Revolutions in World History

Michael D. Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134590278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This broad comparative survey focuses on five big case studies, starting with the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, and going on to the Mexican, Russian, Vietnamese and Iranian Revolutions.

Revolutions in World History traces the origins, developments, and outcomes of these revolutions, providing an understanding of the revolutionary tradition in a global context. Questions about motivations and ideologies are raised as well as about the effectiveness of these revolutions

Chapter 1

Bringing revolutions back into history

World history is filled with coups, revolts, and rebellions. It offers, by way of contrast, relatively few revolutions. The first is arguably the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish crown, beginning in the late sixteenth century. This book attempts to put revolutions back into history. It does this by examining the role of revolutions in world history from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. To accomplish this goal, it makes use of comparative studies of the seventeenth-century British revolutions and twentieth-century revolutions in Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, and Iran.

Three propositions have guided the comparative study of the five revolutions. The first asserts that political repertoires have included the phenomenon of revolution since the seventeenth century. Put another way, revolutions became at some point in the seventeenth century one way of doing politics, one way of deciding who paid what price to accomplish certain ends.

The second proposition is that the use of power is more important than the seizure of power. Obviously the seizure of power is a prerequisite to its use and of considerable interest, but one cannot claim to fully understand a revolution without studying its life course. If this book has some claim to originality, it lies in the idea that revolutions go well beyond the seizure and consolidation of power. They may be episodic or segmented, as was, for example, the Russian Revolution. The events of the 1930s, the Stalin Revolution, might be considered a second and much more convulsive part of the 1917 revolution. It is, in fact, difficult to say where a revolution ends. It becomes embedded in the history of a nation, constantly used or misused in contemporary politics.

Thirdly, whether revolutions ever are completely finished, there are criteria by which a revolution may be considered a “success” or a “failure.” Such a proposition is inherently controversial in that it seems to rest on a highly subjective evaluation. Nevertheless, there are a few criteria that, applied to a particular revolution, may lead to an objective assessment of that revolution. A “successful” revolution, then, should do the following: (1) it should provide for individual liberty; (2) it should result in a flexible and open political system that can deal with economic, social, and cultural changes; and (3) it should generate improvement in the well-being of those it affects.

The phenomenon of revolution is best understood in historical terms. The comparative studies that follow occupy a middle ground between the study of individual revolutions, the approach of many historians, and overarching theories that explain the dynamics of revolution, an approach taken mostly by political scientists and sociologists.

Some time ago, I advanced the idea of “clusters of revolution,” as in the Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe or the several revolutions between 1900 and 1920 in what might be called semi-colonial countries (Russia, Persia, Mexico, China). Looking at clusters of revolutions offers a good approach to the task of recognizing broad patterns. At the same time, it is still important to insist that geographical locations and cultural traditions make a difference even when the revolutions are contemporaneous and subject to similar environmental factors. The search for patterns, for typologies, is useful in dealing with what is otherwise a jumble of detail. Ultimately, however, the useful insights derived from these efforts must be anchored in the historical details of a particular revolutionary experience.

It is also important to understand that the concept of revolution has its own history. Anyone thinking about revolution in the early years of the twenty-first century cannot help but think about it differently from the way someone thought about it early in the twentieth century. Events in Russia, China, Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic and elsewhere in the past century have changed the way people view revolutions. Revolutionaries themselves often have a historical perspective, hoping to find in the past lessons or answers they can use.

At this point, a definition of revolution is probably overdue. At a minimum, revolution involves the use of or the threat of the use of force either to recover a political system that appears to have been eroded or to bring into being a new political system. In many cases, revolution also involves the creation of different social or economic arrangements. In some cases, it may even entail thorough going cultural change.

It would be all too easy to get lost in the thickets of theory, but, as is the case with a working definition of the revolution, a brief theoretical orientation is also useful. The year 1979 was a good one for revolutions. It featured not only two very different revolutions in Iran and in Nicaragua but also publication of a groundbreaking book by Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolution. A review of the literature since the publication of States and Social Revolution makes it clear that Skocpol’s ideas, somewhat modified in response to critics, have continued to exert extraordinary influence down to the present (it is interesting to note a kind of lineage in that Skocpol was a student of Barrington Moore, Jr., a major contributor to comparative studies of revolution, and that one of her students, Jeff Goodwin, has emerged as a major figure in comparative studies in his own right).

