The notion of geopolitical  “periphery.”

The concept of periphery used here refers strictly to what can be called the geopolitical periphery. Being on the geopolitical periphery is an analytic virtue because it makes for more visible policy reform in response to changing external conditions. It is defined as a situation where a nation is engaged in, but not central to the pressing military-security issues of the moment, be it through direct engagement in conflict or involvement in larger alliance decision-making. It does not refer to the core-periphery distinction commonly used by worlds-systems theory and its successors, and as the case sample shows, it is not a product of the global North versus South divide. It does not refer to economically peripheral countries in a context of regionalization and globalization of production, trade and exchange, although it acknowledges the overlap that may occur between economic and military integration processes. As used here “periphery” is not synonymous with “marginality.” The differentiation is based on the fact that these countries are involved, even if not by choice, in the overarching military-security engagements of recent times. They are not excluded from them. Moreover, when it comes to regimes, “marginal” implies instability or inconsequentiality of the regime. Yet the first criterion for selection used here is not the relative stability or consequence of the regimes in question (although democratic regime stability is a factor in the analysis of the case studies), but their relative distance from international military-security decision-making during fluid times. 

It is this commonality that binds the case studies together as a sample: their relative distance from the decision-making that governs the major conflicts of the last two decades. After all, none of these countries has a vital national interest at stake in these conflicts other than a commitment to international norms and principles and support for larger allies. This does not mean that they are inconsequential in the scheme of things, or as analytic subjects. To the contrary, as actors that must respond to changing external conditions without having decisive influence in the decision-making that created them, small peripheral democracies are excellent subjects for the study of policy reform in fluid times, be it in the field of military politics or others. This is due to what might be called the “ripple effect” of world politics: ideological and policy change in the center has a stronger impact the further from the center of decision-making, but still connected to it, that a country gets. As a result small peripheral democracies are, in a phrase, microanalytic barometers of larger international trends (see Buchanan and Nicholls, 2003).

What these countries all share is physical distance from the major political and military power centers around which issues of global security revolve, and physical distance from the military conflicts in which their armed forces are involved. Physical distance in large measure determined their traditional status on the geopolitical periphery. Portugal is located on the southwestern corner of Europe, Chile on the southwestern edge of the Western Hemisphere, New Zealand in the southwestern corner of the Pacific Rim. This has historically given them a measure of insulation from direct threats by larger adversaries (Portuguese concerns about Spain and Chilean concerns about Argentina, Bolivia and Peru notwithstanding), as well as physical distance from the major conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Even so, given the global reach of military power mentioned earlier, their relation to global conflicts has been more political than physical, in the form of neutrality or alliance with larger powers. 

That has been reflected in their approaches towards World War Two, the Korean War and Vietnam conflict. Remaining neutral in World War Two, Portugal spent decades on the outskirts of NATO decision-making in spite of its being a founding member of the alliance. Chile, another neutral in World War Two (although, like Portugal, its Axis sympathies were undisguised), was by 1970 no more than, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” Militarily, New Zealand offered its subjects to a variety of UK and US-led wars during the twentieth century and well into the next. These make for different legacies when confronting the current context in which security politics are constructed. The bottom line is that it is, first and foremost, spatial location that makes these countries members of the geopolitical periphery, a situation that continues to do this day. From that point the political aspects of the military-security equation can be factored in.

The consequences of these legacies are discussed ahead. For the purposes of the argument, the focus here is exclusively on geopolitically peripheral democracies, nations that reside on the geographic fringe of the major military alliances and coalitions that have dominated the world scene in the last 25 years, although continuing to have ongoing involvement or engagement with them. As it turns out, the reasons for geopolitically peripheral status differ among the cases, something that in turn has an impact on the way in which each country has approached the changing international security environment of the last two decades.

Next: Internal versus External Security.