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:
“One of the effects of a safe and civilised life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)