Social Revolution: the Elusive Emergence of an Agenda in International Relations

Home , Fred Halliday, Nikki Keddie, Social revolution

MARYAM H. PANAH*

Abstract. This article addresses the inadequate analysis of modern social revolutions within orthodox International Relations due both to the historical context and the trajectory of the discipline. A critical review of the literature that has more recently come to acknowledge the relevance of revolutions and revolutionary states to IR reveals a number of enduring shortcomings. The present article suggests an alternative framework for the study of revolutions by conceiving them as rooted in the dynamics of the globally dominant socioeconomic system, capitalism. It is argued that the uneven global expansion of this system and its peculiarity contribute to the explanation of revolutionary upheavals in the modern world. This is illustrated in the ﬁnal section of the article by a case study of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which also challenges recent explanations of the revolution in terms of ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic culture’.

Introduction

The history of the twentieth century is dotted with social revolutions. If in its first half the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution and the Chinese were the significant markers, in the post-World War II period a long list can be drawn from Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam to Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Iran. It is our contention and premise here that there has been a crucial international dimension to all of these revolutions. But while revolution has been a favourite subject for historians and sociologists, particularly in the field of comparative study, international relations traditionally approached the subject at best only tangentially.1 Thus, in 1990, in the pages of the Review of International Studies, Fred Halliday noted a ‘mutual neglect’ between the study of revolutions and the discipline of international relations (IR).2 However, a retrospective examination of the period since signals the emergence of a

* Special thanks are due to Fred Halliday and Benno Teschke for detailed comments on this article. I would also like to thank participants of the LSE Graduate Seminars 1995–1998 for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions or sections of this article. 1 A comprehensive bibliography of studies of revolution by historians or sociologists would be too lengthy to reproduce here. An excellent reference list can be found in John Foran (ed.), Theorizing Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997). For a brief survey see Nikki Keddie (ed.), Debating Revolutions (New York: New York University, 1995). 2 Fred Halliday, ‘The Sixth Great Power: Revolutions and the International System’, Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), pp. 207–221 271 272 Maryam H. Panah body of literature concerned with this subject.3 A reappraisal of the situation is therefore germane. The first part of this article presents a brief historical introduction to the study of revolutions within IR. It will be seen that clues to the traditional absence of the subject from our discipline may be uncovered in the historical context and evolution of IR and its institutional practices. We then address the more recent theorization of revolutions within an international context. We shall argue that traditional realist attempts to incorporate revolutions—whether in classical, ‘neo-’ or ‘English’ guise— remain insufficient. The post-positivist turn and, in particular, those arguments drawing on the new constructivist agenda in IR, however, also fail to provide adequate insights into the emergence of revolutions. In this article, in contrast, we put forward an alternative framework for the study of modern revolutions within IR, that focuses on the globally dominant mode of social organisation, capitalism, and the social dynamics of this socioeconomic system, as the key to understanding revolutionary social change. The final section of the article then sets out a case study of the Iranian Revolution as an instance of how such a framework may usefully inform our explanation of such an event.

The peculiar history of IR and the exclusion of revolution

The traditional absence of revolution from the theoretical vocabulary of IR is often accounted for by the conventional argument that the discipline arose from a convic- tion to manage the relations among states and to deal with the problem of war. This explanation remains wanting. Clearly, the centrality of classical interstate conﬂict to scholars of International Relations as well as the statesmen who practised them is not to be denied. However, state leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, namesake of the ﬁrst Chair of International Relations at Aberystwyth, were arguably as much concerned with the international repercussions of social revolution as with the destructive consequences of war.4 Thus, proverbially ‘sweating blood over Russia’, Wilson began the outline of his post-war peace programme by discussing the situation in Revolutionary Russia and proceeded to appropriate and incorporate Bolshevik tenets of the international order into his Fourteen Point proposal.5 In

