Abstract
The scholarship on revolutions, while vast, mainly focusses on the variety of domestic and international factors that instigate or sustain revolutionary movements rather than whether revolutions meet their stated social objectives beyond initial regime change. However, in examining supposedly successful revolutions decades later, when the afterglow of the struggle has subsided, the majority of aims for social transformation remain unachieved and often abandoned by the former revolutionaries themselves. In order to make sense of the limited success of social revolutions, this article proposes two sets of tensions between the international, on the one hand, and the domestic and local, on the other, that constrain and hamper revolutionaries in the aftermath of initial revolutionary success. First, though successful revolutionaries capture the instruments of domestic state power, to achieve revolutionaries’ aims for wide social transformation necessarily requires change in international social, political, and economic forces. Hence, the mismatch between domestic control and international forces limits revolutionary success. Second, successful revolutions depend on narratives full of imminent possibility and radical transformation, but the reality of post-revolution social change is slow and non-linear. This mismatch between narrative and international process hampers the achievement of revolutionary aims. We illustrate this argument with two exploratory examples in the Haitian Revolution and from the Colour Revolutions.
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Notes
Here, ‘successful’ refers to revolutions where the revolutionary faction topples the existing government and takes control. However, for most revolutions, the aim of this regime change is not simply to supplant the old government, but to achieve social and political transformations. In this article, we use the term ‘successful’ in quotes to highlight and challenge the assumed link between success in the first instance—regime change—and success in achieving wider social and political transformation. For example, a ‘successful’ revolution such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 might still fail to achieve broader transformations because of the international and structural forces we highlight in this article.
When discussing revolutions throughout this essay, we refer to social revolutions (see Skocpol 1979, p. 142, 1994). Social revolutions are often an attempt to bridge social movements and the state. Social movements can be defined as collectives that come together over shared grievances and concerns and engage in collective action (see Snow et al. 2004, p. 3). Social revolutions often emerge in the wake of class struggle (broadly defined) and seek to alter social and political structures.
Methodological nationalism refers to the assumption that the nation-state “is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002).
Due to the limitations inherent in this exploratory theoretical intervention, our choice of illustrations are not representative of the full diversity of revolutionary movements since the late-eighteenth century. We selected these illustrations based on how well they demonstrated our key contributions, and future studies are likely necessary to flesh out the full implications.
Or peoples who perceive their oppression can emerge through a change of circumstance, often in the form of a declining advantageous economic or political situation for individuals.
Although an argument can be made that domestic success, despite limited outcomes on international forces, was evident, domestic success continued to be constrained due to external socioeconomic impositions of international forces. This includes Haiti’s ‘independence debt’ and the American embargo of Cuba.
It can be argued that ‘socialism in one country’ developed by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924 and adopted as state policy by the Soviet Union was an attempt to limited Soviet aims to the state level; however, the logics behind socialist thinking still aimed towards international goals and international structural factors still encumbered Soviet policy making (Carr 1961, pp. 275–278).
The story of the Haitian Revolution is multi-layered and complex, particularly in the context of the French Revolution and the rapid social and political changes in the Atlantic region. Even in Haitian society itself, there were several groups vying for status and power including the white plantation owners, the petit blancs, the gens de colour, and the slaves, and all had differing conceptualization of independence, freedom, and liberty (Knight 2000; Geggus 2011). As this section is a brief case to demonstrate the theoretical framework outlined earlier in this paper, we have not fully explored the intricacies of the case, but rather focussed on the tensions between narratives, domestic policy, and international structures.
Guillaume Thomas Raynal was a French writer of the Enlightenment whose works greatly influenced the French Revolution. In evoking Raynal, we can see how Louverture’s revolutionary narratives blended European and indigenous Haitian ideas of liberation and struggle (Beard 1983, p. 46).
The story goes that Dessalines ripped out the white on the French tricolour to create the Haitian flag by symbolically removing the white race. The removal of whites was not only symbolic as Dessalines’ forces massacred whites across the country (Girard 2010, p. 59).
However, despite the language of empire, the constitution does stipulate that “the emperor shall never form any enterprise with the view of making conquests, nor to disturb the peace and interior administration of foreign colonies” (Article 36).
A similar process is described by Susan Eckstein (2004) with regard to Cuba.
Shilliam (2008) characterizes this as the original colour line.
The war in Ukraine is not considered within the analysis of this article due to the continually developing circumstances at present. We bracket our analysis from the moment of revolutionary mobilization to political turnover and the relatively immediate consequences.
The Colour Revolutions of the early 2000s began with protests that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, and included mass mobilization in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon. Since these revolutions demanded Western-style civil and political liberties and overthrew regimes friendly to Russia, Putin saw these revolutions as a Western policy to deliberately isolate Russia. In this brief empirical illustration, we focus on Georgia and Ukraine to illustrate our argument (Newnham 2015; McFaul 2005).
For a more thorough account of Georgia’s domestic politics in the Rose Revolution see the volume edited by Karumidze and Wertsch (2005).
For a more thorough account of Ukraine’s domestic politics in the Orange Revolution see the volume edited by Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul (2006).
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Yao, J., Delatolla, A. The limits of modern revolutions: global constraints on domestic change. Acta Polit 59, 458–481 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00302-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-023-00302-w