The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (9 page)

 
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The belief that the influence of the, or any, church in politics ought to be diminished. Anticlericalism as a political force has been strongest in some Roman Catholic countries, in reaction to the claims (real or supposed) of the Catholic Church. In Europe, it has been traditionally strong in France, representing social divisions that go back before 1789: areas that supported the
French Revolution
tend to remain anticlerical.

 
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An umbrella term invoking a common element of opposition to globalisation amongst a diverse range of protest movements. Anti-globalisation brings together campaigns about labour conditions (including child labour and slave labour), environmental destruction, bio-hazards, animal rights, social justice, third-world development and debt, and politically oppressive regimes. As well as these specific protests anti-globalisation has also attracted groups more generally opposed to liberal-capitalism, such as anarchists. Opposition to globalisation focuses on two areas. Firstly there is the perceived growth in the power of multi-national corporations. These firms are deemed to wield significant political and economic power without being subject to the constraints of democratic accountability. Secondly international bodies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization are held by anti-globalisation protestors to sponsor and facilitate this corporate power, and their meetings have thus also been the targets of protest. Major anti-globalisation demonstrations have occurred at a number of recent meetings of international financial and trade organisations, including the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle, November 1999, the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2000, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington in April 2000, and again in Prague in September of that year, the Summit of Americas in Quebec in April 2001, and the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001.
MH 

 
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Literally, persecution of or discrimination against the Jews. The first use of the term, which came into being in the 1870s, is variously attributed to the German Wilhelm Marr and the Frenchman Ernest Renan . In one respect it was a misnomer from the beginning since, in the jargon of the racial theory of the period, ‘Semites’ were a broad group of non-European ethnic groups including Arabs, whereas anti-Semitism was taken to mean, and has continued to mean, an anti-Jewish racism. Anti-Semitism differs from the anti-Jewish ideas and theories which pre-dated the rise of racial theory in the 1850s in that it identifies Jewish characteristics as congenital rather than as specifically religious or broadly cultural (and, therefore, capable of rejection by individual Jews). The persecution of Jews is as old as the ‘Diaspora’ which spread Jewish population throughout Europe and the Mediterranean after the Romans expelled the Jews from Palestine in AD 79; Jews were expelled from several countries in the later Middle Ages. Anti-Semitism differs from most other forms of racism which emphasize merely the inferiority of certain races (especially those of African origin). Doctrines of racial inferiority usually recognize the possibility of racial harmony provided that the inferior race is kept in its proper, inferior, social place. But anti-Semitism emphasizes the innate hostility of Jews to the interests of non-Jews rather than their inferiority as such.
Anti-Semitism was widespread in Europe, especially in France, Austria, and Germany, in the late nineteenth century. In France there existed a
Ligue Antisemitique
and in Germany anti-Semitic ideas were developed by the English-born social theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain , and encouraged by the popularity of the composer Richard Wagner . The doctrine attributed a wide variety of bad characteristics to Jews, ranging from biological degeneracy to parasitism to conspiracy to take over the world. Anti-Semitism reached its apogee in the regimes of Hitler and his allies when it became the policy of the state and ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’ resulted in the extermination of approximately six million Jews. This extremity, and Hitler's defeat, created a strong reaction against anti-Semitism. But it has proved a persistent phenomenon and there was a revival of anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and the unification of Germany in the period 1989–91. Since there were by now very few Jews in these countries the phenomenon came to be known as ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’.
LA 

 
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A political party that wishes to change or destroy the political system in which it is operating. Used extensively in the 1950s and 1960s to describe fascist, communist, and
Poujadist
parties, the term is less in favour now, as it is widely thought to be a product of the
Cold War
. In particular, most communist parties since 1945 have not been anti-system in any strong sense.

 
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