The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (226 page)

 
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In the UK Parliament, a speech written by the government to be read by the monarch to Parliament at the beginning of each session. It is followed by a debate (‘Queen's Speech debate’ or ‘Debate on the Address’). Should the government not command a majority, it will be defeated at the end of this debate, and by convention must resign.

 
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See
Parliamentary Question
.

 
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Minimum number of members that must be present to make proceedings of a political body, such as a legislature or committee, valid. In the British House of Commons the quorum is forty members, in the House of Lords three (although votes can only be taken if there are thirty members present). In the US Congress the quorum for the Senate and House of Representatives is a simple majority of the membership.

 
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The word race is present in all languages of Latin origin; it is identical in English and French. In general, it merely refers to a group of common origin and is thus not clearly distinguishable from ethnicity or nationality. Eighteenth-century Englishmen would refer to ‘the royal race’ or ‘the race of Smiths’ or, as we still do, to ‘the human race’.
Some eighteenth-century theory, such as Buffon's
Histoire naturelle de l'homme
, published in 1778, can be seen as moving towards a more precise and technical concept of race, but it was not until the 1850s that any such account of race became generally accepted. In large part this was because of the development of biological theories which culminated in the publication of
Darwin's
Origin of Species
in 1859. The Comte de Gobineau in France published his
Essai sur l'inegalité des races humaines
and Ronald Knox his
Races of Men
in England. Both argued that races of human beings were significantly different; such significance was scientific but of ethical importance in so far as the argument suggested that people of different races must be treated differently. Gobineau, for example, argued that ‘Aryans’ (roughly Europeans) were uniquely capable of spirituality and a love of freedom, while the ‘black’ races were unintelligent, and the ‘yellow’ races of Asia unimaginative and materialistic. Races, in this sense, occur in many species; they consist of any group with common genetic characteristics, members of which are capable of interbreeding with members of different races in the same species, but have generally not done so.
The concept of race, used in this way, creates the possibility of both racialism and racism, which can be precisely distinguished, even if the distinction is obscured in much argument and ordinary usage. Racialism in general is the doctrine that racial categories are important in determining human behaviour. Racism is the tendency to identify oneself racially and to show hostility or lack of moral respect for members of other races. It would be possible, therefore, to be a scientific racialist without drawing any ethical racial conclusions (Gobineau was an opponent of slavery and rejected anti-Semitism).
In considering the history of racialism and racism it is essential to keep in mind the core weakness of the concept of race. Increasingly, the natural history of man has posited a common origin for the species. In that light, it is hardly surprising that biology has not discovered any evidence for the kind of morally significant genetic differences between races which were posited by the early racialist theories. Such differences as exist are fairly superficial and could not reasonably be taken to justify the different moral treatment of people on racial grounds. Geneticists have shown that we are probably all descended from a ‘mitochondrial Eve’, who lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago. The different peoples of the earth have not lived and bred so separately as racialist theory assumes. The core weakness of the concept shows itself in the contradictory variety of categories created by racialist theory. Gobineau's category of Aryans, for example, later absorbed into the racial doctrine of Hitler's Third Reich, originally distinguished the relatively pale-skinned Persian and North Indian races from the dark-skinned Dravidians of South India, but came to mean a variety of things varying from ‘Germanic’ to ‘white, non-Jewish’ (the latter meaning is equivalent to the category of ‘Caucasian’ used in the United States in classifying racial origins for the purpose of maintaining policies of
positive discrimination
). Many textbooks divided Europeans into ‘Alpine’, ‘Nordic’, ‘Slav’, and ‘Mediterranean’ types. In the British Isles, the perceived racial difference was between ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Celt’.
After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 racialism lost all semblance of scientific and moral respectability among international intellectual élites. We can, therefore, talk about ‘the century of racialism’ which lasted from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Racism, though, remained very much alive, even if, given its lack of coherent theories or categories, it became indistinguishable from ethnic chauvinisms and nationalisms.
Much of the politics of race stems from the phenomenon, during the century of racialism, of racialism becoming an ideology justifying a range of political institutions. The situation in the 1850s was a paradoxical one: in Europe there were increasing demands for democratization and in America the movement to abolish slavery was reaching its climax. Yet Europeans were extending themselves into colonial empires and the United States was pursuing its ‘manifest destiny’ to dominate its continent. A justification was therefore required for practices which, increasingly, treated Europeans as equals, but non-Europeans as inferior to them. In British India, after the defeat of the mutiny of 1857, a formal Empire was declared and a much greater separation maintained between‘white men’ and ‘natives’. Segregation was also introduced in the ‘reconstructed’ South of the United States; socialist theory also served to justify the treatment of ‘Red Indians’ by white men, which amounted to genocide in extreme cases. In Africa, as it was colonized by Europeans, there was an even more widely shared assumption that the ‘natives’ were racially inferior. (It must not be inferred, however, that imperialism was always justified racially; there were liberal imperialists who saw the differences between themselves and the indigenous population as developmental in nature.)
The kind of racialism which justified these practices did not, however, normally posit the existence of necessary hostility or a conflict of interests between races. Provided there was no interbreeding and the races stuck to their prescribed roles, race relations, it was assumed, could be harmonious and mutually beneficial. This was not true of the racial anti-Semitism developed by such writers as Houston Stewart Chamberlain , which became the accepted policy of the German Third Reich. That saw the very existence of another race as a threat to German identity and culminated in the extermination camps as a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’.
The politics of race since 1945 can be described as the politics of post-racialist racist institutions. In its most important forms it has consisted of powerful interest groups maintaining the structures of power which had existed when racialism was predominant. Globally, the most notable example of this was in South Africa where the victory of the (Boer) Nationalist Party led by Dr Henrik Verwoerd in 1948 led to the institution of
apartheid
, a policy of separate development for black, white, Asian, and ‘coloured’ (mixed race) peoples. Apartheid was often justified in purely cultural terms, but it operated on racial criteria and prohibited interracial marriage. It was a system maintained despite the opposition of a majority of the country and of the overwhelming majority of the world's states. South Africa became an international pariah until the 1990s.
In some respects, the position of the states of the ‘Deep South’ within the United States duplicated that of South Africa in the world as a whole ( see
civil rights
). In most respects, Southern segregation was dismantled by the 1970s, but it lingered on in obscure forms and places long after this. In the later period the politics of race in the United States focused on ‘positive’ moves to create social and economic equality for black people, such as the ‘bussing’ of children to mixed schools and the use of quota systems to ensure a proportion of good jobs for blacks. As a general rule, these policies were both less successful and less popular than the policies intended to secure equal political and legal rights.
Many Europeans countries had a post-imperial politics of race created by the immigration of large numbers of people from their former colonies: Indonesians and Surinamese in the Netherlands, North and West Africans in France, Asians and West Indians in Britain, Central Africans in Belgium. By the 1970s these minority groups averaged around 5 per cent of the population in those countries. To a varied extent, their existence aroused racist responses among some sections of the ‘white’ population and antiracist campaigns among the minorities themselves and liberal allies. Such antiracist campaigns varied in their emphasis from street action to protect people from racists to intellectual efforts to expunge racism and the remnants of racialism from the culture of the white population. In general, racism has shown a capacity to survive long after the demise of racialism as a serious intellectual belief.
LA