World Polity, World-Systems, or World Civilizations? The Strucutre of the Global Embassy Network.

This paper examines the structure of global embassy relations between nation-states. Studies of embassies are virtually absent in the field of sociology, despite that globalization has created extreme increases in diplomatic and cultural exchange among countries. Review of relevant literature including world polity, world-systems, and world civilizations theory in the context of embassies point to divergent predictions in the structure of embassy relations; world polity proposes a fairly even pattern, world-systems theory asserts hierarchical structure, and world civilizations theory argues for a culturally fragmented pattern. Structural equivalent blockmodeling techniques of social networks analysis is used to examine the organization of embassy associations across nations. Overall, the results illustrate a very stratified core-periphery structure of embassy relations, which also has some limited consistency with the ideas of world polity theory and world civilizations hypothesis. The results imply that economically-powerful core nations also dominate embassy relations, and likely use their influence in this network to structure foreign relations to their own benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]