The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (61 page)

 
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A technique of constructing a balance sheet of the consequences of a project or activity. By definition, it is a method of assessment which uses monetary units. When used by a private company it is essentially a way of calculating what profit or loss can be expected, but it goes beyond simple versions of such a calculation by insisting on a ‘full balance sheet’. On the cost side, for example, this would include the ‘opportunity cost’ of the resources involved, including the income which might be derived from investing available money in assets which carry the minimum risk. Benefits might include good publicity for the company, so that a nominal loss on a project might be shown by cost-benefit analysis to be a real gain.
In the sphere of public investment, cost-benefit analysis takes on extra dimensions of complexity, since it is required to assess the full range of costs and benefits not just to the municipal or nationalized company involved, nor even to the government, but to the whole population. In such a calculation all social costs and benefits must be assessed, including those which are ‘external’ to the transactions involved, which would not be considered by a private company. A calculation as broad as that is tantamount to duplicating the felicific calculus of Benthamite
utilitarianism
in terms of money, a point which has been generally accepted by enthusiasts and critics alike.
Cost-benefit analysis thrived in the spirit of rationality which pervaded British government in the 1960s. Its judgement on the addition of the Victoria Line to London's Underground system was that a nominal loss could be shown to be a real gain if social benefits were fully calculated. The Roskill Commission, set up to calculate the costs and benefits of alternative sites for a third London Airport, produced less widely accepted results, however, and its use of a fire-insurance valuation to cost the demolition of a Norman church was widely quoted as a reductio ad absurdum of the technique.
In assessing the social costs of the destruction of such general goods as landscapes and communities, cost-benefit analysis uses a form of ‘shadow pricing’ based on the ‘compensation principle’ of J. R. Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor . This involves asking people how much money they would require to compensate them for such loss or extrapolating what they would require if they were rational. Such a calculation must assume ‘connexity’, which means that given any two goods (including ‘spiritual’ goods like a favourite view and ‘material’ ones like a new car), any person either prefers A to B, or B to A, or is indifferent between them. This assumption is, in effect, a doctrine of the substitutability of all goods, including people and places, and it allows all values to be expressed in monetary terms. In plain terms, it is an assumption that nothing is sacred.
Supporters of cost-benefit analysis argue that it is part of the very idea of rational decision-making. How else are we to find out whether it is better to spend our investment in health and saving lives or alleviating pain? What else can tell us whether the advantages of a new motorway or airport outweigh its disadvantages? Critics regard it as a pseudo-science, a distortion of the values it seeks to assess and an attempt to reduce the serious and evaluative problems of political decision-making to bogus technicalities.
LA 

 
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The Council should not be confused with the cabinet of some countries such as France or the former USSR, nor with the European Council. It is responsible for approving
European Union
(EU, formerly European Community) legislation and is composed of the ministers of the national states under a presidency which rotates among members semi-annually. As such it represents the reality that European integration could never succeed without the agreement of the member states themselves. In this sense it is paradoxically both a basic constraint on the Commission and European Parliament's pro-integration ambitions, and the main driving force behind what has been achieved. The idea that integration is ‘imposed from Brussels’ has therefore little grounding in reality. Important as the Council is in terms of decision-making, however, it does not fully control the agenda: it can only act on a proposal of the Commission.
The Council has a voting system weighted approximately to the square root of the size of member states' economies/population for passing legislation, which the Commission is then responsible for implementing in co-operation with member states. The actual personnel of the Council changes with the issue under discussion: finance ministers discuss the budget, agriculture ministers the CAP, environment ministers the environment, and so on. The foreign ministers, as the senior council, meet at least once a month.
The issue of voting has not' surprisingly been controversial in the operation of the Council. The various EU treaties assigned unanimity to certain Council decisions, and qualified majority voting to others. In 1966 the Luxembourg Compromise established unanimity as the accepted practice if any member claimed that vital national interests were at stake, and this was often abused. The
Single European Act
and subsequent Treaty of
Maastricht
have redefined and reinforced the role of majority voting, particularly with respect to Single Market issues, thus enhancing the supranational qualities of the EU.
GU 

