The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (83 page)

A claim or
right
defended by reference to what has already occurred, or an established procedure, particularly previous authorization under such a procedure. For example, a police officer may be entitled to enter premises by a search warrant. Robert Nozick , in
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(1974), propounded a historical entitlement theory of justice which depends on the pedigree of titles to
property
. According to this theory, individuals have
natural rights
and these ground the legitimate original acquisition (creating titles to property). These entitlements defeat the claims of others, including a state, to those holdings, reducing the scope for redistribution to compensation for rights-violations.
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Literally, ‘digging in’. The property of a framework document, such as a
constitution
, that it makes itself difficult to amend.

 
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Term given to the tactic pursued by extremist parties of gaining power through covertly entering more moderate, electorally successful, parties. Within those parties they maintain a distinct organization while publicly denying the existence of a ‘party within the party’. Entryism is a more acute problem for parties in two party/majoritarian systems than in multiparty/proportional systems. In majoritarian systems such as Britain there is no real political life to the left of Labour or to the right of Conservative, hence there is an incentive for extremist parties to enter Labour or Conservative. In proportional systems the costs of entry into the political system are lower.
Communist (Stalinist) and Trotskyist parties pursued entryism within the British Labour Party for many years after the Labour Party formally established itself as an anti-Communist party in the early 1920s. In the 1940s and early 1950s, during the
Cold War
, Communists attempted to gain entry. From the 1960s onwards the main threat came from various Trotskyite groupings of which the most damaging to the party was the
Militant Tendency
.
Entryism can also occur where extreme right-wing parties, normally fascist or racist, similarly attempt to gain entry into conservative/Christian Democratic parties. In Britain there has been periodic penetration of the Conservative Party by fascists or racists. In Germany neo-Nazis have sometimes sought to enter the Christian Democratic Union.
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A belief in and concern for the importance and influence of environment within a society.
‘Environment’ is derived simply from the French verb
environner
, to surround. Our environment, literally, is no more and no less than our surroundings. The concept of the environment, though, arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It was given force by a range of new ideas that human beings are, to an important degree, formed by their surroundings. These included Darwin's discovery that the survival of species depends on their suitability to their surroundings and the German geographers' theories of the importance of the environment (
Umwelt
) in determining economic and cultural differences between peoples. For most of the history of the concept the word ‘environmentalist’ has referred primarily to a person who believes in the importance of environment (as opposed to free will or genetics) as a determinant of human life.
However, in the second half of the twentieth century environmentalism has come to refer to a combination of beliefs in the value and fragility of the environment, and a tendency to be conservationist with respect to it, leaving the expression ‘environmental determinism’ to cover the old meaning of the word. Unfortunately, what was intrinsically a very broad concept has been further stretched to a point of meaninglessness. Just as ‘environmental studies’ can embrace geography, biology, chemistry, law, history, politics, and many other disciplines, the concerns of environmentalism can range from architecture to the stratosphere, from the water supply to the diversity of species on the planet. Environmentalists can base arguments on virtually any known discipline or philosophical assumption, including those which are anthropocentric (concerned only with benefits to human beings) and those which are studiously opposed to anthropocentrism, and insist that nonhuman entities have value in themselves. Fortunately, some constructive limitation has been suggested by the eco-philosophers, principally Arne Naess, who, since the 1970s, have expressed suspicion of ‘mere environmentalism’ which criticizes existing practices and policies affecting our surroundings only in terms of criteria derived from their effects on human interests. This suggests that environmentalism occupies a middle ground between those (rare) minds who see no disadvantages to current practices because of their effects on our surroundings and those ecophilosophers who seek to orient our entire approach away from anthropocentrism. See also
ecology
.
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EPA
(Environmental Protection Agency)

This US federal agency gained great prominence in the environmentalist 1970s, and has survived attempts by the Reagan administration to marginalize it. It is sometimes accused of being captured by those it regulates.

 
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