The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (181 page)

Application of
functionalism
to the study of European integration. The main impetus behind European integration during the 1940s was federalist and democratic. But the failure of France to accept the European Defence Community in 1954, and the apparent success of the less evidently political European Coal and Steel Community, led to a shift in emphasis towards the achievement of integration through the strengthening of economic and social ties. Some of the protagonists, and many political scientists observing the process, believed that this tactic would achieve a gradual withering of the power of nation-states, as functions of government directly pertinent to the welfare of Europeans came more and more to be performed by international agencies. European institutions would foster a governing élite free of national ties, and become the focus for interest groups and popular loyalties. This view was most clearly distinguished from earlier functionalist visions by its acceptance of a regional and centralized focus of power in place of the older ideal of global integration under dispersed functional agencies. In addition, its advocates were less optimistic than their predecessors, believing that tensions arising directly out of the process of integration would produce periodic crises, to be resolved only by the will of residual national governments, resulting each time in a broadening of the scope of integration.
CJ 

 
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NEP
(New Economic Policy)

Policy introduced in the Soviet Union in March 1921 in place of rigid central controls. It envisaged the end of grain requisitioning and the development of limited market relations in trade and industry. Originally a ‘breathing space’, it was then considered by many Bolsheviks, especially
Bukharin
, as a long-term strategy for the transition to socialism.
SWh 

 
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Neutralism describes the policy of non-alignment in the
Cold War
adopted by a large group of, for the most part, recently decolonized Afro-Asian states. It is not to be confused with
neutrality
. The principal forums for neutralism were the Non-Aligned Movement, the UN General Assembly, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Neutralist states rejected the Cold War as an organizing principle for international relations and tried to establish political space between the two superpowers. In particular they worked to assert the agenda of North-South relations as a priority in international forums, and sought to extract aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union. The ending of the Cold War has seriously undermined the relevance of neutralism.
BB 

 
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Neutrality is a legal position by which a state either takes no part in a particular war, or adopts the policy that it will not take part in any war. Neutrals can claim rights of respect from belligerents in return for their strict impartiality.
BB 

 
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In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt in accepting the Democratic nomination for the Presidency said, ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people’. At the time this was little more than campaign rhetoric, but the New Deal was subsequently widely used as an umbrella term to characterize the domestic reform programmes of the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. These included banking and finance reform, various relief programmes for the unemployed, agriculture recovery legislation, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the act setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act providing unemployment insurance and old age pensions, and much else besides. The phrase ‘New Deal coalition’ is often used to denote the coalition of blue-collar workers, blacks, ‘ethnic’ (non-Anglo-Saxon) white Americans, and Southerners which continued to support the Democrats until the 1960s but has been crumbling since then.
DM 

 
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