3 In addition to Halliday’s own more recent contribution, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London: Macmillan, 1999), studies of revolutions in an international context have included David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Peter Calvert, Revolution and International Politics, 2nd edn. (London: Pinter, 1996), Stephen Chan and Andrew J. Williams (eds.), Renegade States: The Evolution of Revolutionary Foreign Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), Stephen Walt, Revolution and War (New York: Cornell, 1996), Mark N. Katz, Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves (London: Macmillan, 1997). A more recent collection of essays, published after submission and acceptance of this article, can be found in Mark Katz (ed.), Revolution: International Dimensions (CQ Press, 2000). 4 As Arno Mayer has shown, the intense interplay of domestic and international politics in the revolutionary circumstances during and after the First World War figured highly in the agenda of participants in the peacemaking negotiations which led to the Versailles Treaty. Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking; Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1967). 5 Torbjorn L.Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.206. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 273 similar vein, Edward Hallet Carr, read as a founding father of IR and author of a highly influential yet equally unrepresentative introduction to international relations, actually spent the predominant part of his scholarly endeavours on a fourteen- volume history of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.6 Carr’s concerns with interstate relations and the prospects for peace or war constituted part of a more comprehensive worldview which found explicit expression in a volume dedicated to the interplay of the international and domestic as pertaining to post- Revolutionary Russia.7 The initial practical and theoretical engagement of the founding figures of IR with the subject of social revolution and its international implications seems nonetheless to have been written out of our field. So, why this occlusion? Not merely the institutional setting of IR and its particular growth within the Cold War environment in the United States, but further, the knowledge-guiding interests and epistemological and ontological assumptions of IR are central to understanding the traditional deflection of the disciplinary spot- light away from revolutions and their actors. Within the dominant discourse of IR scholarship, the theoretical underpinnings of how we acquire knowledge about the world and what may be designated as the legitimate objects of our scientific endeavours were determined by a peculiar history in origins as well as subsequent trajectory. International Relations was from its inception set up as a ‘science-against- crises’ to deal with conflicts not by addressing their domestic roots, but by managing them at the international level.8 Moreover, it was born within the North Atlantic academic culture such that alternative perspectives of world politics were ‘curiously excluded’ from its discourse.9 In the aftermath of World War II, ‘arch-realists’ such as Hans Morgenthau laid the grounds for the state-oriented and power-focused dominant discourse of American IR.10 The onset of the Cold War then had a considerable impact on scholarship and the academy in the United States.11 Mean- while, American political and economic leadership of the capitalist world reinforced the domination of IR theories by the US tradition and new institutional framework. One aspect of this disciplinary evolution was the emergence of ‘area studies’ as a field geared towards ‘practical needs’. As concerning revolutionary states—specifically the Soviet Union and China—political interests dictated a focus on their containment and the development of institutions of ‘global governance’ aimed at the management of the international order against potential crises. 12 Specialized research institutions set up for this purpose included the Russian Institute at Columbia University, the Hoover Institute on War, Peace and Revolution, the

6 Carr’s IR classic is The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to The Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1983). His broader scholarship has recently been better acknowledged in the Review of International Relations. See also Michael Cox, ‘Will the Real E.H. Carr Please Stand Up?’, International Affairs, 75: 3 (1999), pp. 643–53, and Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and W.J.Booth, The 80 Years’ Crisis 1919–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 7 Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1953). 8 See Benno Teschke and Christian Heine, ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Dialectical Awakening: On the Potential of Dialectic for International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies,25 (1996), pp 399–423. 9 Knutsen, History of International Relations Theory, pp. 211–4. 10 Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948). 11 See the various contributions to Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997). 12 Knutsen, History of International Relations Theory, pp. 231–57. 274 Maryam H. Panah

Russian Research Centre at Harvard and the Foreign Area Fellowship Programme established by the Ford Foundation.13 The neo-realist paradigm, which later came to replace its classical predecessor, secured the exclusion of social revolution from the mainstay of the discipline. In an early study, Kenneth Waltz, its archetypal theorist, dismissed the idea that one could or should theorise about international relations with respect to the internal constitution of states.14 In his later Theory of International Relations he then rejected ‘reductionist’ explanations of international politics in favour of a systemic or structural approach in which the international system (structure) socializes states (constituent units).15 A lack of concern with what goes on within states, so-called ‘unit level phenomena’, banished revolution from what is considered the appropriate subject domain of IR.16 International Relations was thus deﬁned as a discipline concerned with (external) relations between states. Revolutions, supposed to be domestic (internal) phenomena, were eased out of its dominant discourse, even though the practice of international relations could arguably just as well have been seen as a response to social crisis and revolutionary upheaval—after all, one side of the Cold War, perhaps the major subject matter of IR through most of its twentieth century history, was born of a series of social revolutions and much of the literature on ‘intervention’ could similarly be seen as a response to social conﬂict and upheavals in the ex-colonial or semi-colonial states.17 Regardless, these nuances remained unacknowledged by orthodox IR.

