his 'structural theory of violence. While his is not a name that springs to mind when thinking about centre-periphery approaches, Galtung's key contribution to the study of world politics, the concept of 'structural violence' focused on centre-periphery dynamics cognisant of their economic, cultural and political dimensions. Galtung wrote:

"The world consists of Centre and Periphery nations; and each nation, in turn has its centres and periphery. Hence our concern is with the mechanism underlying this discrepancy, particularly between the centre in the Centre and the periphery in the Periphery. In other words, how to conceive of, how to explain, and how to counteract inequality as one of the...