The internal political structuring of the European nation-states took place through the formation of cleavage structures, the articulation of corporate interests, and the development of center–periphery relations. This chapter deals with the third of these aspects and more precisely with the implications of the process of European integration for the established national system of territorial relationships. Once the old forms of pre-modern territorial representation were superseded by functional and crosslocal systems of sociopolitical cleavages and of interest articulation, the relations between the political center of the state and the subnational territories were set up via institutional arrangements moving from a maximum of federalist decentralization to a maximum of unitary centralization, and by political arrangements involving a specific mix of partisan, bureaucratic, and “local notables” linkages. Yet, the older territorial distinctiveness of a cultural, economic, and political nature on which the boundaries of the older and newer nation-states superimposed did not disappear altogether in the process of modernization triggered by the British industrial revolution and by the French political revolution.

The following chapter considers the possibly changing nature of centers and peripheries in this new context as compared with the historical peripheries in Europe. The core theoretical question can be summarized in the following terms:

• Historical peripheries of a cultural, economic, or politico-administrative nature were the result of the process of territorial, cultural, and economic retrenchment associated with the formation of the nation-state and national economy. The closure of boundaries for various types of transactions (goods, messages, peoples, capital) that the formation of the European system of states produced actually determined the formation and strengthening of new centers and the peripheralization of other territories.

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