Revolutions: the elusive presence

In one sense, therefore, it should only have been expected that the dislocation of the dominant realist paradigm and its state-centric positivist assumptions may have had an impact on studies of revolution within IR. We shall come to the actual outcome of the post-positivist turn for this debate in due course. First, however, some consideration needs to be given to one area of relevance which had in fact survived the neorealist ostracism. Revolutionary states continued to be of some relevance for IR scholarship— including the concerns of realism with the maintenance of order within the international system—in their external behaviour and disruptive inﬂuences on the international order. Reassuring IR of its role as a ‘science-against-crises’, the manager of conﬂict and disruption of the order, the external implications of revolutions were deemed to be of import to the practitioner of International Relations.18 Other

13 Wallerstein, ‘Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies’, in Chomsky, The Cold War, p. 208. 14 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 15 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 16 For the debate on the theoretical status of ‘neorealism’ see Robert O.Keohane, Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For excellent critiques of neorealism for its circularity and lack of explanatory power from perspectives within international political economy and international relations, see Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), ch. 1, and Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994). 17 Hedley Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 18 Calvert, Revolution,p.2. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 275

‘managers of crisis’ within the academy have recently addressed the relationship between revolution and war or the spread of ‘revolutionary waves’. Stephen Walt’s main concern in Revolution and War is that policymakers have not understood the general causal relationship between revolution and interstate hostility which leads to war. This work is thus explicitly intended to provide informed policy guidance by predicting the foreign policies of revolutionary states, leading the author to pro- scribe appeasement or intervention and prescribe containment as ‘the best approach toward most revolutions’.19 With the similar objective of providing policy advice for status quo states, Mark Katz’s Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves is launched with the assertion that ‘revolutions upset the international order’.20 The crux of the matter is the prescription of strategy in light of a prediction that all revolutionary waves will ultimately collapse.21 Concerns with the external behaviour of revolutionary states were in fact predated by theorists working within the more historically sensitive ‘English School’ of IR focusing on the concept of an ‘international society’.22 In dealing with revolutions, this literature again focused on the post-revolutionary external behaviour of states and assessed the process of ‘normalization’ or ‘socialization’ by which these states adjust to the norms of conduct of international society. For David Armstrong revolutions are signiﬁcant due to their initial hostility to the institutions of international society.23 Although he recognizes the (limited) adaptation of the Westphalian system in the face of revolutionary challenges, the main thrust of the argument is the durability of international society based on the principle of state sovereignty.24 In a nutshell, revolutionary states are ‘socialized’ and ‘socialization’ occurs as the leaders of revolutionary states aim to gain control over a territorial unit, transforming it into a stronger and more efﬁcient state through gaining recognition of their sovereign status within the society of states. The conceptualization of ‘socialization’ of revolutionary states by the English School, however, is not unproblematic and has been criticized elsewhere.25 Perhaps the most serious indictment concerns the mechanisms and process of socialization itself. Within the ‘international society’ approach, socialization is conceptualized as a gradual and consensual process of adherence to the norms and rules of international society. Scholars of this tradition regard the expansion of international society beyond its original European boundaries as proceeding by adoption of the ‘standard of civilization’ based on acceptance of ‘values and ethical codes’ relating

19 Walt, Revolution and War, p.343. 20 Katz, Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves, preface. 21 Ibid., pp. 83–115. In a later work, Katz elaborates the ‘embourgeoisement of revolutionary regimes’, reﬂecting greater recent interest in the internal dynamics of revolutionary states. See Katz, Revolution: International Dimensions. 22 An early instance was Martin Wight, Power Politics (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 81–94, passim. 23 Armstrong, Revolution and International Order. 24 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing the former point. Nonetheless, Armstrong’s principal argument revolves around the ‘socialization’ of revolutionary states through adoption of international society’s model of state sovereignty. See Armstrong, Revolution and International Order, p. 302. 25 Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, pp. 296–98. see also Fred Halliday, ‘International Society as Homogeneity’, in Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 94–123. 276 Maryam H. Panah not only to their external relations but also how they govern themselves.26 However, neither the mechanism of the so-called ‘expansion’ of international society nor the conditions of acceptance of its norms and rules are adequately explained. The institutions of ‘socialization’ seem to include not only the role of the Great Powers, but also the devices of pressure, manipulation and war thus demanding a considerable leap of faith to concede the analytical value of the concept of socialization as a consensual acceptance of norms.27 These schools, from realism to regime theory, have thus only considered revolutionary states in as much as their behaviour has implications for the international order. Focusing on the external behaviour and foreign policy of post- revolutionary regimes, they have attempted to explain the process of ‘normalization’ which all revolutionary states are deemed to undergo.

