The focus here is on Joseph Ben-David's attempt to use the centerperiphery dichotomy to explain the dynamics of scientific development. As we have seen in Chapter I, according to Ben-David's model, the countries that became scientific centers in modern times were those where the organizational structure for research was built on competition. This produced the innovations that raised the level of scientific activity not just in the country that had taken the lead but generally. Smaller countries constituted the periphery because for various reasons, mainly linguistic ones, they could not compete internationally with the organizational units at the center. All they could hope to do would be to copy the organization of scientific work at the center and thereby adopt its work orientations. In both these respects, however, the center would always retain a monopolistic position.

During the first third of the twentieth century, east-central Europe (defined here as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor, the nation-states of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) was made up of the small and, in the case of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, linguistically marginal, scientific communities that would make the region peripheral according to Ben-David's use of the term. But these countries were also part of Central Europe, which put them in close proximity both geographically and linguistically to Germany, at the time the scientific center of the world. East-central Europe possessed a well-developed, timehonored system of higher education, which in many respects was modeled on that of Germany.