Roccan Center-Peripheral Polarity

The center is “a place for the provision of services, information processing and transaction management at more or less long distances” ^[1] .
Regions - “a number of territorial units having some common features” ^[1] .
A communication network is the totality of connections between a center and its regions, as well as directly between the regions of one center.

Roccan’s “center-peripheral polarity” model is based on the study of the European political space, the respective territorial structures, their interaction with each other and their evolution. The scientist draws attention to the fact that two types of space should be distinguished:

• Geographical (physical)
• Social / cultural (affiliation space)

The meaning of this division is that if it’s easy for a person to cross a geographic border (as a tourist, an exchange student, a worker), then it’s not so easy to be accepted by the local indigenous people who live in another territory and who are the bearers of a different culture. Moreover, this dichotomy of the habitat, according to Roccan, did not appear in human society since the inception of statehood. It was also inherent in the times of the primitive communal system, where the geographical borders between the tribes coexisted with the social division into "friends" and "foreign" relatives.

As for the modern European countries, according to Roccan, within the borders of one state, there are three main groups of people who respectively control three groups of resources:

• Consumer goods / services (controlled by the commercial / industrial urban bourgeoisie)
• Information flows (controlled by church, university, school elite)
• Personnel (control alliances of landowners and military-administrative officials)

Over time, there are places where the concentration of a particular resource is high, and, accordingly, a certain group of people who control these resources begins to dominate in any territory. So the centers appear:

• Economic (high concentration of consumer goods / services, respectively a large% of the population is the commercial / industrial urban bourgeoisie)
• Cultural (pass the main Information flows, a large% of the population is church, university, school elite)
• Military-administrative (a large% of the population are landowners and military-administrative officials, who represent a human resource)

These centers are also distinguished by the presence of specific institutions in them: in economic centers, these are banks, exchanges, etc .; in the military-administrative, these are ministries, courts, etc. in cultural - universities, theaters, concert halls, etc.

Depending on how such centers are distributed across the territory, Roccan identifies the monocephalic (centers are concentrated in one place) and polycephalic (centers are scattered throughout the territory) state structure.

Each center is surrounded by territories that, on the one hand, it controls, and, on the other hand, depends on them in terms of various resources. Such territories are called regions and are:

• Homogeneous (consist of territories similar to each other in a certain way)
• Nodal (depend on a single center)
• Administrative (there is an accumulation of official statistics)
  

Moreover, settlements located in one region can be connected directly to each other, or through a single regional center. If the settlements of one region have communications only with the center, then such a communication network looks like a star graph . A striking example of such infrastructure can serve as the scheme of railways in France.
Regardless of the characteristics of the message, in any communication network, the center plays a dominant role, controlling the flow of resources and being the intersection of communication channels and communications between peripheries (regions). Moreover, depending on the type of center, peripheralization (i.e. the process of subordinating territories) can be of three types:

• Military conquest and administrative submission
• Economic dependence
• Cultural submission

Each individual is associated with his place of residence through socialization : his relatives and friends live here, he communicates with others in the same language and follows local customs and traditions. When a person moves to another country, his access to communication networks and collective decision-making processes in his new place of residence is extremely limited. Thus, he finds himself on the sociocultural periphery. Over time, you can get out of it if you master the language, traditions and customs of the country of residence. Moreover, there are times when people are at the stage of choosing their identification, which can be chosen in such a way that sociocultural boundaries do not coincide with territorial ones. The most striking examples of such discrepancies can be found in multi-component societies. For example, in Belgium on the territory of one country (the same geographical borders) people live who identify themselves as Flemings or Walloons (sociocultural borders), and many people in Spain do not identify themselves as Spaniards, but as Catalans .

The Roccan Center-Peripheral Model can be applied in the study of individual polities . Similar models of a more global level are offered by the school of world-system analysis , a prominent representative of which is I. Wallerstein , who developed models of a mini-system and a world-system, where the whole world space has the structure “center-semi-periphery-periphery-outer space”. A similar approach is reflected in the theory of dependence , where the dependence between the center and the periphery is considered as a dependence between developed and developing countries .

The Roccan model is a valuable contribution to science, and it is often quoted. Despite the fact that, as it may seem, with the processes of globalization and integration in the European space, the concept of a nation-state , from which Roccan pushed in his research, is losing its relevance. In some works, this model performs an explanatory function, as, for example, in an article by Diego Muro ^[5] , in which the scientist traces the process of nation-building in Spain from the 18th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Another study ^[6] , which takes as its basis the development of Rokkan, is devoted to the study of party landscape in three Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) after the local elections in 2014. The results of this study confirmed the relevance of the center-peripheral polarity model. Finally, the conceptual map of Europe, developed by Roccan, was also used by Irish scientists to answer the question of how the structure of Europe changed with the advent of the era of globalization and postmodernism ^[7] .

During its existence, the Roccan model has been criticized and revised ^[8] . Critics include Charles Tilly , who, in his essay ^[9], argues that the center-periphery polarity model no longer has explanatory power. The American political scientist recommends that scientists do not develop the conceptual work of Rokkan, but concentrate on studying the interactions between political actors and their influence on the processes of creating new political institutions.
Roccan is also criticized for the presence in his studies of the so-called conceptual stretch ^[10] . In other words, Rokkan, using the center-periphery model, to explain the reason and essence of the large-scale political transformations that have taken place in Europe over the centuries, overlooks the various forms of social structures and political organization that existed in any particular time period under consideration. Thus, the author sacrifices accuracy by increasing the breadth of coverage of the phenomena under consideration ^[11] .

• World-system analysis
• Center-Peripheral Model
• Peripheral capitalism

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/mobilization-center-periphery-structures-and-nation-building-a-volume-in-commemoration-of-stein- rokkan-edited-by-torsvikper-bergen-norway-universitetsforlaget-and-new-york-columbia-university-press-1981-pp-567-3800 / C83B19D314C39CF30233A6E3965EC62E
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.17549469.2004.tb00065.x
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537113.2016.1169063
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272166989
• http://www.lomonosov-fund.ru/enc/ru/encyclopedia:0127769