Constructivism, culture and revolution in IR

An alternative to the unpalatable and unfashionable notion of socialization as the adoption of Western norms and rules has been to conceive of international society as a ‘practical association’ that ‘reﬂects and promotes the pluralism characteristic of the modern world.28 Within the context of intersubjectivist and culturalist perspectives that have emerged from the ‘post-positivist debate’ in IR, therefore, the idea of ‘the rest’ adopting the norms of ‘the West’ has been subjected to criticism. Here, constructivism has ostensibly become a buzzword of contemporary IR theorization. Drawing on the assumption that our understanding of the world hinges on socially constructed tools, and cannot be derived objectively, state behaviour is taken to be derived from particular interpretations.29 These notions have also taken a particular inﬂection in the study of revolutions. In their discussion of the revolutionary foreign policy of Renegade States, Stephen Chan and Andrew Williams, for instance, argue for a consideration of the ‘cultural origins of revolutions’ and an understanding of our objects of study by ‘trying to develop some sympathy [for them]’.30 Studies of revolutions from this perspective are apparently differen- tiated from the international society framework by asking not merely ‘how much of

26 See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977); Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 27 Scholars working with a ‘regime theory’ approach also describe a process of the acceptance of the ‘norms’ of the system by the ruling elites. Nevertheless, alongside ‘normative persuasion’, they acknowledge the importance of ‘external inducement’ and ‘internal reconstruction’, entailing coercion or direct intervention, again stretching the concept of ‘socialization’ to its absolute limits. See G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Socialization and Hegemonic Power’, International Organisation, 44 (1990), pp. 283–315. 28 Chris Brown, ‘International Theory and International Society: The Viability of the Middle Way?’, Review of International Studies, 21 (1995) pp.183–196. 29 These correspond to Alexander Wendt’s ‘shared understandings’ or Nicholas Onuf’s ‘social knowledge’ where social reality can only be regarded as people’s construction of social reality. See Alexander Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation and the International State’, American Political Science Review, 1988 (2 June 1994), pp. 384–96; Nicholas Onuf, World Of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and IR (Columbia, SC: University of Carolina Press, 1989). 30 Chan and Williams, Renegade States, pp. 14–15. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 277 ours is accepted by them’ but also ‘how much of theirs is accepted by us’.31 Where knowledge is regarded as bounded by the conditions of its emergence within a speciﬁc culture, cross-cultural communication is problematized and limited to a mere act of ‘sympathy’ for the ‘other’.32 In the context of the present discussion of revolutionary states, the most that can be achieved is pragmatically to ‘cope’ with them and maintain a situation of ‘politely conversing and talking at cross-purposes’ as a form of ‘cross-cultural etiquette’.33 Where cultural determination prevails, revolutions once more appear only to be relevant to the formation of policy—the management of crises without seeking to explain them. The evolution of constructivist, culturalist and ultimately relativist approaches within IR mirrors a more general trend in the social sciences where, as Bryan Turner has observed, ‘culture’ has come to replace the ‘original hegemony of “structure” in the sociological canon’.34 The recent re-evaluation of culture—norms, values and social constructions—in IR comes in the wake of this ‘cultural turn’ and cannot be seen except in connection with the wider study of cognate disciplines. The (re)emergence of ‘culturalism’ can be related to the stumbling blocks of modern sociological theory and the particular anomalies of modernization theory.35 In fact, the intellectual origins of the most fervent advocates of ‘culturalism’ are to be found in crude and evolutionist modernization theories, as culture has been adopted as a functional substitute for the ‘anomalous blockages’ to the process of modernization which mainstream sociology and political science had previously sought in social structures. The roots of these debates around the notion of culture are in fact to be found in the antinomies of orthodox sociology where Max Weber’s commitment to a verstehende Soziologie and interpretative method have often been taken to have hermeneutic implications, which vindicate the culturalist position.36 However, although a culturalist interpretation may be gleaned from aspects of his opus, Weber was explicit in distinguishing his idea of ‘re-experiencing’ and empathetic understanding from the hermeneutic tradition.37 Methodologically, Weber rejected ‘reiﬁed’

