A month ago, I wrote about the incipient 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and added some comments about the unlikelihood of similar events here in the 21C. This is a reconsideration of that latter point.
One of the benefits of being an open-minded historian is that I get to change my mind after taking a position, discovering I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and then researching and thinking a bit more. So, my skepticism about future revolutions is an instance of (almost instant) revisionism; and likely not the last, especially since I’m still sorting out what I want to say for my upcoming OLLI course this winter.
The first point to make is that the nature of revolution has changed over the centuries. Or, in other words, we use the same word to describe some different things. This is partially a function of ordinary semantic sloppiness, but more fundamentally, as phenomena occur that are similar to previous phenomena, we use the same word to describe them. It’s one aspect of the famous Mark Twain misattribution: “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” The rise of ideologies, nationalism, and the taking root of beliefs in democracy (all themselves products of the revolutions of the 17/18C) became essential parts of the discourse of revolution later on. More importantly participants in later phenomena, e.g. the Russian Revolution of 1917, are conscious of their past, in this case, the great French Revolution of 1789. The desire to replicate or to avoid such precedents not only changes attitudes and outcomes, but makes the nature and purpose of these echoes different. The Revolutions of 1848 across Europe were in a dialectic with (i.e., they were responding to) what happened in Paris in 1789 (and 1830 and 1834, etc.). Revolutionaries of the 19C and 20C had read their Marx (and, later, Lenin) and sought different goals as a result. So, it’s only by taking a step back and recasting a model of revolution more abstractly and generally that we can keep the word and the actions connected.
With this broader perspective, we can see that the 21C is filled with revolutions—some successful, some failures—and that there is no particular reason to think that we’ve hit some metahistorical wall ending an era (or, at least the label for an era). In the last three years alone, we can see the culminations (one always has to be careful not to characterize a particular revolution as having come to a “conclusion”) of revolutions in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Syria. There are ongoing struggles (which we could call revolutions in process) in Venezuela, Sudan, Myanmar, and (arguably) elsewhere. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether any in the former group will stabilize (and, if so, how) and whether any in the latter group will “succeed.”
But just to take the three that seem to have come to some climax, we can see that revolutions overlap with all sorts of other labels for major political violence, such as insurrections, civil wars, and wars of independence. They don’t fit into any clear and tidy model. The forced departure of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh was the result of years of turmoil and political infighting, but relatively little violence (at least as compared with the following two examples). A civil war in Syria has been bubbling at various temperatures for more than a dozen years. Afghanistan really has to look back at least fifty years to a monarchy that was overthrown in a coup in 1973 for any semblance of political stability, suffering in the meantime from invasions by the USSR and the US, tribal disputes, and all manner of incoherence.
Indeed, both Syria and Afghanistan faced their own of religious disputes within the broader framework of Islam. The former was ruled by a family from the Alawite sect that comprises less than 15% of the population. The latter faced disputes different religious/tribal factions until the radically conservative Taliban succeeded in securing control of the capital in 2021. Both country’s incumbent governments were the products—to a greater or lesser degree—of externally imposed structures and institutions and their revolutions can be said to be in part a rejection of those foreign injections of power (imperialism). In both cases, revolutionary forces sought to force fundamentally new structures of government and social organization. In contrast, Bangladesh, whose independence and coherence date from the 1971 independence from Pakistan and the 1947 Partition of British India, seemed relatively democratic and the recent eruption and ouster of the incumbent government did not seem driven by either religious or ethnic issues, but rather a combination of concerns about corruption and incompetence.
The Taliban’s triumph in 2021 led them to consolidate governmental control (although it remains a political outcast internationally). The nominal governmental structure in Bangladesh remained in place in August, 2024, with a technocratic caretaker government still sorting out its constitutional and operational plans. And, as to Syria, it is far too early to tell what will emerge from the December 2024 climactic even on an interim basis.
This is, of course, just a skimming of the many ways we could compare the developments in these countries and the degree to which the facts on the ground aligned with any number of models of revolution. It’s no wonder historians are inherently wary of social science approaches to the diversity of human behavior and social structures.
One notable aspect of these revolutionary developments is that none were well-predicted. Some historical developments resemble slow-motion car crashes where there are few surprises. Here, however, the world was stunned by the rapidity of the changes that eventually emerged out of recognized cases of instability. Who on the outside has any real sense of what is going on in China or Russia? Could there be secret cracks behind the facades of authoritarian control? Even so, aren’t coups there more likely than revolutions?
Historians are not inherently better at prediction than any other group, so I won’t be going down the road of specific prognostication of when and where the next revolution will break out or succeed. As I have noted elsewhere, the state system and most established governments around the world are facing crises of competence and legitimacy. There is a lot of distributed and uncontrollable means of military power sitting out there. People are unhappy. All the key ingredients for revolution are there.
