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Center-periphery interaction patterns: the case of Arab visits, 1946–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

William R. Thompson
William R. Thompson
Affiliation:
Government and Research Associate in the Middle East Center at The Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.
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Abstract

Eight generalizations are extracted from two partially competing perspectives (Johan Galtung's “feudal interaction” and Jorge Dominguez's “international fragmentation”) on center-periphery interaction patterns. Seven of these generalizations are tested by examining head of state, governmental and ministerial visits to and from the Arab world between 1946 and 1975. Neither perspective is fully supported or disconfirmed by the data. Dominguez's emphases on limited resources and local problems, however, which lead in turn to relatively high intra-subsystemic interaction between peripheral actors and changing center-periphery patterns, appear to provide a more accurate analytical base than does the static model, with its emphasis on high levels of asymmetry and concentration, advanced by Galtung. Further tests of the two perspectives will be necessary in order to assess fully the geographical scope and the type of interaction patterns covered by these diachronic findings.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Spring 1981 , pp. 355 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1981

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References

1 Galtung, Johan, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,”Journal of Peace Research 8 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dominguez, Jorge E., “Mice That Do Not Roar: Some Aspects of International Politics in the World's Peripheries,”International Organization 25 (Spring 1971)Google Scholar.

2 For earlier analyses of visit flows, see Modelski, George, “Communism and the Globalization of Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 12 (12 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brams, Steven J., “The Structure of Influence Relationships in the International System,” in Rosenau, James N., ed., International Politics and Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Hughes, Barry and Volgy, Thomas, “Distance in Foreign Policy Behavior: A Comparative Study of Eastern Europe,” Midwestern Journal of Political Science 14 (08 1970)Google Scholar; Thompson, William R., “The Arab Sub system and the Feudal Pattern of Interaction Hypothesis: 1965,” Journal of Peace Research 7 (1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kegley, Charles W. Jr, and Howell, Llewellyn D., “The Dimensionality of Regional Integration: Construct Validation in the Southeast Asian Context,” International Organization 29 (Autumn 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kegley, Charles W. Jr, and Wittkopf, Eugene R., “Structural Chracteristics of International Influence Relationships,” International Studies Quarterly 20 (06e 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopherson, Jon A., “Structural Analysis of Transaction Systems: Vertical Fusion or Network Complexity” Journal of Conflict Resolution 20 (12 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thompson, William R. and Modelski, George, “Global Conflict Intensity and Great Power Summitry Behavior,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 21 (06 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 “The Comparison of Subordinate Systems” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, 1974), p. 5.

4 The lists have been compiled from the following studies: Binder, Leonard, “The Middle East as a Subordinate International System,”World Politics 10 (April 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frederic Pearson, “Interaction in an International Political Subsystem: The ‘Middle East,’ 1963–64,” Peace Research Society (International) Papers 15 (1970)Google Scholar; Brecher, Michael, “The Middle East Subordinate System and Its Impact on Israel's Foreign Policy,” International Studies Quarterly 13 (06 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cantori, Louis J. and Spiegel, Steven L., The International Politics of Regions: A Comparative Approach (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1970)Google Scholar; and Evron, Yair, The Middle East: Nations, Superpowers and Wars (New York: Praeger, 1973)Google Scholar.

5 The three sources are the Middle East Journal (Washington, D.C.); Mansoor, Menachim, Political and Diplomatic History of the Arab World, 1900–1967: A Chronological Study (Washington, D. C.: MCR Microcard Editions, 1972)Google Scholar; and the Arab Report and Record (London). Using these sources, Patrick Cole, Mary Grace Tavel, David Rapkin, Mima Nedelcovych, and the author collected the data and prepared them for analysis at a decidedly incremental rate between 1974 and 1978.

6 The main problem is that while Mansoor's Political and Diplomatic History improves (in terms of the number of visits reported) over time, the Middle East Journal appears to have become increasingly selective about which visits it chooses to report. Of the three, the Arab Report and Record is the best single source for visits although it is only available for the post-1965 era.

7 Mansoor's Political and Diplomatic History and the Arab Report and Record are explicitly biased in favor of reporting events involving Arab states. This means that data on visits between relevant non Arab states must come largely from the Middle East Journal, which, as noted, has declined in value as a data source over the 1946–1975 period.

8 The eighteen Arab States are Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen (PDR), Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Multilateral visits are excluded from consideration as are bilateral visits that appear to involve only medical and/or vacation purposes.

9 Earlier in this study, Israel was categorized as a nonperipheral actor.

10 Official visitors are usually but not always met by officials of the same rank. Regardless of the rank equivalence of the meeting, visits were scored according to the status of the highest ranking member of a visiting delegation. Of course, state representatives occasionally meet one another in states other than their own. In such cases, the visitor versus visited distinction is not relevant but such visits are included in the dyadic visit counts as long as they are bilateral in form.

11 This reflects an arbitrary division of the thirty year period into three equally long segments. The perspectives to be tested in this study are silent on this question of appropriate phases and the author is unaware of salient watershed points that are equally applicable to the eighteen Arab states or that are pertinent to the structure of center-periphery interactions.

12 For a discussion of the Ray Singer concentration index, see Ray, James L. and Singer, J. David, “Measuring the Concentration of Power in the International System,” Sociological Methods and Research 1 (05 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Information on the identities of independent members of the international system for the 1816–1978 period has been supplied to the author from the Correlates of War project through the courtesy of Professor J. David Singer (Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan).

14 Galtung's fourth generalization (G4) anticipates little interaction between peripheral actors that possess highly concentrated center interaction patterns if they are focused on different center actors. But if peripheral states are tightly connected to a center state through highly concentrated interaction patterns (G2) and if these same peripheral states rarely interact with any other peripheral states (G3), it is redundant to advance G4 as an independent observation. Ironically, this redundancy is decreased by the lack of empirical support for G3. However, the relative absence and nature of the pertinent concentration patterns (see Table 3) precludes the possibility of an adequate test of G4 in the context of Arab visit patterns.

15 Trading partner concentration is employed here simply as another attribute characterizing international interactions. One critique of this indicator may be found in Dieter Senghaas, “Further Analyses on Global Dependence: An Exchange with Bruce Russett,” in Deutsch, Karl W., Fritsch, Gruno and Jaguaribe, Helio, and Markovits, Andrei S., eds., Problems of World Modeling: Political and Social Implications (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977)Google Scholar. Senghaas's position is that reductions in partner concentration do not indicate reduced dependency under present conditions because new dimensions of dependency are emerging simultaneously. However, this point does not appear to affect directly the way in which partner concentration is used in this paper.

16 In this context, see Mc Gowan, Patrick J. and Smiths, Dale L. discussion on the differences between Latin American and tropical African dependency patterns in “Economic Dependency in Black Africa: An Analysis of Competing Theories,” International Organization 32 (Winter 1978)Google Scholar.

17 See Rapkin, David P., Thompson, William R. with Christopherson, Jon A., “Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the Cold War Era: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Validation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 23 (06 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 The Modern World System; Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 3Google Scholar.