31 Ibid. p. 202. 32 For a good critique see Aziz al Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 17–40. 33 Azmeh, Islams and Modernities p. 36. 34 Bryan S.Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 8. 35 There is no space here for a detailed exposition of modernization theory. Briefly, this has concerned the supposed transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ society and sought to explain the blockages in this process. For an exposition and critique see Ray Kiely, Sociology and Development (London: University College London, 1995). 36 This is the position attributed to Weber’s ‘orientalist’ thesis. See Turner, Max Weber. For an elaboration and critique of the Weberian undertones to culturalist approaches, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 37 Related to the postmodernist critique of the universal pretensions of the Enlightenment as ‘Eurocentric’ and the rejection of notions of objectivity and truth, the relativistic epistemology that advocates of the culturalist position defend, derives from the hermeneutic tradition, rooted in German romantic and conservative thought, of verstehen: a mode of understanding the particular by seeing it as a document of an underlying whole. As H.H.Gerth and C.Wright Mills have elaborated, Max Weber’s point of departure and his ultimate unit of analysis is the human individual as the ‘upper limit and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct’ such that social collectives such as the ‘state’ or other ‘association’ designate ‘certain categories of human interaction’. The task of sociology would then be to ‘reduce these concepts to “understandable” action, that is, without exception to the actions of participating individual men’. See ‘Intellectual Orientations’ in H.H.Gerth and C.Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 55–61. 278 Maryam H. Panah notions of social collectives adopting a sociological definition by conceptualizing them as ‘sets of social circumstances’. Recognizing the difficulties bound up with the notion of ‘understanding’, Weber adopted the procedure of constructing ‘ideal types’ precisely to obtain conceptual clarity and degrees of approximation.38 Nonetheless, for what concerns our debate, the implication of the relativist turn in at least one body of the contemporary literature is that we cannot seek sociologically to explain the causes of revolutionary behaviour, for the origins of social revolutions are rooted in cultural factors.39 Somewhat ironically therefore, the reification and essentialization of ‘culture’ implicit in this perspective forms a mirror-image of the positivist ‘states-as-unit’ model, but now substituting ‘culture’ for the ‘state’. This, paradoxically, has also meant that the insularity of early sociological theories has been reproduced by tracing the origins of social change, including revolutions, to ‘internal’ factors that are now considered predominantly to be ‘cultural’ ones.40 Once more, the origins of revolutionary crises are factored out as their causes are deemed to be cultural or ideological ones and the legitimate domain of departments of Cultural Studies and Sociology, but not of International Relations—they become relevant to IR only when they exhibit ‘rogue behaviour’ that upsets the precarious international order.

Social revolution and global processes: a historical sociology?

Here we present an alternative account of social revolutions within the global context which rejects the reiﬁcation or essentialization of structures—whether as ‘international system’, ‘state’ or ‘culture’—and focuses on social relations as the basis of understanding revolutionary processes while also attempting to show how these are relevant to IR and how international processes impinge on apparently domestic ones. The argument will proceed by identifying and setting out the relevant features of the globally dominant mode of social relations: capitalism. We submit that modern revolutionary movements reﬂect an attempt to overcome social contradictions at least partly rooted in the dynamics of this globally dominant socioeconomic system.

38 As he put it ‘from the methodological point of view the choice is between a terminology that is not clear at all and one which is clear but unrealistic and “ideal typical” … the latter sort of terminology is scientiﬁcally preferable.’ W.G. Runciman (ed.), Weber: Selections in Translation, translated by Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 65–8, p.25, p.8. In a dictum borrowed from George Simmel, Weber claimed, pace the hermeneutic tradition, that ‘it is not necessary to be Caesar in order to understand Caesar’! 39 Stephen Chan thus refers to the ‘cultural animations of the Chinese and Iranian revolutions’. Stephen Chan, ‘Cultural and Linguistic Reductionisms and a New Historical Sociology for International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 22 (1993), pp. 423–42. 40 An interesting example of a shift from early insular sociological explanation in terms of ‘modernization’ to explanation in cultural terms is the academic trajectory of Samuel Huntington. Compare Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies ((New Haven, CT: Yale, 1968), and Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 279

