The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (193 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
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pair
Parliamentary practice, where members voting opposite ways on legislation agree to co-operate about which measures to vote on. Paired members can thus be absent from the chamber when votes are taken, without affecting the outcome of the vote.
Palestine Liberation Organization
panachage
In a list system of proportional representation, the procedure for allowing voters to select candidates from more than one party; the practice of such selection.
Pan-Africanism
A movement, founded at the turn of the century, to secure equal rights, self-government, independence, and unity for African peoples. Inspired by Marcus Garvey , it encouraged self-awareness on the part of Africans by encouraging the study of their history and culture. Leadership came from the Americas until the Sixth Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, UK, in 1945, which saw the emergence of African nationalist figures, notably Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta , with a programme of African ‘autonomy and independence’. With independence, however, the concept of a politically united Africa was soon replaced by the assertion-within colonial frontiers-of competing national interests.
IC 
Pan-Africanist Congress
Pan-Arabism
The idea that the Arabs are a distinct people with a common language, history, and culture. Pan-Arabism emerged in the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. There was little interest in or agitation on behalf of it prior to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, except among Christian Arabs. In general, the Arabs of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the First World War did not dissent from the Ottoman Empire, nor organize against it. Indeed, a Pan- Islamic movement had emerged in reaction to the efforts of the Ottoman Empire to reform itself by using European law codes and institutional forms and in opposition to increasing European pressures and penetration. Pan-Islamism was promoted by the Ottoman Sultan as a means of further integrating and mobilizing his subjects against the centrifugal forces undermining the unity within the Empire. When the shock of the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the imposition of the Mandates at the expense of the Arab Kingdom of the Amir Faisal in 1920 settled in upon the Arabs, some argued that Pan-Arabism had emerged as a substitution for Pan-Islamism with the more narrowed focus on the Arabs rather than on Muslims. For others, it was an expression of resistance to the colonialism of Britain and France that had imposed a territorial division upon the region. For yet others, Pan-Arabism was an expression of opposition to the effort of the newly formed states and governments of the mandates to encourage separate national identities.
Arab nationalism is generally referred to as a Pan-Arabist ideology incorporating the above ideas but with the added ultimate political objective of Arab unity. The latter was interpreted by the Ba'athists as meaning the formation of a single independent Arab state incorporating the Arab nation. The other main view of Arab unity associated with Jamal Abd al-Nasir was that of solidarity among Arab governments, aligning themselves with each other and not with outsiders.
While Arabism, the foundation of the
ethnos
in Arab nationalism, did not deny the Islamic element, the Pan-Arab nationalism that evolved was secular in character. Until the humiliating defeat by Israel in the June 1967 war, it attracted the hopes and support of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. This defeat had the corrosive effect of undermining faith in an already weakening ideology that had served as a guide, a strategy, and a driving force in the region that competed with other developing local nationalisms. It was apparent that Arab governments were not inclined to integrate, nor able to unite on the basis of solidarity, nor co-operate to defeat the Zionist state of Israel. From this point onward, Pan-Arab nationalism began to lose ground to political Islam.
BAR 

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