JOHAN GALTUNG of world history' and that 'the masses have boundless creative power'". Although nothing in what follows is contrary to what has just been said it would be less than self-reliant to give to the Chinese any kind of monopoly position relative to this precious idea. After all the idea of local self-reliance in the sense of the small community relying on its own forces, is as old as humanity itself: this was the normal form of human existence. Then something happened: above all the world-encompassing center-periphery formation built as a program into Western civilization 2 (with the West in the center, of course), put into (1) cultural practice through the spread of christianity and later on Western science and other forms of Western thought; into (2) socio-economic practice through capitalism and (3) military-political practice through colonialism, all of them wrapped together in the imperialism of the nineteenth and first hait of the twentieth centuries, and the neo-imperialism of our part of the twentieth century. 3 The neo-imperialist experience informs us that center-periphery formation is a much deeper phenomenon than political-military colonialism. One basic theoretical assumption is that one has to find its roots in the economic infra-structure e.g. in the centralizing networks and economic cycles spun by the transnational corporations. Another assumption, to which we would subscribe ourselves, working backwards with the list given above (also working backwards in history), would be that the roots above all are cultural/civilizational, and of a double nature. On the one hand there is one civilization in the world, the Western one, which not only considers itself the center of the world (that is natural) but to be universally valid, the center from which messages of all forms radiate to a periphery eager to receive the Western truth in material and immaterial forms. On the other hand, due to a number of geographical and historical circumstances the rest of the world has to a large extent let itself be impressed by the West and have to some extent accepted a position in the Periphery in exchange for some of the Center products, material and immaterial, that the Center has considered it not only its right, but its duty to distribute all over the world. ln other words, we postulate an 2 This i's a bas·ic theme of the "Trends in Western Civilization" research program of the Ohair in Conflict and Peace Resear•ch,University of Oslo. ' The standard term ls "neo-colonialism", but the phenomenon is broader in scope; i,t is actualily imperialism no •longer supported by mil·ltary-political colonialism in the classical sense. 50
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