The uneven global expansion of capitalism

Capitalism is an expansive mode of social organization—both in the spatial sense of geographical spread across the globe and in terms of the augmentation and development of the production process.41 This expansion is disruptive in that it overturns old ways of life leading to social upheaval. This is the result of the tendency to bring prevailing social relations under the logic of capitalist market relations, through the dispossession of pre-existing direct producers by turning them into wage labourers forced to sell their labour on the capitalist market. 42 The internal connection between the development of capitalism and social revolution was classically set out in the nineteenth century by Karl Marx. However, Marx famously envisaged this process as the linear and universal formation of the two modern inherently conﬂicting classes—capitalists and the proletariat. Modern social revolution would then result from the struggle between the two. This scenario, in retrospect, has not corresponded to historical reality. While the expansion of capitalist social relations has led to the dispossession of the direct producers, the result has often been not the creation of a modern proletariat, but new categories of rural or urban ‘marginals’, as well as the preservation of other social classes. Furthermore, social revolution throughout the twentieth century succeeded not where Marx originally envisaged it, in the countries of advanced capitalism, but in relatively ‘backward’ ones, while revolutionary crises and upheavals in the more developed countries have been suppressed or neutralised far more readily.43 The discrepancy between historical reality and Marx’s original theoretical outlines provided the background to further development of Marxist theory to explain the uneven development of capitalism across the globe.44 Recognizing that at any world historical conjuncture more and less capitalistically developed areas co-exist, the theory suggests that the latter have been subjected to the ‘external whip’ of international competition and engaged in a ‘catching up’ process, aimed at closing the developmental gap between them and the more advanced countries.45 This process

41 By capitalism we mean here a socioeconomic system where capitalist property relations prevail. In other words, direct producers—peasants, artisans, and so on—are separated from the means of subsistence such that all economics actors are forced to put their product on the market at the most competitive price. Under such conditions, there is a constant pressure to cut prices. This is achieved by being more efficient—the pattern of modern economic growth. See Robert Brenner, ‘The Social Basis of Economic Development’, in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 23–53. 42 The analysis of the capitalist mode of production was, put forward by Marx in Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976); the references to the revolutionary consequences of capitalist development are made in Karl Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), although the polemic nature of this document and its politics must be borne in mind. 43 In his later writings, for example in his famous letter Vera Zasulich in 1881 and in his speech in Amsterdam in 1872, Marx gave greater recognition to these ‘irregularities’ and historical differences. 44 See also the discussion of these issues in Justin Rosenberg ‘Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations’, New Left Review, 215 (1996), pp. 3–15. 45 The classic exponent of this idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ was Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1933). Others have also adopted the idea of ‘backwardness’ and ‘catching up’, but diverged from Trotsky’s analysis in the political implications of the process. See Alexander Gerschenkeron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard, 1962). This outline of historical development can leave itself open to deterministic readings which still asserts a priori the uni-directionality of history and the existence of specific stages in the historical process. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantale Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso), pp. 48–54. 280 Maryam H. Panah of ‘modernization’, largely led and implemented by state leaders, results in social change and upheaval. This uneven development, its global context and its corresponding pressures have, in fact, received some recognition within the sub-discipline of historical sociology. Adopting a historical-theoretical approach in the study of the domestic and international dimensions of social revolutions, Theda Skocpol offered a structural account of social revolutions based on the premise that states collapse as a result of a crisis brought about by the conjunction of international and internal pressures. 46 However, while recognizing the importance of uneven development, geopolitical pressure was placed at the centre of this and other analyses within historical sociology.47 This distanced the analysis from the deeper social processes at the international level which drive social change and transformation. While the social structural approach of historical sociological analysis has on the one hand presented an advance, the centrality of institutional structures most particularly in respect of external interstate relations, resembles realist neostructuralism and its attendant problems.48 The focus on geopolitical pressures resulted from an excessively structural framework that has excluded social relations in favour of state structures. 49 This detracted from assessment of the specificity of capitalism as the mode of social organization dominant at the international level. Fred Halliday has recently called for a historical sociology of revolutions and international relations that would set, as its context, the growth and contradictions within modernity.50 Here we emphasize capitalism as the prime mover of this growth and these contradictions. It is our principal contention that the uneven global expansion of capitalism has been the root cause of the impetus to change, develop and modernize through a process of ‘catching up’; that this is a disruptive process; and that the dislocation caused to existing social relations may be revolutionary where popular coalitions are built around antagonism towards the source of social disruption: the state.

