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Noel Parker, Revolutions and History Polity Press: Cambridge 1999, 14.99 (paperback) 232 pp, 0 7456 1135 4 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics Macmillan: Basingstoke 1999, 15.99 (paperback) 424 pp, 0 333 65328 9

Gran Therborn

RECONSIDERING REVOLUTIONS
Between our contemporary concepts of revolution and modernity there is an intimate mutual dependence. She who does not understand revolution does not understand modernity, and he who does not understand modernity does not understand revolution. Both notions denote a rupture with the past, an afrmation of the innovative capacity of the present, and a vision of the future as an open horizon, on which new lands will be discovered and new houses built, never seen before. The history of modernity is a history of revolutions: scientic, industrial, post-industrial, info-tech; sexual, artistic and, last but not least, politicalAmerican, French, Russian and Anti-Colonial. It is no surprise there should be a close, if by no means invariable, connexion between scientic or aesthetic avant-gardes and revolutionary politics, from the socialism of Einstein to the communism of Picasso. Up to the 1790s, the term re-volution normally signied a movement backwards, or a continuous rotation, in a circular or cyclical direction. The entry in the Encyclopdie, the collective summa of the French Enlightenment, refers to astronomy, watch-making, and cog-wheels. It does also mention a political usage in the modern history of England, viz. the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But upheavals that we consider revolutions today, like the English or American, were in pre-modern times typically conceived as rebellions to restore ancient rights and libertiesor the knowne lawes and statutes and freedome of the Realm, as the 1689 Declaration of Rights put itviolated by a tyrant. More loosely, the word could by the mid-18th century, as in Voltaire, refer to changes in a general

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sense. What the term denitely did not denote was a break with a traditional political system, opening the gate to a novel future. Thomas Paines words in early 1791 marked a turning-point: It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for. From the 19th century onwards, revolutionsas extraordinary events, the object of intense passions, vast mobilizations and dramatic social conictshave always been popular topics for research and debate. In the 1960s and 1970s, the apparent actuality of revolution multiplied the number of such studies and widened their analytic and geographical range. Two inuential new approaches were Theda Skocpols focus on the role of the stateits crisis and post-revolutionary re-strengtheningin social revolutions, and Jack Goldstones model of demographic pressures on the scal and the institutional base of Eurasian agrarian polities. Subsequently the bi-centenary of the French Revolution and the implosion of the Soviet Union triggered new rounds of literature, much of it politically correct denunciation of the objects to hand. The result is today an enormous corpus of scholarship on revolution(s), at once creating space for introductory text-books, and raising the stakes for original reections. Noel Parkers Revolutions and History falls somewhere between these stools. Attractively written, well read and circumspect in judgement, it offers an essay rather than a systematic guide to the literature on revolution. Parkers framework is a combination of modernization theory and world system analysis, approaches that sit together here without much mediation. His general argument is that revolutions occur where states are conduits of the pressures from the expanding, modern global systemthe English revolution being a borderline case, at the late end of the pre-revolutions of the Reformation era, before popular overthrows of government proper. But his main interest lies in the meanings that revolutions have held for contemporaries and posterity. His key concept here is what he calls the revolutionary narrative, or the form within which the events and actions that constitute one revolution or another are interpreted and acted upon. Even as actual revolutions occurred at ever greater distances from the core of the modern world, revolutionary narratives relayed the impact of these outliers within it. This is potentially a very fruitful idea. But the genre Parker has chosen does not allow him to elaborate it. Taking willed change towards a better future as the central motif of modern revolutions, he overlooks the fact that modernity has generated at least three master narrativesemancipation/liberation, progress/ development, and victorious survival (in a darwinist sense). Parker pays no attention to emancipation, arguably the most important revolutionary narrative, or to evolutionary stories of progress, that allow collective efforts for a better future to be conceived as reform rather than revolution. In effect, his subject is ill-tted to the interpretive essay, a Latin (American-cum-European) speciality often characterized by a reckless drive to originality, rush to judgement, and preoccupation

