Structuralism, lately freshening the air of many venerable institutions and discourses, has been fruitfully deployed in what Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881) once termed the ‘dismal science’, economics. The opposition core/ periphery has been used to demonstrate the structural relationship between the wealth of the First World and the poverty of the Third. Like all productive oppositions, core/periphery signifies a relationship and not an essential condition. Thus, in one version, Scotland may be seen as part of the developed world, but in another version with a somewhat longer timespan, that country (like all the Celtic margins of the British Isles) may instead be seen in a peripheral relationship with the Anglo-Saxon core of England.

The core/periphery opposition fashioned within economic discourse is now being applied to questions of culture and ideology with dramatic results. The power of the core region does not lie simply in the disposition of its periphery or peripheries’ economic and political affairs. It also lies in the core's control over the institutions and practices of discourse production, such as the mass media, which contribute to the ordering of what goes on inside the heads of the peoples of the periphery or peripheries. Thus it is that (certainly over the last 250 years, and arguably for much longer) the identity of the Scots has been defined elsewhere than in Scotland. The new social type, homo oeconomicus, initially coming to ascendancy in the eighteenth-century dynamic core societies of England and France, was defined by the ideologues and artists of those societies within the mode of Romanticism, and by means of a process of structural opposition. Those core societal ideologues and artists created an Other (let us call the latter homo celticus, although similar identities were assigned to other so-called primitive peoples throughout the world) who was all the things that homo oeconomicus was not:

Oppressed peoples the world over know this discourse to their bitter cost. It may take an overtly hostile form (the ‘savage’ mode) or an apparently benign one (the ‘poetic’ mode), but it matters little. What is important is that the Celtic Other (or African, or Polynesian, and so on) is allocated their place and constructed within a discourse enunciated elsewhere.