I take from Skocpol’s work primarily the emphasis on the state as an autonomous actor, both on the domestic level and on the international. For there to be a chance of revolution the state must, inadvertently of course, create a potentially revolutionary situation. This may involve a fiscal crisis, as in the case of France in 1789, or a regime that fails to maintain an adequate coalition of elites, as in the case of Mexico in 1910.

Some group, or perhaps a coalition of groups, then has to respond to the potentially revolutionary situation. The would-be revolutionaries may already have been in existence before the situation developed or may have found each other only after the appearance of new possibilities. Charles Tilly’s work, in From Mobilization to Revolution among others, has been helpful in understanding how revolutionaries organize and locate necessary resources.

Although class-based analyses have grown increasingly sophisticated, they nonetheless do more to obscure the dynamics of revolutions than to clarify them. And, also problematic, they reinforce a tendency to concentrate on the origins of revolution. As a graduate student, I read Georges Lefebvre’s brilliant study of 1789, published in English as The Coming of the French Revolution: 1789, which laid out the role of each class in the revolution very convincingly: an aristocratic revolution providing an opening, a bourgeois revolution creating a national assembly and beginning the work of drafting a constitution, a popular revolution and then a peasant revolution protecting and extending the initial efforts, all of these streams coming together in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” in August and in the October days that led the revolutionaries and the royal family from Versailles back to Paris. In the end, however, Lefebvre’s analysis, brilliant and convincing as it was, was simply too schematic to reflect the complicated opening months of the revolution.

Finally, culture matters. In 1981 I arranged a panel on “States and Social Revolution” for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. One of the panelists, William Sewell, contributed a long paper, later published in the journal of Modern History with a rejoinder by Skocpol. Without taking sides in that very fruitful debate between Sewell and Skocpol, I will note that it made me aware of just how much culture mattered. Emiliano Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution furnishes one example of the power of culture. In 1909 he was elected president of the village council of Anenecuilco. At the age of thirty, he had already proved himself an able defender of village rights. Although Zapata was not a peasant and had never worked as a day laborer on the hacienda, he was nonetheless regarded as a man of the people. Understanding the problems of his own village and the many other similar villages in the state of Morels made him a formidable leader in the Mexican Revolution. His inability to see the larger national picture, however, meant that eventually he would lose out to revolutionaries with wider perspectives.

Because of the need to bring revolutions back into history, this book begins with an examination of the British Revolution of the seventeenth century rather than the French Revolution of the eighteenth century. The former reveals in a striking manner the ways in which revolution is simply another way of doing politics. It is worth noting that the people involved in revolutions in Britain in the 1640s and 1650s and again in 1688 only reluctantly changed the existing political system. Change, in fact, was disguised as the recovery or the preservation of old rights and institutions.

In France the revolution appeared first as a response to the contemporary political situation, but it soon became, in effect, an attempt to escape from history, to start over. It was, to be sure, a very different approach to politics, perhaps stretching the idea of politics to its limit. Nonetheless, even in France and the subsequent revolutions that aimed at beginning afresh, revolution was still an integral part of politics.

Whether revolution builds on existing institutions and procedures or attempts to make a fresh start, it must be seen as part of the historical process. Sometimes, in the life of a society or nation, as the title of a recent book on revolutions by Jeff Goodwin has it, there is No Other Way Out of a particular situation than through revolution. There are costs involved in dealing with any situation where politics comes into play. Politics is essentially a process for determining who pays, how much, and in what manner to accomplish the desired goal.

The Cold War produced an obsession with the origins of revolution. The reasoning was that if it were possible to understand what caused revolutions, it might be possible to find ways to prevent them from occurring. To some extent, we have moved from an over-emphasis on the origins of revolution and the seizure of power to a concern with the use of power. In any case, beginning with the British Revolutions of the seventeenth century also helps us see the importance of taking a long-term view of the phenomenon of revolution.

Until we have seen how revolutionaries put power to use it is difficult to determine whether a revolution has succeeded or failed, Of course, a revolution that does not result in the seizure of power is clearly a failure even though it may leave a legacy, as was, for example, the case with the 1905 Revolution in Russia. It is possible that the “failure” of a revolution may create conditions leading to its eventual “success.” In the case of the British Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, the restoration of the Stuart kings in the person of Charles II seemed to mark the mid-century revolutionary efforts as a failure. The Stuart dynasty, however, ran into problems, to which the Revolution of 1688 formed one possible solution. Over an additional period of more than a century, an evolutionary process, with occasional near-revolutionary situations, led to the development of a constitutional monarchy with the House of Commons as its political center—a successful and enduring political system.