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with style. Even a more balanced Anglophone variant is not best suited to tackle a subject where so much detailed scholarship has accumulated. Fred Hallidays Revolution and World Politics focuses on the complex set of relations between revolutions and the inter-state system, over the short and long runrelations of causation, conditioning, constraint, amplication, support, or connement. This is a major original work, by a scholar with extensive rsthand experience as a sympathetic observer of Third World revolutions. Social and political revolutions have normally been studied as processes bounded by state bordersthat is, as local chains of events with local outcomes. Halliday turns the lens around, and starts from the explicitly internationalist orientation of revolutionary leaders and ideologues. For instance, from Robespierre: Men of all countries are brothers and the various nations must assist each other like citizens of the same State. Halliday, emphasizing that they meant what they said, traces the record of revolutionary internationalism all the way up to Iranian support of the Lebanese Hizbollah and the Cuban apparatus for outtting guerrillas across Latin America run by the late Manuel Pinheiro. The thrust of his book is a forceful correction of what he calls a double exclusion in the prevailing approaches to revolution, exclusion of the international from the analysis of society, and of ideology from the study of revolution. Revolution and World Politics is divided into three parts. The rst starts with an overview of concepts of revolution, and then moves to questions of revolutionary internationalism and export of revolution. Halliday is a good guide to this terrain, which he knows well. It ends with a perceptive chapter on six antinomies of revolutionary foreign policy. The second part focuses on the systemic repercussions of revolutionshow they affect inter-state relations, and are affected by them. This is the core of the book, written with verve and clarity, if not always with even success. A somewhat impressionistic chapter highlights international factors in the causation of revolutions; another asserts, without much argument, that the whole history of modern international relations is one of wars and revolution. We get wide and sharp-eyed insights into the incoherence of counter-revolution and of the varieties of interaction between war and revolution. A chapter on economic constraints and failed attempts at autarky or delinking poses crucial questions, and answers them rather abruptly. Finally, the third part of the book discusses theories of international relations and interpretations of the century that has just ended. Here Halliday sketches a framework for analyzing international relations in general and revolutions in particular. Even serious scholarship on controversial issues tends to take on the avour of its time. Revolutions have always been issues of intense contention. Currently they have fallen into widespread discredit. Can anything of current conventional wisdom be found clinging to Revolution and World Politics? Halliday is well aware of the problem. Indeed, he opens his account with the ringing credo: There are few things less becoming to the study of human affairs than the complacency of

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a triumphal age. Stressing the unpeaceful origin of a peaceful world, he warns against self-satised visions of a future of global democratic peace. Violence may always resume and the agenda of the revolutions of modern history is still very much with us because the aims they asserted, above all in regard to the rights of individuals and social groups, are far from having been achieved. This commendable stance notwithstanding, in practice Halliday has had some difculty in disentangling himself from surrounding assumptions. About a year after the book was nished, amidst the debris of the war in the Balkans and clashes in Kashmir, with battles still raging in Congo and Chechnya, and recurrent lethal racist violence in the North Atlantic zone itself, one wonders whether Halliday himself would still incline to call this a peaceful world. This difculty aside, he has also sometimes been too prone to accept without critical scrutiny some widespread anti-revolutionary assumptions. Today respectable opinion holds that socialist revolutions were unviable. Halliday echoes this view, alleging that they were inherently incapable of sustainable development. While there can be no irrefutable proof that this conclusion is false, any scholar with a critical sense would do well to pause before endorsing the outlook of victorious politicians and ideologues at their moment of triumph. Halliday, while acknowledging that debate will continue, buys it without further ado. He is no doubt right to argue that autarky was a dead-end, and it is, of course, true that European Communism ultimately failed. But his uncritical treatment neglects the fact that until about 1970 communist Eastern Europe was closing the gap with capitalist Western Europe in economic output, life expectancy, and womens rightsin the last respect, even overtaking West-Central and Southwestern Europe. Likewise, Hallidays dismissal of the possibility of any kind of market socialism, as a half-way house that for internal and external reasons could not have worked is very cursory, lacking much logical or empirical basis. He cites the internal difculties of Sandinista Nicaragua, but does not consider the more developed and elaborate experience of Hungary in the 1980s, which foundered not on the rocks of socio-economic contradictions but on the fatal lack of national legitimacy of the regime. Soviet perestroika failed miserably, but the reasons for its downfall have yet to be fully unravelled. Economic reform in China, on the other hand, has been a spectacular success. How to dene the current system in the PRC is open to debate, and where it is leading is anyones guess. But a halfway house certainly seems as good a description as Hallidays managed variant of capitalism. In tune with the times, Halliday avers that revolution turned its eyes away from Western Europe after 1848, as it moved from the developed to the underdeveloped world. There were to be no more revolutionary upheavals in Western Europe [after 1848] and after 1917 no more in Eastern Europe either. This blots out, inter alia, the Paris Commune, the revolutionary breakdown of Wilhelmine

