Negotiated revolutions: The prospects for radical change in contemporary world politics

Review of International Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 473-493

  Lawson, George ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 22144475167     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210505006595     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4.
2. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, (London: Orion, 1993), p. 103.
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 12.
4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
5. Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Penguin, 1978).
6. Using fairly demanding criteria, John Foran calculates that there were 31 revolutions in the twentieth century. For more on this, see John Foran (ed.), The Future of Revolutions (London: Zed Books, 2003).
7. Barry M. Schutz and Robert O. Slater (eds.), Revolution in the Third World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990).
8. Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 331.
9. This trend is best epitomised by the example of Hugo Chavez, a former Venezuelan paratrooper who returned as president in 1998, six years after he had conducted an attempted coup, in order to lead a 'peaceful revolution' against the 'rancid oligarchs' and 'squealing pigs' of the old regime. But other examples are also pertinent - the former dictator of Bolivia, Hugo Banzer, was re-elected as president in 1997. Since Banzer's death in 2002, the country has witnessed a period of some turbulence, exemplified by the coup in October 2003 against the regime headed by Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori's period in office ended in 2000 with his forced exile amidst a welter of political and financial scandals. His successor, Alejandro Toledo, was forced to declare a state of emergency in 2002 as a result of increasingly violent grass roots protests. The current instability which mars Ecuador and Argentina, along with Colombia's longer-term volatility, serve as potent examples of the region's unsteady milieu. For more on this, see Michael Shifter, 'Breakdown in the Andes', Foreign Affairs, 83:5 (2004).
10. Although many states in the region, among them Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, now bear the trappings of formal democracy, the region remains mired in deep-seated problems from which it will be difficult to recover, not least among them the spectre of a return to populist, authoritarian rule.
11. There is also a demographic factor behind the continuing importance of radical change to the contemporary world. As David Willetts points out, of the world's twenty-five most youthful countries, sixteen have experienced major civil conflict since 1995. The average age in China at the time of the revolution was nineteen, in Iran at the time of the Shah's overthrow, it was seventeen. Conversely, of countries with the oldest populations in the world, only Croatia has experienced serious conflict over the last fifteen years. For more on this, see David Willetts, 'Too Many Kids', Prospect, October 2003, p. 18.
12. On this, see Halliday, Revolution and World Politics.
13. For more on this, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963),
14. and Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
15. Tocqueville was so taken with this restoration that, writing in 1852, he claimed 'nothing, or almost nothing has changed since 1789'. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 8.
16. See Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Negotiated Revolution: Society and Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1993);
17. Allister Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Negotiated Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1995);
18. Rudolf Tökés, Hungary's Negotiated Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
19. and Michael Kennedy, 'Towards a Theory and Practice of Negotiating Revolution', Eastern European Politics and Society, 13:2 (1999).
20. This article draws on a comparative research project into three contemporary transformations: the collapse of communism in the Czech Republic; the end of apartheid in South Africa; and the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The Czech Republic is defined as having undergone a negotiated revolution in a 'maximum' sense because of the systemic transformation of its principal political, economic and social institutions since 1989. The South African case warrants the label 'minimum' transformation because some of the structures inherited from the apartheid regime (in particular economic institutions), have been difficult to break and remould. Chile is considered to be a case of transition rather than revolution, negotiated or otherwise, because while some important social, political and economic changes have taken place since 1989, these have largely been contained within the 'authoritarian enclaves' prescribed by the outgoing junta. These three cases are used in this article as the principal empirical material by which to test and illustrate the theoretical claims. George Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
21. On the 'maximum' and 'minimum' dimensions of revolutionary change, see Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
22. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1965).
23. Jaroslav Krejčí, Great Revolutions Compared: The Outline of a Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
24. See, for example, Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), Chapter 6.
25. Even within such a loose taxonomy, there are still exceptions. For example, the Mexican Revolution was an uprising against an authoritarian regime rather than a movement for an alternative utopian future, at least until the intervention of Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio and his nationalisation drive during the late 1930s.
26. Vladimir Ili'ch Lenin, On Culture and Cultural Revolution (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 94.
27. John Foran, 'Theories of Revolution Reconsidered: Towards a Fourth Generation'? Sociological Review, 11:1 (1993).
28. The idea of there being an evolution to the study of revolutions with each generation building usefully on the insights of the last, stems from an article by Lawrence Stone: Lawrence Stone, 'Theories of Revolution', World Politics, 18:2 (1966).
29. Also see Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions, ch. 2.
30. Institutions and organisations are offered as a 'middle-level' analysis capable of unravelling and evaluating revolutionary transformations. For more on this, see Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions, ch. 1.
31. For more on this, see Alexander J. Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
32. A useful differentiation is made by James Rosenau, who distinguishes between 'personnel wars' that take place for control of the government, 'authority wars' that lead to a change of regime, and structural wars or social revolutions, which encompass a much broader transformation of power relations. James N. Rosenau, International Aspects of Civil Strife (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964).
33. For more on this, see Piotr Sztompka, The Sociology of Social Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
34. The notion of 'organic crisis' is drawn from Gramsci. For Gramsci, revolutions take place in an era in which, 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear'. Cited in Colin Bundy, 'History, Revolution and South Africa', Inaugural Lecture given at the University of Cape Town, 17 June 1987, p. 7.
35. For contrasting views, see Lex Rieffel, 'Indonesia's Quiet Revolution', Foreign Affairs, 83:5 (2004),
36. and Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).
37. For more on this, see Halliday, Revolution and World Politics.
38. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994).
39. Similarly, one only has to look at the failings of the 'transitions from above' in Afghanistan and Iraq to draw parallel cautionary lessons.
40. For example, in the Czech Republic, unemployment rose from a statistically redundant 0.8 per cent of the working population in 1990 to over 10 per cent in 2003.
