The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (244 page)

The Security Council is one of the ‘principal organs’ of the United Nations Organization. It originally consisted of eleven members, expanded in 1965 to fifteen, of whom five (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States) were permanent members, the rest being elected by the General Assembly for a two-year period. In 1991 Russia was awarded the Soviet seat. The Security Council exercises primary responsibility within the UN for the maintenance of international peace and security. It can act only with the agreement of the five permanent members who exercise a veto; the lack of agreement on most issues throughout the Cold War severely restricted the role of the Security Council although since the late 1980s it has enjoyed a much more active role. The war to liberate Kuwait was organized by the United States in 1990–1 under a series of Security Council mandates.
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See
civil rights
.

 
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Legislative committees which deliberate upon complex issues and/or scrutinize the executive on issues broader than legislation. In the UK House of Commons the
Public Accounts Committee
, charged with examining accounts of money appropriated by Parliament, dates from 1861, and the system of twelve (later fourteen) departmental select committees from 1979. The House of Lords has long had select committees for procedural issues, and introduced committees for the European communities in 1974 and science and technology in 1977. House of Commons departmental select committees are charged ‘to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the principal government departments … and associated public bodies’. They may invite written and oral evidence from witnesses, deliberate, and make reports with recommendations to the House. Their membership is determined in proportion to party strength in the House, and their members normally serve for a full Parliament. Members attempt to work on a non-partisan basis and it is normal for some select committee chairs to go to members of the opposition parties. Select committees are criticized for lacking information in undertaking inquiries. Only the Public Accounts Committee in drawing upon the work of the National Audit Office has a substantial information base. The Osmotherly rules (so named after the civil servant who drafted them), governing what civil servants can and cannot say before a select committee, prevent revelations on ministerial-bureaucratic relationships. Nor do committees' reports bind the executive. Defenders of the status quo highlight the policyinfluencing and legitimizing functions of select committees. Critics seek greater powers reminiscent of the committee system in the US Congress.
In the United states a select committee is an ad hoc body. For instance, the official title of the Erwin Committee, which more than anything else toppled President Nixon over
Watergate
, was the Senate Select Committee on Campaign Practices.
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The philosophical idea of self-determination arose out of eighteenth century concern for freedom and the primacy of the individual will. It has been applied to every kind of group which can be said to have a collective will, but in the twentieth century has come to apply primarily to nations. National self-determination was the principle applied to the break-up of the Austrian, German, and Ottoman Empires by President Woodrow Wilson's ‘Fourteen Points’ after the First World War. It is also embodied in the charter of the United Nations, in the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples and in the 1970 Declaration of the Principles of International Law.
Unfortunately, for an idea so widely embraced, it can be argued that the principle of national self-determination is as vicious as it is vague. The justification of repressive national regimes as preferable to liberal empires is a travesty of the original idea of individual self-determination. What, in any case, is the ‘self’ of a nation and who can express its will? There would be reason to be suspicious of the application of this principle even if people were neatly divided into discrete nations on well-defined territories. They are not; and self-determination taken to its most vicious extremes leads to phenomena like the ‘ethnic cleansing’ practised by the Serbs in the 1990s.
LA 

 
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The term may be applied both to the individual person and to a group or an institution. An autonomous person is, fundamentally, one able to act according to his or her own direction. An autonomous institution is one able to regulate its own affairs. The relation between the self-government of a group and individual autonomy is complicated by the need to distinguish between the collective self-government of a group and the self-direction of an individual member of that group.
Rousseau's
writings illustrate the difficulties involved. Ideas about individual autonomy are closely linked to conceptions of
freedom
. For example, to act according to my own direction may (on some views of freedom) require access to resources I presently lack, in which case to provide me with them would enhance both my liberty and my autonomy. This problem is, further, connected to notions of the constitution of the self. For example, it may be held that I am not truly ‘self’-governing if my action is driven by powerful phobias ‘I’ cannot regulate, any more than if my actions are determined by external circumstances beyond my control.
AR 

 
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