The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (85 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

‘Concepts … the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper use on the part of their users’ (W. B. Gallie ). Such concepts lie on a putative spectrum between the ‘essentially straightforward’ and the ‘radically confused’. They are to be found in all the philosophic disciplines: Gallie's own principal three examples were ‘art’, ‘democracy’, and ‘a Christian life’. In each of these cases the concept carries a positively appraisive character and there is agreement on an ‘original exemplar’, but there is a problem interpreting that exemplar's achievement in contemporary conditions and a requirement that argument sustains or develops the original exemplar's achievement.
The historical significance of Gallie's argument lies in his rejection of positivism and his insistence on the value of continued debate about meaning in such fields as aesthetics, theology, and political theory. For those reasons it has constituted an important candidate in arguments about the nature of political language and was increasingly taken up by opponents of positivism in the years after its publication. One of the commonest criticisms of Gallie's theory is that it requires us to hold a contradictory pair of beliefs before we can argue theoretically: we must continue to assume that disputes can be resolved whilst knowing that they cannot.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

A religious organization is established if the State recognizes it as having a unique or superior claim to the allegiance of the population in religious matters. However, there is no precise line to be drawn between established churches and those which have some other form of special status. For example, England has an established church, the Anglican Church, which is Protestant and Episcopalian. The Queen, as head of State, is also head of the Church; she is also head of the Church of Scotland, which is considerably different from the Church of England theologically and she, like her predecessors, worships in the appropriate Church depending on which side of the border she is at the time. Neither Wales nor Northern Ireland now has an established Church. The Republic of Ireland has no established church, but its constitution acknowledges a ‘special place’ for the Roman Catholic Church in the hearts and minds of its citizens. There can be no doubt that this ‘special place’ has proved far more potent than has established status in England, where the specifically Anglican influence on policy has been very little.
Most Western constitutions have followed the American model and firmly eschewed all possibility of an established church. However, forms of the Lutheran Church are still established in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, even though religious observance in Scandinavia is much lower than in most of Europe.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

See
French Revolution
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

A contentious and ill-defined term used extensively from May 1992 onwards by the international media, western politicians and diplomats to describe a systematic policy of mass killings, deportation, rape, internment and intimidation engaged in by rival ethnic groups of the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina with the goal of rendering ethnically-mixed areas homogenous and thereby establishing a de facto claim on ethnic grounds to sovereignty over disputed territory. Principally, though not exclusively, applied to the actions of Bosnian-Serb paramilitaries backed by elements of the Yugoslav People's Army. Subsequently used to refer to other instances of minority persecution world-wide. The term is also increasingly employed anachronistically by historians, e.g. to refer to the expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor in the 1920s or Germans from Eastern Europe in the 1940s.
The concept of ‘cleansing’ or ‘purifying’ undesirable elements from a community on the grounds of their ethnicity or otherwise is neither exclusively Balkan nor of recent vintage. Notable in this regard are the eugenics movement and the racial tenets of National Socialism, e.g. areas of Nazi occupied Europe were declared
judenrein
(‘pure of Jews’) once the Jewish population had been deported or exterminated. Similarly, the Russian term for the Stalinist purges of the 1930s is
chistki
‘the cleansings’). However, the exact origins of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ are unclear. It is most probably a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian
etnicko cicenje
, references to which were already being made in Kosovo in the early 1980s. Its contemporary usage possibly derives from military jargon during the Croatian war of 1991 and was subsequently popularized by western journalists.
From the outset, the term was considered by those critical of western policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina to be a euphemism for genocide cynically used by the international community to evade its obligation under the 1948 UN Convention to ‘prevent and punish’ recognized cases of genocide (which many at the time regarded the Bosnian Muslims victims of as a UN tribunal has subsequently acknowledged). Its use was also condemned on the grounds that appropriating the language of the perpetrator inadvertently legitimized and sanitized the practice. Nevertheless, partly because of its ubiquity and descriptive power, the term subsequently assumed a moral force all of its own and came to imply both an obligation to act and a pretext for international intervention, as in the case of NATO's campaign against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999.
There have been recent attempts to draw a clearer theoretical distinction between genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and thereby give the latter some terminological credibility. It has been argued that despite its emotive and graphic connotations ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a useful term to conceptualize the more extreme forms that modern state-building has taken over the last century and that it not only captures the motivation and mindset of the perpetrator but also communicates the process itself more graphically than bloodless terms such as population transfer or forced migration. When seen primarily in terms of its intent - i.e. the removal of an ethnic group from a given territory - ‘ethnic cleansing’ can be conceived as a spectrum on which at one end lies genocide and at the other, milder administrative measures such as forms of legal discrimination. That is, genocide represents the most extreme form of ‘ethnic cleansing’, but not all forms of ‘ethnic cleansing’ are necessarily genocide.
Seen as a process - i.e. the methods used to pursue that goal - ‘ethnic cleansing’ is itself part of a continuum, situated towards but not at the extremity, next to but differentiated from genocide by lacking the crucial element of intent to kill in part or whole an ethnic group. However, both approaches are problematic. Does ‘ethnic cleansing’ have to involve overt violence? If not, then all manner of petty infringements of minority rights might be labelled ‘ethnic cleansing’, and categorizing these alongside genocide runs the serious risk of relativization. As a process, the distinction between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide is still unclear, especially when the former is genocidal in its consequences if perhaps not in its intent.
Although the UN and the US State Department both have working definitions of the term, it has no legal definition. All of the defendants at the Hague-based International Tribunal for War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia (as of February 2002) have been charged under existing UN statutes, including crimes against humanity and genocide. In none of the indictments is the term 'ethnic cleansing' used. It remains therefore a political rather than a legal term.
MF