Abstract
Although contemporary theorists of revolution usually claim to be incorporating international dynamics in their analysis, “the international” remains a residual feature of revolutionary theory. For the most part, international processes are seen either as the facilitating context for revolutions or as the dependent outcome of revolutions. The result is an analytical bifurcation between international and domestic in which the former serves as the backdrop to the latter’s causal agency. This article demonstrates the benefits of a fuller engagement between revolutionary theory and “the international.” It does so in three steps: first, the article examines the ways in which contemporary revolutionary theory apprehends “the international”; second, it lays out the descriptive and analytical advantages of an “intersocietal” approach; and third, it traces the ways in which international dynamics help to constitute revolutionary situations, trajectories, and outcomes. In this way, revolutions are understood as “intersocietal” all the way down.
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Notes
For the purposes of this article, revolutionary struggles are considered in a broad sense, i.e., as contestations over state power sustained by mass mobilization, an ideology of social justice, and an attempt to enact forceful institutional change (Goldstone 2014, p. 4). Successful revolutions are the rapid, mass, forceful, systemic transformation of a society’s political, economic, and symbolic relations (Lawson Forthcoming, Anatomies of Revolution).
Or perhaps it is better to take both cases together. The Haitian revolutionaries were labeled by C.L.R. James (2001) as the “black Jacobins” in order to stress the many connections between the revolutionary forces and their counterparts in France.
One notable exception within revolutionary scholarship is Eric Selbin (2010, p. 143), who argues that Haiti is “the world’s most important revolutionary process,” albeit one that “virtually everyone ignores.”
The idea of there being several “generations” of scholarship on revolutions stems from the work of Stone (1966) and Goldstone (2001). Although such an approach can foster an overly tidy picture of the development of revolutionary theory, and uproot twentieth and twenty-first century approaches from their classical heritages, there are two benefits to thinking in generational terms: first, it works as a heuristic device by which to parse theories of revolution; and second, it helps to illuminate the development of a self-conscious canon in the study of revolutions.
Despite this statement, Tilly’s concern with the generative power of warfare was integrated more into his analysis of state-formation than it was into his account of revolutions. Indeed, the role of war (or any international factor) in fostering revolutionary situations is absent from Tilly’s (1978) major work on the subject—From Mobilization to Revolution.
Such fourth generation scholarship sits in parallel to recent work on the transnational dimensions of contentious politics, which stresses the co-constitutive relationship between domestic and international mechanisms (Tarrow 2005, 2012, 2013; Bob 2005, 2012; Carpenter 2014; Weyland 2014). The word “parallel” is used advisedly. With relatively few exceptions (e.g., Tarrow 2012, ch. 4; Tarrow 2013, ch. 2), debates on contentious politics and non-violent protests are not well integrated into the study of revolutions. And, as is the case with revolutionary scholarship, the international is unevenly integrated into this analysis, playing a major role in Tarrow (2013), a minor role in Nepstad (2011), and virtually no role in Chenoweth and Stephan (2011).
Parsa’s (2000) deployment of the international is restricted to the ad hoc activities of international organizations (such as the IMF) and non-governmental organizations (such as the International Red Cross). Goodwin’s (2001) use of the international is limited to the observation that states inhabit an international system of states. Thompson (2004) barely mentions international factors at all. Slater’s (2012) account of south-east Asian revolutionary movements explicitly excludes the international dimensions of these movements from the book’s theoretical apparatus, even while the empirical sections of his book are saturated with such factors. Such a bifurcation parallels Barrington Moore’s (1967, p. 214) account of revolutions, which reduced the theoretical impact of international forces to “fortuitous circumstances” even as his empirical account relied heavily on them (on this point, see Skocpol 1973).
Foran lists three exceptions (out of 39 cases) to the condition of dependent development—China (1911) (seen as a partial exception), Haiti (1986), and Zaire (1996). Yet it is difficult to see how these cases are free of dependent development in any meaningful sense. More convincing would be to see the three cases as ultra-reliant on wider metropolitan circuits, something Foran (2005, p. 254) seems to recognize in his depiction of Haiti and Zaire as cases of “sheer underdevelopment.”
If the rather conservative agenda of mainstream IR provides some rationale for this omission, it is more surprising to see the way in which revolutions dropped off the radar of Political Science and Comparative Politics during the 1990s and 2000s. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue. It may be that, in recent years, revolutions are making a comeback in these fields—see: Beissinger (2007, 2014); Slater (2012); Bunce and Wolchik (2007, 2011).
At the heart of the generalized Girondin-Jacobin conflict was a personal clash between Brissot and Robespierre. As Brissot called (successfully) for war with Austria, arguing that French troops would be greeted as liberators, Robespierre responded with an apposite prognosis: “personne n'aime les missionnaires armés” (“no-one likes armed missionaries”). This is a lesson that subsequent revolutionaries have been slow to learn.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. For example, revolutions in Iran and Cuba took place without a major opening in international relations. Yet this does not mean that these revolutions were without intersocietal causes: Iranian revolutionaries benefited from post-Vietnam fatigue amongst US policy makers and publics, while Cuban revolutionaries benefitted from relatively favorable international press coverage, particularly in the New York Times. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to these examples.
The closeness of the ties between ruling families and their coteries also fuelled diffusion effects—their similar modes of rule meant that they shared similar vulnerabilities (Owen 2012).
There is increasing evidence that Chinese leaders saw these “spectacular transformations” as a transnational wave that had the potential to spread well beyond Central and Eastern Europe. In this regard, the deployment of the military against protestors in Tiananmen Square was closely bound up with fear of revolutionary contagion, not least because China was already witnessing protests linked to rising prices and the death of the reform-minded Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. On the reaction of Chinese leaders to the events of 1989, see Sarotte (2012).
Oftentimes, counter-revolution has taken the form of carrot rather than stick. For example, one of the principal rationales for the US Alliance for Progress program, which pumped billions of dollars into Latin America during the 1960s, was to halt the “virus” of the Cuban Revolution from contaminating other states in the region.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to the Theory and Society Editors and anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article—it is much improved as a result. Thanks also to participants at workshops at the London School of Economics, Yale University, and the University of Chicago, Beijing Center, who provided extremely helpful comments on the article as it was being developed. Particular thanks to Justin Rosenberg and Dingxin Zhao for extended discussion about this topic.
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Lawson, G. Revolutions and the international. Theor Soc 44, 299–319 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9251-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9251-x