Abstract
It has already been argued that war and revolution are the two formative processes of modern international history. The history of revolutions is repeatedly combined with that of war. This was never more so than in the twentieth century. It was the upheavals accompanying two world wars that provided the context for revolutionary triumph and counter-revolutionary reversal alike. A survey of the relationships between war and revolution can therefore serve to bring together some of the themes of earlier chapters, and to examine more closely some of the ways in which this phenomenon, political as well as military, relates to revolution. Revolutions, in addition to precipitating wars, guerrilla or conventional, are themselves often caused by wars. Perhaps most importantly, wars in many ways resemble revolutions, and are indeed, in some approaches, assimilated to them. That they are interrelated, but distinguishable, is one starting point for an overall assessment of how these two formative processes interact.
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Notes
‘A War for Eternal Peace’, in Stuart Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (London: Praeger, 1964) pp. 267–9.
Tad Szulc Fidel. A Critical Portrait (London: Hutchinson, 1986) pp. 7–8.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary the term entered English in 1809 as a result of the Peninsular War (1808–14). It referred first to a combatant engaged in such a war, then to the war itself. For general histories, see Gerard Chaliard (ed.), Stratégie de la Guerrilla (Paris: Mazarine, 1979)
Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977).
von Clausewitz, On War; Raymond Aron, Clausewitz (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986) p. 45
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
On Trotsky The Prophet Armed, pp. 214-15; on Lenin, George Lukacs, Lenin, The Unity of His Theory (London: Verso, 1970)
Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).
For analysis and edited texts, see Bernard Semmel, Marxism and the Science of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
W. B. Gachie, Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge: CUP, 1978).
V.I. Lenin, Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969)
Quoted in Hugh Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1971) p. 1417.
Mao Tse-tung, Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954).
Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961).
Che Guevara, Guerrilla War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961).
Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?. See also Regis Debray and the Latin American Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); Hartmut Ramm, The Marxism of Regis Debray: Between Lenin and Guevara (Lawrence, Kansas: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978).
For a perceptive and critical account of the post-war evolution, and one that lays proper stress on the role of ideology and strategic vision in revolutionary movements, see Chalmers Johnson, Autopsy on People’s War (London: University of California Press, 1973).
For retrospective reflection on the mixed experience, see the political critiques of Régis Debray Che’s Guerrilla War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
João Quartim, Armed Struggle in Brazil (London: NLB, 1971)
On the lessons of the 1962 Indian campaign see ‘Introduction to Tukhachevsky’, New Left Review, no. 55 (May–June 1969) pp. 85-6. Also Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Cape, 1970).
Most discussion of Mao as a theorist of war has focussed on his theory of guerrilla war, and the relation of politics to military strategy and tactics. On this aspect of Mao as Clausewitzian, see Raymond Aron, Clausewitz (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
Theda Skocpol, ‘Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization’, in Social Revolution in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 281.
On the Iranian army in war, Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989).
For a feminist perspective on the erosion of support for the FSLN as a result of the war, see Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). War and Revolution. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_9
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