 
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The sudden, forcible, and illegal removal of a government, usually by the military or some part thereof, often preceded by widespread and prolonged unrest, and precipitated by more immediate grievances bearing directly on the military. In most cases a coup involves the displacement of one set of rulers, and the substitution of another who may or may not be military. The coup may be the prelude to some form of military rule, with a greater or lesser degree of civilian collaboration, perhaps requiring the collaboration of the civil service and members of the professional and middle classes, or involving the co-optation of sympathetic politicians and parties and of occupational groups, such as peasant and union leaders. While the focus of the coup is on the remedy of specific or immediate grievances, the outcome is unlikely to involve wide-ranging changes in the social order. More often a coup is seen as an effective means of pre-empting revolutionary change from below by imposing some measure of ‘reform’ from above. However, repeated military intervention has seldom contributed to a resolution of long-term social and economic problems.
Although not unknown in developed industrial societies, coups have been exceptional wherever governments, popular or not, are accorded a large degree of legitimacy and where there are widely accepted procedures for effecting a regular and orderly change of administration. In Europe the most recent cases of military intervention have been precipitated either by failures of decolonization (France 1958, Portugal 1974), or by rapid economic change and political polarization (Greece 1967), or have been linked to the crisis of communism in Eastern Europe (Poland 1981). The strengthening of the European Union, with democracy as a condition of membership, has also been seen as a stabilizing factor. Moreover here the military has available to it constitutional means for advancing its corporate and professional interests. In developing and underdeveloped countries, however, military intervention was commonplace until the 1980s. The nature and frequency of coups has varied both by country and by context. Latin America has the longest experience of military involvement and intervention, dating almost from the inception of the republics, and even affecting relatively advanced states like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. With independence in Africa coups quickly became the accepted means of changing governments in the absence of free and regular elections, and in circumstances where governments are highly personalized, have little authority, and command almost no legitimacy.
There are several distinct but related schools of thought about coups and their causes. Some seek to explain them largely as a response to social upheaval, economic collapse, and political and institutional failure. On that view intervention is a military response to acute social and political unrest in societies where the level of political culture is low or minimal. The military acts, almost by default, to fill a power vacuum at the centre. Others have looked instead for specifically ‘military’ explanations for intervention, focusing on the organizational strengths of the armed forces (e.g. discipline. centralized command structure, cohesion), compared with civilian institutions in underdeveloped countries. Intervention, according to this view, is likely to be the result of acute frustration with civilian incompetence and corruption. Others again have focused on the internal politics of the armed forces, insisting that coups are more or less random phenomena, arising from and inspired by a mix of personal ambitions, corporate interests, constituency rivalries, and often intense manifestations of ethnic and sectional loyalty. Meanwhile the appearance in Latin America of authoritarian military regimes, from the 1960s through to the 1980s, has been attributed to the failure of one particular model of economic development, based on import substitution, and the need to attract substantial foreign investment to promote export-based recovery and sustained industrial growth. The military was determined to stay in power to restructure society and create a climate more appropriate to such investment.
It is doubtful whether such a complex and variable phenomenon can be explained in terms of one or a small number of variables. Meanwhile military regimes have been increasingly concerned with the problems of withdrawal: how to extricate themselves from government without at the same time creating the conditions for renewed intervention. Since the 1980s there have been additional pressures arising from the debt crisis, and growing demands from creditor states for good governance. International monetary bodies have also begun to insist on multiparty democracy as a condition for further aid. Consequently, there has been a sharp decline in military intervention in the Third World, measured in terms of the incidence of coups. This trend is particularly marked in Latin America, although elsewhere military rulers continue to resist demands for their departure. In some cases, as in Ghana, they have submitted to elections and been returned to power.
IC