The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (280 page)

See
Versailles, Treaty of
.

 
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Political movement originating with Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), especially his 1938 text
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International
(commonly known as
The Transitional Programme
). Trotsky argued that the creation of a new International was necessary in order to compensate for the political bankruptcy of the Second and Third Internationals and to provide revolutionary leadership for the
working class
during a period of growing capitalist crisis and fascist offensive.
Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state' (in
The Revolution Betrayed
, 1936) was central to this strategy. Power had been transferred from the
proletariat
to the
bureaucracy
, which controlled state and party structures. The Soviet Union was a transitional society—it could either go forward to socialism or back to capitalism. The latter could only be prevented by a political revolution which could build upon the already socialized base.
The Fourth International would lead resistance to Stalinist control, creating new working-class parties and unions and propagating world revolution. However, Trotskyism generally failed to establish a real base within the working-class although it has exercised influence in certain countries (particularly in Latin America) and enjoyed bouts of notoriety (for example,
Militant
). Best by factionalism and sectarianism, it should—like Marxism—perhaps be distinguished from its ‘founder’.
GS 

 
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The so-called Truman Doctrine was enunciated by President Harry S Truman in a speech to a joint session of the US Congress on 12 March 1947. In it he denounced the oppressive nature of the communist system of government and warned against the possibility that campaigns of subversion might bring even more countries under that system. He sought, and was given, Congressional authority to provide assistance to threatened regimes—initially those in Greece and Turkey. The ‘Doctrine’ was thus the starting point for the strategy of containment of communism developed by successive US President during the
Cold War
.
DC 

 
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Now largely defunct, trusteeship was the system by which the United Nations, at its inception, appointed states to administer territories whose peoples, while regarded as units of self-determination, were deemed unfit to exercise immediate territorial sovereignty. United Nations trusteeships replaced League of Nations mandates, providing a means by which administrative authority over the colonies of powers defeated in the two World Wars could be transferred to the victors without compromising their democratic and anti-imperialist pretensions. The UN Trusteeship Council, under the authority of the General Assembly, had the power to issue questionnaires and demand reports from states administering trust territories, to send missions to such territories, and to receive petitions from their inhabitants. Up to independence, all or part of the territory of Ruanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Togoland, the Cameroons, Nauru, and Somalia was ruled under trusteeship agreements by former colonial powers and the United States.
CJ 

 
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See
anarchism
.

 
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(1727–81)
French politician and economist. A follower of the
physiocrats
, Turgot tried to free the grain trade in France from internal tariffs during his brief career as Louis XVI's finance minister (1774–6). After protests from those whose
rent-seeking
he had disrupted, he was dismissed. This episode drove Turgot's disciple
Condorcet
away from the ‘beautiful dream’ that Enlightened administrators could influence practical politics towards his highly theoretical study of voting and juries.