41. World Bank, Czech Republic: Completing the Transformation of Banks and Enterprises (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002). It is worth noting that the comparable figures for Poland and Hungary are 33 per cent and 31 per cent respectively. However, in Slovenia the figure is as low as 8 per cent.
42. Europa Publications, Central and South Eastern Europe (London: Europa, 2003).
43. Figures taken from Economist Intelligence Unit, The Czech Republic: Country Profile (London: EIU, 2004).
44. Rick Fawn, 'Czech Attitudes to the Roma', Europe-Asia Studies, 53:8 (2001).
45. John Nagle and Alison Mahr, Democracy and Democratisation (London: Sage, 1999), p. 159.
46. For more on these polls, see Robin Shepherd, Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
47. Erin Jenne, 'The Roma of Eastern and Central Europe: Constructing a Stateless Nation', in Jonathan R. Stein (ed.), The Politics of National Minority Participation in Post-Communist Europe (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2000).
48. Economist Intelligence Unit, Czech Republic: Country Profile.
49. There is increasing evidence, however, that the Soviet Union supported revolutions in the developing world covertly. At a seminar held at the London School of Economics in November 2003, Vladimir Shubin, a Russian expert on Southern Africa, claimed that the Soviet Union was involved in nineteen conflicts in the Third World during the Cold War.
50. The importance of counter-revolution lies in what Philip Windsor calls 'the vulnerability of the great powers'. In order to maintain their position, status and credibility, great powers are forced to quell moments of disorder, intervening in order to demonstrate their steadfastness against threats to their hegemony. This 'system-pressure' is, as Windsor points out, a kind of 'weakness-in-strength'. For a fuller discussion of this, see Nick Bisley, 'Counter-Revolution, Order and International Polities', Review of International Studies, 30:1 (2004).
51. Just over 80 per cent of Czechs voted in favour of membership in the June 2003 referendum.
52. Peter Schraeder, Exporting Democracy: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002). Some diplomatic efforts were made, particularly by Pik Botha, Foreign Minister between 1980 and 1994, to establish apartheid South Africa's legitimate credentials. But in Africa, only Malawi and the Côte d'Ivoire recognised the apartheid state. Elsewhere, South Africa maintained cordial relations with Israel, particularly after 1973, as it did with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's Iran. Some states, among them the United States, Britain and West Germany, established a working relationship with Pretoria, but by and large, the apartheid regime was an outcast, excluded from multilateral bodies and ostracised by most of the international community.
53. Greg Mills (ed.), From Pariah to Participant (Johannesburg: South African Institute of International Affairs, 1994).
54. This shift should not be seen as an even nor as an unproblematic process. For a fuller analysis of South Africa's post-apartheid foreign policy, see Chris Alden and Garth Le Pere, South Africa's Post-Apartheid Foreign Policy: From Reconciliation to Revival. (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003).
55. In Kumar, Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals, p. 166.
56. The term 'rectifying revolutions' was coined by Jürgen Habermas.
57. This is not to say that truth commissions originate with negotiated revolutions. In fact, they first appeared during the 1980s in Latin America as a means of hearing from, and compensating, families of those who had 'disappeared' under military dictatorships. As they have developed, truth commissions have become far more complex, reaching their apogee, at least to date, in South Africa.
58. Lustrace was flawed in numerous ways. First, the investigation commission set up by the law relied on secret police documentation which many argued was incomplete, could have been doctored to appease bosses or implicate enemies, and failed to differentiate between formal informers and those who unwittingly helped the security services. Second, the law did not exempt anyone on the grounds of mitigating circumstances, even torture, threat or blackmail. Third, lustrace presupposed guilt, requiring the accused to prove their innocence rather than accusers to establish culpability. This allowed lustrace to become both a powerful political tool and a moral condemnation of people who were, at least initially, unable to defend themselves. Names of people under investigation were regularly leaked to the press, only later for them to be found innocent. In the most famous, or perhaps infamous case, Jan Kavan, a dissident who had spent much of the communist period in exile abroad claimed that he had no knowledge that he had been targeted by the secret police, had been denied access to crucial files and prevented from presenting witnesses. Kavan won his appeal and later became Foreign Minister, but not before comparing lustrace to McCarthyism, declaring 'we are at the top of the league at witch-hunts'. For more on this, see Nagle and Mahr, Democracy and Democratisation;
59. Kieran Williams and Dennis Deletant, Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies: The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000);
60. and Kieran Williams, 'Lustration as the Securitization of Democracy in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic', Journal of Communist Societies and Transition Politics, 19:4 (2003).
61. The proclivity of revolutionary regimes to domestic tyranny is evidenced today by Fidel Castro's regular crackdowns on domestic dissent in Cuba.
62. For more on this, see Pierre Du Toit, South Africa's Brittle Peace: The Problem of Post-Settlement Violence (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
63. For more on this, see Michael Mann, 'The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results', European Journal of Sociology, 25:2 (1984).
64. In this sense, there was a seemingly permanent state of what Charles Tilly (pace Leon Trotsky) calls 'dual sovereignty'. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).
65. Figures taken from Paul Collier, 'How to Stem Civil Wars: It's the Economy, Stupid', International Herald Tribune, 21 May 2003, p. 13.
66. For more on this, see Geoff Mulgan, Connexity: How to Live in a Connected World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997).
67. Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order (London: Demos, 2000).
68. On the double nature of modernity and globalisation, see Ian Clark, Globalisation and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
69. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1944).
70. Unfortunately, Carr's vision of a world in which 'British policy must take into account the welfare of Lille or Düsseldorf or Lodz as well as the welfare of Oldham or Jarrow' looks unrealistic even today, 65 years after it was first proposed. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 219.