One of the benefits of being an open-minded historian is that I get to change my mind after taking a position, discovering I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and then researching and thinking a bit more. So, my skepticism about future revolutions is an instance of (almost instant) revisionism; and likely not the last, especially since I’m still sorting out what I want to say for my upcoming OLLI course this winter.
The first point to make is that the nature of revolution has changed over the centuries. Or, in other words, we use the same word to describe some different things. This is partially a function of ordinary semantic sloppiness, but more fundamentally, as phenomena occur that are similar to previous phenomena, we use the same word to describe them. It’s one aspect of the famous Mark Twain misattribution: “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” The rise of ideologies, nationalism, and the taking root of beliefs in democracy (all themselves products of the revolutions of the 17/18C) became essential parts of the discourse of revolution later on. More importantly participants in later phenomena, e.g. the Russian Revolution of 1917, are conscious of their past, in this case, the great French Revolution of 1789. The desire to replicate or to avoid such precedents not only changes attitudes and outcomes, but makes the nature and purpose of these echoes different. The Revolutions of 1848 across Europe were in a dialectic with (i.e., they were responding to) what happened in Paris in 1789 (and 1830 and 1834, etc.). Revolutionaries of the 19C and 20C had read their Marx (and, later, Lenin) and sought different goals as a result. So, it’s only by taking a step back and recasting a model of revolution more abstractly and generally that we can keep the word and the actions connected.
With this broader perspective, we can see that the 21C is filled with revolutions—some successful, some failures—and that there is no particular reason to think that we’ve hit some metahistorical wall ending an era (or, at least the label for an era). In the last three years alone, we can see the culminations (one always has to be careful not to characterize a particular revolution as having come to a “conclusion”) of revolutions in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Syria. There are ongoing struggles (which we could call revolutions in process) in Venezuela, Sudan, Myanmar, and (arguably) elsewhere. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether any in the former group will stabilize (and, if so, how) and whether any in the latter group will “succeed.”
But just to take the three that seem to have come to some climax, we can see that revolutions overlap with all sorts of other labels for major political violence, such as insurrections, civil wars, and wars of independence. They don’t fit into any clear and tidy model. The forced departure of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh was the result of years of turmoil and political infighting, but relatively little violence (at least as compared with the following two examples). A civil war in Syria has been bubbling at various temperatures for more than a dozen years. Afghanistan really has to look back at least fifty years to a monarchy that was overthrown in a coup in 1973 for any semblance of political stability, suffering in the meantime from invasions by the USSR and the US, tribal disputes, and all manner of incoherence.
Indeed, both Syria and Afghanistan faced their own of religious disputes within the broader framework of Islam. The former was ruled by a family from the Alawite sect that comprises less than 15% of the population. The latter faced disputes different religious/tribal factions until the radically conservative Taliban succeeded in securing control of the capital in 2021. Both country’s incumbent governments were the products—to a greater or lesser degree—of externally imposed structures and institutions and their revolutions can be said to be in part a rejection of those foreign injections of power (imperialism). In both cases, revolutionary forces sought to force fundamentally new structures of government and social organization. In contrast, Bangladesh, whose independence and coherence date from the 1971 independence from Pakistan and the 1947 Partition of British India, seemed relatively democratic and the recent eruption and ouster of the incumbent government did not seem driven by either religious or ethnic issues, but rather a combination of concerns about corruption and incompetence.
The Taliban’s triumph in 2021 led them to consolidate governmental control (although it remains a political outcast internationally). The nominal governmental structure in Bangladesh remained in place in August, 2024, with a technocratic caretaker government still sorting out its constitutional and operational plans. And, as to Syria, it is far too early to tell what will emerge from the December 2024 climactic even on an interim basis.
This is, of course, just a skimming of the many ways we could compare the developments in these countries and the degree to which the facts on the ground aligned with any number of models of revolution. It’s no wonder historians are inherently wary of social science approaches to the diversity of human behavior and social structures.
One notable aspect of these revolutionary developments is that none were well-predicted. Some historical developments resemble slow-motion car crashes where there are few surprises. Here, however, the world was stunned by the rapidity of the changes that eventually emerged out of recognized cases of instability. Who on the outside has any real sense of what is going on in China or Russia? Could there be secret cracks behind the facades of authoritarian control? Even so, aren’t coups there more likely than revolutions?
Historians are not inherently better at prediction than any other group, so I won’t be going down the road of specific prognostication of when and where the next revolution will break out or succeed. As I have noted elsewhere, the state system and most established governments around the world are facing crises of competence and legitimacy. There is a lot of distributed and uncontrollable means of military power sitting out there. People are unhappy. All the key ingredients for revolution are there.
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