The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (70 page)

See
civil rights
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Autocratic rule by one person. Thus in its original Greek sense a ‘despot’ was the lord or ruler of an unfree state. The Byzantine emperor was routinely referred to as a despot, the title was transferred to Christian rulers in provinces of the Turkish Empire, and remains in modern Greek as an old-fashioned word for a bishop,
Thespotis
.
But
Aristotle
began an important Western tradition of thought by distinguishing Persian ‘despotism’ from Greek tyranny. Tyranny was usurped, unstable power, wielded coercively, while despotism was persistent and stable, depending on the acquiescence of the people, often the only authority they knew and therefore essentially legal. It was thus an oriental phenomenon because free, Greek peoples would not tolerate it for long. The category of oriental despotism is almost universal in Western political thought. Most notably,
Montesquieu
developed the category in his
L'Esprit des Lois
, published in 1748. Even the most absolute of Western monarchies was not a despotism, he argued, because the monarch was bound by law whose legitimacy was justified by the same reasoning as was his authority. He did, though, note a tendency for the French monarchy to degenerate towards despotism, as did several of his contemporaries, and after the revolution of 1789 it became customary to refer to the
ancien régime
as a despotism.
Western theorists have used despotism as a limiting case, a
reductio ad absurdum
of the concentration of power. To Burke it was ‘the simplest form of government’, the domination of the will of a single man. To Bentham it was an evil form, the inverse of the evil of anarchy. Their shared assumptions about the actual working of the Ottoman, Chinese, Persian, and Moghul Empires can be said to be oversimplified where not actually wrong, and the use of the term has degenerated into a mere political boo-word, not really distinguishable from ‘tyranny’, ‘dictatorship’, or ‘absolutism’.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Literally ‘loosening’.
Détente
was used to refer to periods of reduced tension in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the
Cold War
. It was closely associated with the process (and progress) of
arms control
, and the main period of
détente
ran from the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 to the late 1970s when the ratification of the SALT 2 agreements was derailed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a renewed period of tension between the superpowers.
Détente
revived with the coming of Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, but the term has fallen out of use with the end of the Cold War. Although associated with the Cold War, it has generic standing and can be used to describe any easing of tension in relations between states that are otherwise expected to be hostile.
BB 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

A policy of attempting to control the behaviour of other actors by the use of threats. The deterrer tries to convince the deterree that the costs of undertaking the actions that the deterrer wishes to prevent will be substantially higher than any gain that the deterree might anticipate making from the action. Deterrence is a general principle for human behaviour, but with the deployment of nuclear weapons by states after the Second World War, it became the central theoretical idea in the largely American discipline of Strategic Studies. Nuclear weapons made it much easier and cheaper to threaten very large punishments than it had ever been with conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons also forced the adoption of deterrence as a policy for military security because it was widely accepted that there was no effective way for states to prevent some nuclear weapons from getting through if an attack was launched. The threat of a nuclear counterstrike thus became the centrepiece of superpower military policy during the
Cold War
; hence the unpredictable consequences of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars).
Deterrence is frequently associated with nuclear retaliation, and is sometimes used in contrast to defence. The key distinction is between strategies of denial (seeking to block an attack directly by confronting the forces making it), and strategies of retaliation (inflicting punishment, usually elsewhere than on the attacking forces). Deterrence is restricted to retaliation in the case of nuclear exchanges between geographically separated powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union. In such cases denial is prevented by the technical inability to shoot down or disable a sufficient number of incoming nuclear warheads to prevent unacceptable damage, though some advocates of strategic defence believe that the technology for nuclear denial could be developed. But where there was geographical contiguity, as between the
NATO
alliance and the
Warsaw Pact
, then denial (i.e. the threat to defeat and/or destroy the attacking forces) became part of deterrence policy. The strategy of NATO was to confront Soviet forces with a ladder of escalation, starting with conventional defence and moving up rungs to a full-scale nuclear strike.
Although simple in conception, deterrence can be extremely complicated in practice. If two nuclear powers confront each other, each fears that the other might gain advantage from a first strike, particularly if such a strike could largely disable its retaliatory forces. Under these conditions, each side must seek to possess a secure second strike force: one that is large enough to survive a first strike and still inflict unacceptable damage in retaliation. Fear of becoming vulnerable to a first strike (and/or a desire to attain first strike capability) gives technology a central role in deterrence, and tends to fuel a high-intensity qualitative
arms race
. Deterrence theory was shot through with many debates about problems of rationality, dangers of accidental war, and dangers of uncontrollable escalation from peripheral conflicts. Because it developed largely in the context of the Cold War, deterrence theory is largely cast in terms of a two-party relationship, with much less thought having been given to the operation of deterrence logic in a multipolar system. For the United States and its allies the issue of extended deterrence became the core focus of NATO policy. Extended deterrence required the United States to give a nuclear guarantee to its allies, and the problem was how to make this threat credible once the Soviet Union acquired the ability to make nuclear strikes against North America. Maintaining credibility was seen as the central problem for American deterrence policy throughout the Cold War.
Broadly speaking, deterrence theorists can be divided into two groups. On one side are those who think that nuclear weapons make deterrence easy. They tend to support policies of minimum deterrence, the logic being that deterrence is made effective by the appalling consequences of even small nuclear strikes. On the other side are those who think deterrence is difficult. They focus on the complexities of the escalation ladder, and the need to deter highly aggressive, risk-taking, opponents under all foreseeable contingencies. They tend to favour large and diverse nuclear force structures capable of dealing with all worst-case scenarios. Extended deterrence favoured the ‘difficult’ logic, and with the ending of the
Cold War
, there has been a general move towards minimum deterrence amongst the big nuclear powers. Nuclear deterrence has implications for
nuclear proliferation
. To the extent that the large powers rest their own security on nuclear threats, it makes it difficult for them to persuade other states that they should renounce their right to possess nuclear weapons.
BB 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search