I am helping to edit a journal at my university called Retos Internacionales. The new issue is about "Revolutions in World History". Here is my introduction below:
Dr. Tamir Bar-On, "Revolutions in World History"
This year is special in Mexico’s history. It is simultaneously the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s independence and 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. As a result, Retos Internacionales made the decision to explore the Mexican Revolution in the context of other revolutions in world history. I invite you to read the various pieces of “Revolutions in World History” with an eye to the unique historical, political, cultural, economic, and social circumstances surrounding revolutionary processes.
Revolution comes from the Latin word revolutio, meaning “a turn around.” Revolutions come in different forms. A revolution connotes a radical change of the existing political, economic, social, cultural, and institutional frameworks of a society and state. Examples of these types of often violent revolutions include the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the 1922 Fascist Revolution in Italy. However, a broader understanding of revolutions allows us to examine long-term revolutionary processes with no precise dates, which nonetheless engender profound and radical changes in society, its institutions, and its dominant values. The Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 18th and 19th centuries is one such example. Another is the Quiet Revolution in Quebec (Canada) from around 1960-66, corresponding to the tenure of Liberal Quebec Premier Jean Lesage. The Quiet Revolution was indeed non-violent. Yet, it represented a profound change in state and societal mentalities; rejection of the conservative, rural-based, clerical, and authoritarian values of the past; and a turn towards processes of modernization, industrialization, secularization, civil rights, national assertiveness, and state involvement in the economy.
Revolutions can result in failure or success for revolutionaries themselves. A major failed revolution is the spectacular worker-students revolts of May 1968 in France. Another is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation’s failed revolution against the Mexican state in the mid-1990s. Do failed revolutionaries go gently into the good night, or continue the fight with different tactics or ideological colours? A successful revolution was the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the worldwide and hypnotic pull of the internationalist, socialist revolution from the late 19th century until the official demise of the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union in 1991.
Revolutions all have their springtime of hopes when revolutionaries are able to capture the state and offer radically new models of society and the state and sweep away the old “corrupt” order. Yet, revolutions also have their winters of discontent when the revolutionary ideals of the past are frozen in the coffins of rhetoric. New revolutionaries might arise to call for “a turn around” in which an alternative, radical society is proposed, or return to the "purity" of the original revolutionary ideals. From 1943-45, Benito Mussolini promised to take the pro-Nazi Italian Social Republic towards the original, “leftist”, “corporatist”, and revolutionary values of “movement fascism” in 1919 before Italian fascists captured the state.
Revolutions often have unexpected consequences for their own societies, but also regional and global repercussions. In these respects, the Industrial Revolution, the revolution born of the Information Age, and the biotechnological revolution have impacted diverse regions of the world in different periods with varied consequences. The struggle between competing revolutionary ideologies, whether liberal republicanism, socialism, and fascism, tore asunder Western societies in the 20th century and spawned world wars, totalitarianism, gulags, and concentration camps. Socialist ideas had great transnational pull until the official fall of the Soviet Union in diverse locations such as Nicaragua, Chile, Angola, Algeria, Yemen, Romania, and Vietnam, as well as among the Western and non-Western intelligentsia alike.
Moreover, there are often terrible human consequences with revolutions, but also perceived gains for individuals and societies. In his 1994 work Death By Government, R.J. Rummel estimated that the Stalinist, Maoist, and Hitlerian revolutions killed approximately 100 million people. Yet, revolutions are difficult to stop because they embody the hopes of selected elites or their societies for wholescale political, social, cultural, and economical changes, as well as the modernist desire to raze the “decrepit” order of the past and radically create new people, values, institutions, and even conceptions of time. Do revolutions perhaps represent an irrepressible human desire for change and a better world? The turn away from slave-holding societies in ancient times, or apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1990s were born of a desire for human betterment. The Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries spawned a progressive desire of individuals and societies in Europe to turn away from the static, hierarchical universes of the Church, feudalism, and aristocracy. Its repercussions were eventually felt with the desire of Mexican revolutionaries to achieve social justice in the context of liberal republican and national values. When the United States of America elected Barack Obama as its first ever black President in 2008, liberal republican revolutionaries of the past from Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry to the civil rights movements in the 1960 helped to radically shift mentalities, which made Obama’s victory possible. In short, the Enlightenment set in motion unseen revolutionary processes, which eventually allowed for the rise of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, multiculturalism, and the election of President Obama.
Today there are those that question the merits of the Enlightenment project and the notion that through human reason individuals and societies can achieve a better, saner, and more just and free social order. Others like Francis Fukuyama boldly proclaimed the “end of history” and the worldwide triumph of liberalism in 1989 in the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. If history has ended, we should ask why the rise of militant pan-Islamism in the mould of al-Qaeda, the proliferation of anti-globalization revolutionaries, or the rise of left-wing revolutionary populism in Venezuela and other parts of Latin America in the 1990s and into the new millennium? Might we say that the rapid spread of global capitalism and its attendant institutions worldwide, as well as the crashing of socialist and fascist revolutionary projects, highlight the demise of totalizing, revolutionary “grand narratives”? Or, might we read Fukuyama’s thesis as a call for human beings to take charge of their own lives and radically re-start history as revolutionary activists, movements, parties, and regimes have done since the erection of human communities?
Tamir Bar-On
