inXuenced by law, such as the French ‘‘science administrative,’’ or with mere
descriptions of formal institutional settings, as in the case of prebehavioral
American public administration theory, have been cut.
Territorial politics borrows massively from disciplines like political science,
sociology, and economics. Streams and domains like local government studies
(Chisholm 1989 ), community studies (Aiken and Mott 1970 ), policy analysis
(Pressman and Wildavsky 1973 ), urban aVairs (Goldsmith 1995 ), not to mention
electoral and party studies (Gibson 1997 ), international relations, and economic
sociology, paved the way for the understanding of intergovernmental relationships
as such.
A center–periphery paradigm has been quite inXuential in political science.
Within society, a center has the monopoly of deWning what is sacred, with the
ultimate and irreducible content in the realm of beliefs, values, and symbols (Shils
1975 ). The periphery is taken to be in itself awkward, narrow-minded, unpolished,
and unimaginative. To avoid impoverished autonomy, it accepts enriching depend-
ence and defers to the center as providing the locus of excellence, vitality, and
creativity. Centrality provides cultural salvation. The center also controls action
tools such as roles and institutions that embody these cultural frameworks and
propagate them. Dependency theories studying underdevelopment (Frank 1967 )
and world order (Wallerstein 1974 ) argue that conXict loaded domination rela-
tionships link core or metropolis to satellites or peripheries. The center imposes a
principle of order, acts as a dominator, and structures a unitary capacity to a
periphery that is fragmented, disorganized, and not cohesive.
Territorial politics has reached the status of a proper domain. It has its own
research agenda. Asymmetries, culturalXows, and dependencies are considered as
research questions. They no longer should be treated as postulates. It is up to
inquiry to verify how far, in a given empirical context, the center also depends on
the periphery, if the relationships between national, regional, and local levels really
are transitive or linear, in which conditions the role of the center is stable,
increasing, or losing ground, and whether more than one center may exist.
6 Approaches and Debates
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
A common domain does not imply uniformity and consensus. Debates are
permanent and diVerentiation exists.
Some forms of national insularities suggest a diversity of emphasis and agendas.
Countries such as the USA, Britain, and France had entered theWeld quite early in
territorial institutions 285