Europe: core, peripheries and postcolonial relations

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Europe: core, peripheries and postcolonial relations

Journal Title: Соціологія: теорія, методи, маркетинг - Year 2017, Vol 20, Issue 1

Abstract

Most concepts of Europe as a unitary community are characterised by a bipolar scheme where the notion of Europe appears together with contrastive representations of an “anti-Europe” (Arab-Muslim culture, Asia, the Orient, Africa, etc.). There is a mirrored reflective relationship by which the former’s basic traits are identified through a presumed diametrical opposition with the lat ter’s. However, it is misleading to think of Europe as a united civilisation, or even worse, as a sum of cultural areas. As suggested by a Hungarian historian Jenö Szücs, a French historian Fernand Braudel and an American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, Europe must be considered as a system of strictly (inter)dependent yet structurally diverse “historical regions”. The rise of the capitalist “world-system” and the emergence of a new international division of labour transformed those regions into core, peripheries and marginal external areas. The divide between centre and peripheries suggests the existence of power relations, which are postcolonial by nature. The consequence of such postcolonial situation implies a division of European societies into hegemonic and subaltern ones.

Authors and Affiliations

CHRISTIAN GIORDANO

Keywords

Europe. historical regions. centre. peripheries. postcolonial power relations. hegemonic and subaltern societies

EP ID EP333507
DOI -
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