Equality of Opportunity
Increasingly, in most Western countries, during the 20th century it became
accepted that individuals should not be impeded in their careers by such factors
as their race, religion or sex. However, while Napoleon advocated the reform
of French institutions by making career advancement dependent on skills and
performance alone (seeegalitarianism), in the United Kingdom, for exam-
ple, recruitment for senior positions in thecivil servicewas overwhelmingly
from arts graduates from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and printers’
trade unionseffectively barred entry to the trade to those without a suitable
family connection, in both instances until well into the second half of the 20th
century. In the 1960s sensitivity to various forms of discrimination became
especially strong in both the USA and the UK, and such concerns were
reflected from the outset in the Treaty of Rome establishing the European
Economic Community, and have subsequently been taken seriously by both
the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. In the 1960s
and 1970s, Race Relations and Equal Pay Acts were passed making certain
forms of racial and sex discrimination illegal. At the end of the century, these
were strengthened further, and new legislation protecting the rights, for
example, of the disabled, was introduced widely. In the USA the concept of
equality of opportunity has become so accepted that all commercial and
industrial firms, as well as public institutions, have to ensure that they can
prove a good performance on appointments and promotions; indeed, steps
have been taken to introduceaffirmative actionas a measure to redress
previous inequalities. Meanwhile, in the UK, the issue of discrimination
against women, and indeed against, for example,homosexualminorities,
has been less central to political debate. Even this limitation is waning as
industrial tribunals increasingly take a stronger and more assertive role in
protecting women’s rights, and the courts take notice of issues of sexual
identity and orientation.
Escalation
Escalation is a term used in modern militarystrategy, especially nuclear war
theory, which indicates an increasing violence or force in the response of a
protagonist towards its enemy. Thus a war might start with purely conventional
weapons (seeconventional arms), and when one side finds itself doing badly,
it might ‘escalate’ by using battlefield, ortactical nuclear weapons. At this
point the other side might move to the same stage, or even to the use of major
strategic nuclear weapons, thus ‘escalating’the war further. The concept is very
much based on the image of a ladder, with rungs representing different levels of
force. Most strategic thought is concentrated on minimizing the ‘escalating’
Escalation