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:
“Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“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)
“Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)