ABSTRACT
Centre-periphery conflicts vary according to the particular characteristics of the nation-states themselves. From the point of view of territorial control by political power, the two historic state models have been the unitary state and the confederation of states. Other models have appeared in the era of the nation-states, the federal state and the autonomous state. France and the United Kingdom, strong and weak models respectively, are both unitary states. The characteristics of historical empires are the agglutination of a plurality of peoples, the organisation of a vast space and the tendency toward expansion. De-colonisation consists of the transformation of the old colony into its own centre, which frees it from the metropolis, and changes the liberated territory into a nation-state. The nation-states which emerged from the break-up of the empires often had in common the artificial nature of their borders, especially in those cases where the international context had decided its location.
