Abstract
There are few things less becoming to the study of human affairs than the complacency of a triumphal age. At the close of the twentieth century the world was able to contemplate, in a manner never previously possible, the prospect of an age of democratic peace. After two world wars and a forty-year cold war, and the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes of left and right, it appeared to some that the consolidation of democracy in the major states of the world, and its apparent spread to others, would herald an age when inter-state conflict of a military kind would cease. A solution, imperfect but durable, to the twin problems of attaining internal political order, and external, inter-state, peace appeared to have been reached. The agenda for international relations, as for domestic politics, would therefore appear to have been clear: the consolidation of democracy within states, combined with the growth of cooperation between them.
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Notes
Göran Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, New Left Review, 103, May–June 1977; Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1967).
‘The Civil War in France’, in Karl Marx, The First International and After, edited by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) pp. 232–3.
For an example of a specific national study that is silent on the international, Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1789–1799 (London: NLB, 1974)
Stan Taylor, Social Science and Revolutions (London: Macmillan, 1984).
I have gone into this in greater detail in Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994).
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: CUP, 1979)
Engels to Zasulich, 23 April 1885, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, c. 1956) p. 460.
E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’ in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Revolution in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 12.
Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française (Paris: Le Plon, 8 vols, 1893–1908).
Anthony Giddens, Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) pp. 702–5.
On the earthquake analogy see Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Oxford: University of California Press, 1991) pp. 35
Gary Sick, All Fall Down, America’s Fateful Encounter with Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 1985) pp. 38–3.
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile edited by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 146.
‘... revolutions do nothing to weaken the institution of the state, but, rather, by stripping away their inefficient anciens régimes, actually reinforce the state and make it into a more efficient engine of war, disruption and ultimate creativity, directed inevitably against the status quo of the day’, Andrew Williams, ‘The French Revolution’, in Stephen Chan and Andrew Williams (eds), Renegade States: The Evolution of Revolutionary Foreign Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) pp. 50–1.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Karl Radek, Ein offener Brief an Philipp Scheidemann, pp. 2-3, quoted in Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968) p. 20
Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991).
Hence the apt title for Jorge Dominguez’s study of Cuba, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
For examples of critiques of communism that, though astute in their identification of its mythical character, failed to explain either the broad international appeal of such ideas, or the causes of the mass upheavals that characterised twentieth-century revolutions, see: Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution. Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)
Theodor Hamerow, From the Finland Station. The Graying of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1990)
Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed, Reflections on the Soviet Union (London: OUP, 1994)
François Furet, Le passé d’ne illusion, Essais sur l’idéé communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: Laffont, 1995).
For example, Richard Pipes in his The Unknown Lenin (London: Yale University Press, 1996)
Lars Lih et al. (eds), Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (London: Yale University Press, 1995) pp. 27–36.
Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen 1967–1987 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990).
The argument for revolutions as distinctive events had been made by, among others, Karl Marx and Theda Skocpol. The argument against has come from a variety of standpoints. Thus behaviouralists deny the specificity of these events, seeing them as part of a broader continuum of violence, or ‘internal war’; Peter Calvert prefers a broad definition of revolution as ‘the forcible overthrow of a government or regime’ (Revolution and International Politics, London: Frances Pinter, 1984, p. 2)
J. Böhlin et al. (eds), Samhällsvetenskap, ekonomi, historia, Götebord: Daidalos, 1989).
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). Introduction: Revolutions and the International. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_1
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