The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (127 page)

A formal accusation of wrongdoing. To impeach a public official is to accuse him of crimes or misdemeanours in the execution of his duties. Impeachment proceedings normally occur in the lower house of a legislature, with any subsequent trial taking place in the upper house. In England, prior to the development of ministerial responsibility to Parliament, impeachment was used as a means whereby the legislature sought to call to account ministers who saw themselves as answerable primarily, if not exclusively, to the Crown. For example, in 1677 the House of Commons impeached the King's chief minister, the Earl of Danby, for negotiating a treaty with the King of France. The House of Lords declined to convict Danby although he was dismissed and committed to the Tower for five years. There have been only two cases of impeachment in Britain in the last two hundred years—Warren Hastings was impeached in 1786 arising from alleged misgovernment in India, and Lord Melville was impeached in 1806 for corruption in the use of public funds.
In the United States the Constitution provides for the impeachment of federal officials charged with ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanours’. The House of Representatives has ‘the sole Power of Impeachment’ and all impeachments are tried in the Senate with the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court presiding. Conviction requires the agreement of two-thirds of the members present. Since 1787 seven federal judges have been removed following impeachment proceedings. President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, but survived in the Senate by one vote.
In 1974 the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives agreed three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon . Nixon was charged with the abuse of his power as President, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. Before these articles could be voted on by the full House the President resigned, after being informed that his impeachment and conviction were otherwise inevitable.
DM 

 
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Rooted in a geopolitical vision of enduring maritime Empire, the proposal that Britain and its dependencies should form a single autarkic economy, raising tariffs against the rest of the world but extending preferential rates to one another, attracted considerable support following the realization, in the 1890s, that the British economy was failing to keep pace with Germany. Joseph Chamberlain's divisive advocacy of the proposal through the Tariff Reform League, in the face of opposition from a majority of his Conservative and Unionist cabinet colleagues, helped bring about an overwhelming defeat of the government by the Liberals in 1906. The persistent British attachment to
free trade
survived the First World War but was finally overcome in 1931 as steeply declining relative competitiveness of British manufacturing industry coupled with more autarkic trade policies in the United States and elsewhere coincided with an unprecedentedly sharp cyclical downturn in world demand and trade after 1929. The system of imperial preference was partially applied to the self-governing dominions following the Ottawa Conference of 1932 and was underpinned by formalization of a largely coextensive sterling area, especially after the imposition of exchange controls in 1939. The system gradually withered after 1945 as changing trade patterns diminished the importance of intra-Commonwealth commerce while margins of preference were eroded by inflation and British membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The end, effectively, came with the twin blows of sterling devaluation in 1967 followed by British entry to the European Economic Community (now the EU) in 1973.
CJ 

 
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president
.

 
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Domination or control by one country or group of people over others, in ways assumed to be at the expense of the latter. Beyond this sweeping definition, there is much disagreement over the precise nature and the causes of imperialism, about what the clearest examples are, about its consequences, and therefore over the period which exemplifies it best.
The so-called new imperialism pertains to the imposition of colonial rule by European countries, especially the ‘scramble for Africa’, during the late nineteenth century. Many writers have construed imperialism in terms of what they believe were the motivating forces behind the territorial expansion. Among these,
Hobson
,
Luxemburg
,
Bukharin
, and especially Lenin focused on economic factors, such as the rational pursuit of new markets and sources of raw materials. The last named argued, in
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1917), that imperialism is an economic necessity of the industrialized capitalist economies, seeking to offset the declining tendency of the rate of profit, by exporting capital in the pursuit of investment opportunities overseas. For Lenin, imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
In a very different theory,
Schumpeter
(1919) defined imperialism as the non-rational and objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion. Imperialism is rooted in the psychology of rulers and the effects of surviving pre-capitalist social structures, not the economic interests of nation or class. Yet other accounts view imperialism as an outgrowth of popular nationalism, a function of the need to underwrite the welfare state which helps pacify the working class (notably in Britain), a matter of personal adventurism, an application of
social Darwinism
to struggles between races, a civilizing mission, and as simply one dimension of international rivalry for power and prestige. The latter in particular means that imperialism is potentially a feature of leading socialist as well as capitalist states.
All the above ‘push’ versions share an endogenous or Eurocentric focus. They are challenged by views which emphasize pull factors: that is, the contribution made at the periphery by local crises such as a power vacuum (perhaps induced by foreign intervention) and the collaboration of indigenous élites. Imperialism becomes a matter of accident as well as design.
The concept of ‘informal imperialism’ is said to render direct political control unnecessary, in the presence of other ways of exercising domination, for example through technological superiority or the free trade imperialism of a leading economic power, and cultural imperialism. Therefore, for modern neo-Marxists, capitalism in the West has been able to survive the process of decolonization, and imperialism outlives the age of annexation. Economic, financial, and social structures of dependence still remain, and are being continually reproduced by the multinational corporations in particular. The Third World is still exploited and is subjected to indirect political control. This imperialism without colonies was characterized by Ghana's first President, Kwame Nkrumah in his book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism (1965): ‘The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.’
Some analysts argue that the idea of imperialism loses its usefulness when it becomes equated with international capitalism, in which asymmetries of economic power and integration are inevitable. They reject monocausal explanations, and stipulate that the relations of political domination and subordination must be specified closely before imperialism can be inferred from the existence of unequal economic relations.
PBI 

 
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