By Fred Halliday.
Duke University Press; 424 pages; $59.95.
WARS and revolutions have made the modern world what it is, Professor Fred Halliday argues in this thought-provoking study. But, he adds, they have not had equal time. In the study of international relations, wars are bread and butter. But revolution—Karl Marx's “sixth power”—has been comparatively neglected.
Wars and revolutions cause one another. The revolution of 1789 gave France an army of national-minded conscripts, a perfect tool for that anti-imperial imperialist, Napoleon. With him began 200 years of nationalist struggle and counter-struggle in Europe. The first world war brought on the Russian revolution of 1917 by weakening the Tsar and making Russians desperate for land, peace and bread. It also helped weaken Germany and, because all of Europe was scared of Bolshevism, helped bring on a second, even more destructive, world war. The pattern is not just European. War followed revolution in China (Korea) and in Iran (its long, bloody conflict with Iraq).
Internationally, revolutions disrupt normal relations, Mr Halliday observes. They provoke counter-revolutions (Britain and Austria in the 1790s). Revolutionaries in power often try to export revolution, either directly (Cuba to Nicaragua; Russia to China; Iranians to “all Muslims”) or through ideas: the American revolution of 1776 fostered “liberty”, the French one “democracy” and the Russian one “equality”—prompting social reform in the West to avert communism.
As few can quarrel with any of that, against whom is Mr Halliday really arguing? His first target will be familiar mainly to fellow scholars. This is the academic habit of treating revolutions as local affairs. Revolutions, in Mr Halliday's view, can be fully understood only in an international context.
His second target is one general readers are likelier to recognise: complacent folk who believe that democracy and capitalism are, so to speak, the end of the historical road. Now it may be that the two centuries between the fall of the Bastille and fall of the Berlin Wall were revolution's heyday. But perhaps not. To leave the story there, he believes, is to neglect the unsettling potential of future ideas, new mass movements and the resentments of the poor.
Revolution stamped the past two centuries by strengthening the modern state. Disputes over the size of the state and over who controls it will continue to be the stuff of politics—ideological debate by any other name. To believe that from now on these will always be settled peacefully and without disturbing the neighbourhood is complacent, Mr Halliday thinks. The lesson he wants to give is essentially historical: calm and prosperous as things may be, sources of upheaval are always there. Revolutions have never been purely national and in an interdependent world they will be even less so.
This article appeared in the Review section of the print edition under the headline "A sixth power?"