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Germany and of Habsburg Austria, the Italian factory occupations of 1920, the revolutionary upsurges in Spain of the 1930s, the near breakdown of the Belgian state after the Second World War, the civil war in Greece, the Czecho-Slovak overturn of 1948 and the Portuguese revolution of 1974. France was clearly close to a collapse of the political order in late May 1968, when De Gaulle had to make sure of the loyalty of his parachute divisions. From todays perspective, with the bulk of a corrupt political class swept away, even the wild hopes and fears of 196970 in Italy do not look so irrational. Another, more difcult question is posed by the history of European fascism. Halliday avoids some thorny issues here. He includes the Islamic revolution in Iran in his survey, mainly on the grounds thatwhatever its retrograde ideologyit was in many ways functionally equivalent to rival secular revolutions in the Third World, in its populism and anti-imperialism. But we are not shown why a similar argument could not be applied to Italian fascism. Halliday does touch on Nazism, which he terms a counter-revolution that fought against any idea of progress or historical development. This can be questioned. Nazi ideology and practice was by no means uniformly hostile to scienceit drew much of its appeal from an afnity with Social Darwinism. Was Nazism just a counterrevolution? Only in part, Halliday concedes, without taking more notice. In fact, there was a signicant differenceas well as alliancebetween fascism and the purely counter-revolutionary right in Europe, which any comparison of inter-war Italy and Germany with Hungary, Romania, Portugal or Spain points up. In the former, traditionalist counter-revolutionaries were defeated by their Fascist allies; in the latter, victory went the other way. Fascism is irreducible to counter-revolution, and modernity is not synonymous with Habermass version of the Enlightenment. Fascism can be viewed as a modern project to rival the liberal and socialist projects, but even if we categorize it otherwise, it occupies a position in the history of European modernity that is more complicated, and more disturbing of modernist self-images, than Halliday allows for. This is not just a problem of denitions within European history. It has two wider implications for Hallidays conception of revolution and modernity. It fatally weakens the idea that 1848 marked an end to revolutionary upheavals in Western Europe. For how could there be counter-revolutions if there were no revolutions, at least around the corner? Omission of fascism also means lack of any analysis of the ways in which nationalist, anti-internationalist state ruptures have affected and have been affected by international relations. There was an export of fascism too. Such critical observations do not mean that Halliday is seriously unfaithful to his excellent methodological principles. The main line of the book is one of critical sympathy with its currently unfashionable object. We would do well to remember the three not easily forgotten lessons of history with which it ends. First, the enduring inability of those with power and wealth to comprehend the

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depth of hostility to them; second, the ability of history, and of social movements in general, to surprise; nally, the need of peopleindividually and in mass collective movementsto dream, to believe in alternatives to the world in which they live. This is Halliday at his strongest. Commenting on critiques of the myth of revolution by Furet, Laqueur and others, he notes that this is an account that fails the test of explanation, of identifying against what revolutionaries and their sympathisers were reacting. Equally it fails to explain why millions fought and in many cases died for these beliefs. Conversely, Hallidays book is impressive not just as a work of analytic scholarship, but because it is written from within revolutions, with an ear for their polyphonous voices of aspiration and hopefrom Milton to Khomeiniand with a feeling for their constraints and contradictions as their militantsfrom Jacobins to Fidelistasmanoeuvre in a hostile world, without being in the least apologetic or uncritical. He goes back and forth between different centuries and different continents with the sureness of someone familiar with all the rooms of the vast, and rather ruined, house of revolutions. Still, there is nothing nal here. Is modernity really made only of war and revolution, as Halliday suggests? War is an age-old phenomenon, and even revolution, if we extend the notion as Halliday does to the time of Cromwell, still governed by the ancient word of sacred scriptures, would precede modernity. Missing, above all, is the variable setting of revolutions within different routes to modernity across the globe. The cases Halliday takes are used as illustrations or supports of an argument, without any systematic analysis of their trajectories or outcomes, or comparison of these with cases where there was no revolution. In principle the book argues for a combination of state-centred, socio-economic and cultural analysis, but in practice there is no real exploration of the ways in which the tripartite system of inter-acting states, economic systems, and cultures, has been structured or how it should be periodized. Capitalism is invoked, but not integrated into the framework of Revolution and World Politics. In this sense, the whole bookfocusing as it does overwhelmingly on ideas and inter-state policiesis marked by a socio-economic under-determination. Perhaps most tellingly, we are told of the importance of social movements, but we would look in vain for any overview of them. With all due admiration for the achievement of this volume, we must hope for another and more systematic one to come.

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Gran Therborn is co-director of the Swedish Colloquium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and author of European Modernity and Beyond (1995).

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