The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (81 page)

The right of the state, on behalf of the public, to take private property without the owner's consent. The term remains in wide current use in American property law and planning because American arrangements are framed by a republican constitution informed by the writings of
Locke
,
Grotius
,
Pufendorf
, and others who suggest that the state can and must take public property on occasions, but has an absolute duty to compensate the owner justly; both the owner's and the state's rights are said to be derived from natural law. The requirement for ‘due process and just compensation’ are established by the
Fifth Amendment
.
The arrangements for compulsory purchase are the functional equivalent of eminent domain in the United Kingdom, but the philosophical justifications and constitutional status are quite different from those in the United States. Both states must sometimes take land without the owner's consent. But in the United Kingdom, no specific right of eminent domain can exist and nor is there an extrastatutory right to compensation. Since Parliament is sovereign, it can, naturally,
inter alia
, take land without compensation if it chooses to. In practice the British Parliament has almost always established machinery to pay fair compensation to those whose land it has taken for public use.
LA 

 
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Deriving from the Latin term (
imperator
) for a supreme military and, later, political leader, empire came to mean a territorial realm over which exclusive authority was exercised by a single sovereign. Thus the preamble of the English Act of Appeals (1533) justified denial of the right of subjects of the Crown to appeal to courts outside the realm or territory of England on the ground (however dubious) ‘that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king’.
The term soon came to be applied to the much more loosely controlled and heterogeneous domains of princes such as the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, even when his power was manifestly compromised and limited in many places, and most of all in the so-called Holy Roman Empire from which he derived the title, by the continuing privileges of Church, lesser princes, cities, guilds, electors, and estates. Likewise, Queen Victoria adopted the style of Queen Empress in 1877 at precisely the moment when the addition of India and new African dependencies to her dominions led them to resemble the ramshackle constitutional amalgams of her Austrian and Russian cousins more than the older English ideal of a contiguous territory with a homogeneous population. Thereafter, ‘empire’ was generally taken to denote an extensive group of states, whether formed by colonization or conquest, subject to the authority of a metropolitan or imperial state, even when—as in France or the USSR—that dominant state became a republic, lacking an emperor or empress at its head. In this later sense, well established by the early years of the twentieth century, empire became closely associated with
imperialism
.
CJ 

 
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EMS
(European Monetary System)

The system in the
European Union
intended to stabilize exchange rates between the currencies of member states, using the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the balance-of-payments support process.
European Union monetary co-operation was not specifically mentioned in the
Treaty of Rome
, but it was recognized that if the internal market were to avoid competitive distortions linked to exchange rate volatility, monetary co-operation would become an issue. This led to the Barre Report of 1969, the Werner Report blueprint for monetary union of 1970, and the European ‘snake’ exchange rate system of 1971 as the first stage of the process to be completed by 1980. The snake died prematurely in the collapse of the
Bretton Woods
gold-dollar system.
The Commission sponsored renewed efforts in 1977, unexpectedly supported by Germany and France and leading to the EMS agreement of March 1979, with Britain remaining outside. The EMS consisted first of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) fixing currency parities to +/-2.25 per cent in relation to the ECU or European Currency Unit (weaker currencies such as the lira were allowed to float or maintain wider parities of +/-6 per cent). There was also a commitment to enhanced economic policy convergence, a co-operation agreement amongst central banks to intervene to support currency parities, and an agreement to establish a European Monetary Fund (EMF) of common foreign exchange reserves by 1985. While the later was never implemented, the ERM and central bank co-operation proved quite successful. Once currencies approached 75 per cent of their allowable upward or downward fluctuation, the central banks concerned were obliged to intervene to support the parity on the markets. An adjustment of parities could occur, but only with the agreement of all members of the system.
Parity adjustment was frequent in the early 1980s, but by 1985 stability returned and agreement emerged on the need for further monetary integration as the Single Market Programme became a reality. The Delors Report on Economic and Monetary Union (1989) eventually became enshrined in the Maastricht treaty, for which the EMS was seen as an essential building block. Despite the clear success of the EMS, with even the UK participating by 1991, economic recession in the early 1990s and the turmoil of German reunification conspired to destabilize the ERM. Britain and Italy were forced to withdraw in September 1992 with Spain and Portugal devaluing, and by July 1993 ERM parities were allowed to fluctuate up to 15 per cent, essentially a float, which put the system on hold until more opportune times.
GU 

 
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(1820–95)
Born in Barmen in the Rhineland, just east of Dusseldorf, the eldest in a family of eight, Engels was the son of a wealthy mill owner who was as much dedicated to the pietist church and good works as he was to profit. He was educated as a boarder at the grammar school in the neighbouring town of Elberfeld, where he proved himself to be a gifted student of languages. He also quickly developed an enduring admiration for ancient Greek civilization. Later Engels was to combine his compulsory military service in the Prussian artillery with attendance at Berlin University. In Berlin he was influenced by the materialism and humanism of the
Young Hegelian
critique of religion and, when in Cologne, he was strongly attracted by the communism of Moses Hess. He is remembered now, of course, as the life-long friend, collaborator, and financial supporter of Karl Marx, a collaboration which began in real earnest in 1845 with the joint writing of
The German Ideology
, the first full statement of
historical materialism
. Orthodox Marxists are still rather inclined to assume that Marx and Engels were intellectual twins with a kind of composite personality. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there were large and unquestioned areas of agreement between Marx and Engels , most of all in political economy, the history of industry, and in the demands and tactics of the proletarian party, there were also crucial areas of disagreement, particularly, perhaps, in natural science and in the philosophy of nature. Engels was a Darwinian of sorts and he kept abreast of modern developments in evolutionary biology. He also saw that modern materialism was inextricably bound up with the concept of evolution by natural selection and his
Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature
, first published in 1925, shows him to be very well informed about the history of the evolutionary idea. Marx, on the other hand, was a critic of Darwin , characterizing his method as crude and his results as inconclusive. He much preferred the environmentalism of the Frenchman Pierre Trémaux , a stance which led Marx to argue that the Confederate states would win the American Civil War because they were built on better soil. More important, perhaps, was that Engels was solely responsible for formulating the doctrine of
dialectical materialism
and for attempting to rest Marxism on a dialectical philosophy of nature. In
Anti-Dühring
of 1876, Engels applied universal dialectical laws to geology, mathematics, history, philosophy, to thought itself, and even to grains of barley, the three main dialectical laws being negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites, and the transformation of quantity into quality. There is no evidence that Marx approved of this. Indeed, many scholars now insist that Engels was writing in a mode and with conclusions about dialectics that Marx could never have accepted.
Engels' influence on Marxism was greatly increased by the fact that he was editor of Marx's posthumous works.
JH