On the Periphery of Society

Edward Shils conceived of social structure as comprising a sacred, charismatic central zone and a periphery whose membership is constituted in relationship to it. Distance from the core produces a painful feeling of being an excluded outsider, feeding resentment and grievance. Central Europeans are now members of the European community, but peripheral to its central institutions and values, which has led to a widespread feeling of second-class citizenship, reactive ethnic identity, and oppositional sentiments. This chapter illustrates these peripheralization processes with the case of eastern Germany. These exclusionary dynamics help explain the appeal of the populist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party.=