Effects
The semi-peripheral nations of the world have played an important role to world trade and interaction since early periods of globalized trade. This "middle ground" between the very powerful cores and the backwaters of the far periphery allowed those two zones to interact with greater ease. For example, during the 13th-century world system, the semi-periphery areas around Europe's Mediterranean Coast facilitated trade between the peripheries of the more manufacturing based Northern Europe and the cores of India and China. John Markoff, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, also notes that political developments, particularly in the advancement of democracy, originate in the semi-periphery. He notes that innovations in democracy came from the semi-periphery rather than the more established, stable core nations, where profit discourages great reform, or the extremely poor periphery where instability makes reform too dangerous to attempt. It has been within semi-peripheral nations where democratic reforms like the expansion of suffrage and the institution of the secret ballot have been implemented.
Read more about this topic: Semi-periphery Countries
Famous quotes containing the word effects:
“Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Society’s double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate.”
—Anne Tucker (b. 1945)
“Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)