The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (268 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

On 26 July 1956 the President of Egypt, Jamal Abd al-Nasir , announced that his government was nationalizing the Suez canal. The action was a response to the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the building of the Aswan Dam, and led to a joint military attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel.
Anthony Eden , the British Prime Minister, feared Nasir's brand of Arab nationalism, and harboured a deep personal dislike of Nasir, seeing him as a new Hitler. Eden wanted Nasir overthrown, and believed a military operation to take control of the canal would enable this. The French, who were also concerned about the growth of Arab nationalism, agreed to mount a joint military operation. However, the action of the Egyptian government was not against international law, and so the British and French had to find a
casus belli.
This led to the secret involvement with Israel, who offered to invade the Sinai Peninsula, and advance towards the Suez region, giving the British and French the excuse that shipping through the canal was at risk, and invasion necessary to protect it.
The Israelis attacked Egypt on 30 October, and British forces landed in Egypt on 4 November. Militarily the operation was successful, but politically it was a disaster. It was glaringly obvious that the grounds stated for the invasion were spurious, and merely an excuse for military action. This led to a schism between Britain and the United States, with President Eisenhower opposed to any military action. The United States invoked intense diplomatic pressure, and when Britain faced a run on the pound which threatened reserves, the United States withheld assistance until a military withdrawal was complete.
Faced with the humiliation caused by the failure of the Suez campaign Anthony Eden was forced to retire as Prime Minister. In France the failure was blamed on British and American duplicity, and was a factor in the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958. Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai. Nasir became the hero of Arab opposition to the West. Although Eden's successor, Harold Macmillan , managed to restore Anglo-American relations, the Suez crisis symbolized Britain's reduced status in the postwar world, and the economic power of America.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Originally meaning prayers, especially for the souls of the departed, the senses relating to the right to vote emerged in the sixteenth century. In ancient Greek democracy, the qualifications to vote were not much discussed, as democracy depended more on the principle of random selection than on voting. From the emergence of modern democratic thought until the late nineteenth century, almost every commentator, radical as well as conservative, linked suffrage to property and accepted that only those who held some minimum amount of property should be allowed to vote. Universal suffrage had to await the supersession of that view. Universal male suffrage was introduced in the French constitution of 1793 and was in force in most countries which called themselves democracies by 1918 (the year in which it arrived in Britain). Enfranchisement of women was much slower. Universal adult suffrage arrived in Britain in 1928 and in Switzerland in 1971. In the United States it arrived in theory in 1920. However, the massive disenfranchisement of black citizens in the South, for federal as well as state and local elections, was not reversed until the court and legistlative actions that culminated in the Voting Rights Act 1965.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Militant campaigner for the right of women to vote. After J. S.
Mill
tied to introduce a motion for universal suffrage in the Second Reform Bill of 1867, societies agitating for extension of the franchise to women were formed, but the ‘suffragists’ had little success in persuading MPs to allow women to vote. In 1903 Emily Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union, which instead of the peaceful means practised by the suffragists, advocated more violent methods, including demonstrations, disruption of House of Commons debates and public meetings, and the destruction of property. Pankhurst's ‘suffragettes’ stepped up agitation after the failure of legislation to enfranchise women in 1911, with increasingly violent measures, and, when imprisoned, resorted to hunger strike. In 1913 Emily Davison killed herself at the Derby by throwing herself under the King's horse.
Whether the suffragettes' campaign was successful in advancing the case for enfranchising women is debatable, and their violent methods alienated moderate supporters. Far more important in the move to female suffrage was the liberating effect of the First World War, which proved women were capable of the same work as men, and was quickly followed by the 1918 Representation of the People Act, giving the vote to women over the age of 30.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1866–1925)
The best-known early leader of the Chinese nationalist revolution, Sun was born into a poor peasant family in 1866, in the southern province of Guangdong. At the age of thirteen he joined an older brother in Hawaii, where he was educated in Western schools, from which he went to Hong Kong and took a medical degree. Concerned at the decay of China, he formed a small society. The Revive China Society (
Xing Zhong Hui
), which was reformist and moderate. However, the destruction of the 1898 Reform Movement and the execution of some of its leaders by the Manchu Empress dowager, led Sun and many other Chinese to turn to revolution. He formed a new group, the Alliance Society (
Tongmeng Hui
). Support for this spread from the Chinese emigrant communities to the southern secret societies and then to young Chinese intellectuals, notably those studying in Japan. Meanwhile attempted reforms by the Manchus actually reduced Chinese as opposed to Manchu power, so that disaffection spread to the Chinese gentry. In 1911, after ten failed risings organized by Sun and his followers, the eleventh succeeded. The Manchus abdicated and a republic was proclaimed. Sun was elected provisional president, but was soon succeeded by Yuan Shikai , a much better-known and acceptably conservative figure.
With the imperial focus of loyalty gone, China fell to pieces. Sun's task was to reunite the country, and to do so (as he perceived it) by the creation of a nationalist democracy. In 1923, in despair of assistance from the Western powers, he turned to the Soviet Union. He made an alliance with the new Communist Party of China (then minuscule, but backed by Russia), reconstituted his party on Leninist lines, and adopted a radical programme. He died in 1925 with China still fragmented among the warlords, but he had created a new climate of opinion and new political aims and expectations. Both Nationalists and Communists claim his inheritance.
His political ideas and programme were expressed in a series of published lectures called the
Three Principles of the People
(nationalism, democracy, and livelihood), and in his
Plan for National Reconstruction
. He was not a systematic philosopher. His ideas were often contradictory. He argued that the Western ideas of liberty and equality were not relevant to Chinese society in its existing state. As China (he believed) had not suffered from extremes of autocracy, liberty was not demanded. China's problem was too much liberty, by which he meant that the Chinese people were free to ignore appeals to national solidarity: ‘On no account must we give more liberty to the individual; let us instead secure liberty for the nation.’He argued similarly that China did not demand equality; she had no aristocracy, few big landlords, and few capitalists. In China, he said, there were no rich and poor, only poor and poorer. Yet he professed to be committed to democracy and even proposed the rights of recall, initiative, and referendum. He put forward a programme for the development of democracy, under tutelage, beginning with the village and culminating in the eventual creation of a national parliament.
He deplored communism as expressing only ‘the pathology of a particular society’, but at the same time insisted that his Principle of Livelihood was ‘practical communism’, and his plans for the economic reconstruction of China were fairly radical. The profits of expanding urban land values would be invested in state-sponsored industry, while lower rural rents and better security of tenure would prepare the way for the redistribution of land.
On Chinese culture, he professed to believe that China's morality was on a higher level than that of the West, but admitted that the Chinese had been ‘less active in matters of performance’ than the foreigners.
Sun's successor, Chaing Kai-shek , a traditionalist soldier who encouraged China's Blue Shirt fascists, made no serious attempt to apply Sun's ideology until he was chastened by defeat and confined to Taiwan. There land reform with compensation for the landlords, state control of upstream industry, and inducement planning of private enterprise, combined with a one-party system which while oppressive towards individuals was very responsive to peasant interests, produced an economic miracle—the more miraculous because rapid growth was most unusually accompanied by a rapid diminution of inequalities in income. Sun's ideas seemed vindicated, and this was not lost on the many Chinese of all communities who have always found Sun's modernization of tradition more comfortable than the repudiation of tradition in favour either of communism or Western democracy. Sun's three principles have life in them still.
JG