Once the idea of revolution became part of the political repertoire, even if many political actors did not care to acknowledge it as such, individuals and groups tried with increasing frequency to make use of it. The nineteenth century is filled with efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to imitate the French Revolution of 1789. Several of these efforts took place in France itself, as the French seemed doomed to repeat their initial revolutionary experience.

Ultimately, the revolutions of the nineteenth century demonstrated the historical character of revolution. Revolution in the nineteenth century was mostly about politics, although with the social question and even some ideas about cultural change thrown in. In the course of the nineteenth century, the world changed fundamentally as industrial capitalism and the concept of nation states took hold. Revolution, defined as a form of politics, changed if for no other reason than political problems and political aspirations changed. The addition of economic and social issues complicated the situation even more. Expectations about what a revolution might accomplish increased rapidly.

After the French Revolution, with its idea of starting over, many revolutionaries paradoxically attempted to go outside politics, in a sense to escape from history, by destroying the old regime and setting in its place something with no connections to the old systems, culture, and traditions. The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s provides an extreme example of a desire to set in place a utopian system in which all revolutionaries will be good and pure.

The British Revolutions of the seventeenth century set the stage for the book, calling attention both to the wish to modify and the desire to establish something radically different. The British Revolutions also point to the importance of looking at the use of power and at ways in which “failure” might eventually lead to “success.” Finally, the British Revolutions had an impact on other countries and on political thought more generally.

The four remaining chapters focus on twentieth-century revolutions: the Mexican, Russian, Vietnamese, and Iranian revolutions. The Mexican Revolution was the first major revolution of the twentieth century, beginning in 1910 and continuing for most of that decade. It, too, is an excellent illustration of the themes of the book. For example, revolution as an integral part of history, another plausible form of politics, is connected with the failure of the Porfiriato, the regime of Porfirio Díaz, to maintain a viable political system. It is perhaps uncharitable to call a regime that lasted thirty-four years a failure; nonetheless, its collapse in 1910 opened the way to revolution. The second concerns the use of power. Tracing that theme requires an examination of the course of Mexican history not only in the revolutionary decade but also through the 1920s and 1930s as well. Out of the turmoil of revolution came a remarkably stable, quite cynical political system that lasted nearly the rest of the century. It was, to be sure, a highly limited system in that it worked well only for certain groups, but it became more successful, at least in its own terms, than one would have predicted in the 1920s. Ultimately, the “success” or “failure” of the Mexican Revolution will depend on the direction taken by Mexico in the next few decades.

The Russian Revolution must count as the most important revolutionary upheaval of the twentieth century. The trauma of World War I led directly to the February Revolution and eventually, also, to the October Revolution. Vladimir Lenin’s brand of Marxism also played a crucial role, helping to create the conditions that made the October Revolution possible. Revolution continued to be an alternate method of politics, but now was seemingly a far more consciously directed alternate method.

What makes the Russian Revolution, specifically the “Great October Socialist Revolution,” such a powerful component of world history in the twentieth century is that the Soviet Union, operating more and more as a modern variant of the Russian Empire, had the potential to become a major power and did. Lenin seemingly showed the way to seize and retain power. Stalin, his disciple and successor, made it his life’s work to turn a weak, backward, largely agricultural country into an industrialized, technologically advanced, and militarily strong nation. After World War II and victory over Nazi Germany offered a validation of the Soviet approach, the Soviet model was almost irresistibly attractive to emerging nations around the world. Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by Stalin, became the revolutionary ideology of choice.

Marxism-Leninism marked the Vietnamese Revolution as well but so did nationalism and patriotism. Including the Vietnamese Revolution in this book provides an opportunity to examine a national liberation movement of extraordinary duration and persistence. The combination of Marxism and nationalism served to mobilize hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese for extraordinary sacrifices over long periods. Again, the Vietnamese Revolution demonstrates party leaders’ increasingly conscious direction of revolutionary efforts.

From another vantage point, the Vietnamese Revolution demonstrates the limits of power. The United States, as successor to the French in Indochina, found it could not create, much less sustain, a South Vietnam that could compete with the Marxist, nationalist regime to the north. Vietnam became in many respects the Spain of the 1960s and 1970s, a cockpit in which great ideologies, this time Democracy and Communism, competed. As was the case with Spa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Bringing revolutions back into history
• 2 The British Revolution of the seventeenth century
• 3 The Mexican Revolution
• 4 The Russian Revolution
• 5 The Vietnamese Revolution
• 6 The Iranian Revolution
• 7 Revolutions in world history
• Index