Capitalism, the state and revolution

With the expansion of the capitalist market, new social formations have emerged through the articulation of capitalist social relations with pre-existing modes of life. The outcome, of course, has always depended on concrete historical local and global conditions giving rise to a variety of social formations and peculiar combinations

46 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Other works of historical sociology which deal with the international dimension include Michael Mann (ed.), States, War and Capitalism :Studies in Political Sociology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Anthony Giddens. The Nation-State and Violence (London : Polity, 1985). Martin Shaw, War, State and Society (London: Macmillan, 1984). 47 This tends also to be reproduced in Halliday’s work. See Revolution and World Politics, pp. 174–7. 48 In fact in discussing the external dimension of sovereignty of revolutionary states, Skocpol draws on realist accounts within IR including Kim’s discussion of the French Revolution. See Kyung-Won Kim, Revolution and International System (London: University of London, 1970). 49 A good critique of the historical sociology approach is submitted by Paul Cammack, ‘Bringing the State Back In?’, British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), pp. 264–269. 50 Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, p. 163. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 281 that cannot be determined a priori.51 The ‘combinations’ that arise from the expansion of the capitalist market across the globe are on the one hand affected by the pre-existing local conditions that differ from place to place. On the other hand and crucially, however, they are also determined by the speciﬁcity of capitalism. The peculiar feature of capitalism as a mode of social organization distinct from all others, as we shall brieﬂy set out here, relates to the domain in which social power can be exercised. In contrast to all other forms of social organization, under capitalist social relations, the social power to extract resources (surplus product) is brought to bear in the ‘free market’.52 Capitalist society is premised on the separation of direct producers from the means of production and the existence of wage-labour under conditions where agents are legally free to buy or sell labour as a commodity. This exchange, based on a ‘private contract’ amongst legal equals, occurs in the marketplace and appears to have little to do with the political domain and power relations embodied in the state. Put differently, the formal political institutions of the state under capitalism seem to be removed from the supposedly ‘purely economic’ process of surplus extraction that takes place in the market. They differ from forms of domination in other types of society where political relations of domination are not hidden by exchange on the market but are visibly exercised by those in control of the instruments of coercion.53 The ‘purely political’ state of advanced liberal-democratic capitalist societies cannot, however, be abstracted out of the broader social relations of which it is part. The separation of the institutions of ruling from the persons of the rulers— characteristic of the bureaucratic modern state—is rooted in the formal separation of ‘purely political power’ and ‘social power’—characteristic of capitalism—where social power is located in the ‘free market’. Phenomena such as ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ do not exist as externally related entities, but as forms of existence of the relation that constitutes them.54 Where the ‘free market’ exists, the state can ideally act as the guarantor of the legal existence of the market and not administratively be involved in the extraction of resources. Where no such conditions exist, the exercise of social power and the extraction of resources takes place through the mediation of ‘political’ instruments. Both local states and external powers—including not only imperialist or hegemonic states but also international institutions of ‘governance’— have historically been complicit in these coercive processes of extraction. The main point is that the location and source of social power, which may or may not be directly located in the administrative structures of the state, must in every case be uncovered. Comprehension of the internal connection between state and market,

51 In every set of social circumstances, there is thus a specific balance of social forces. This particular combination determines the revolutionary potential or otherwise and must form the object of historical study. These considerations on specificity of situations are arguably best elaborated by Antonio Gramsci and his discussions of the state, civil society and culture. See David Forgacs (ed.), A Gramsci Reader (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), pp. 200–230, passim. 52 See Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The separation of the “economic” and the “political” in capitalism’, in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19–48. A ground-breaking exposition of the specificity of capitalism and the relevance for IR theory is provided by Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society. 53 For one example see Benno Teschke ‘Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and Theory’, International Organization, 52 (1998), pp. 325–58. 54 Werner Bonefeld ‘Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State’, in Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.), Open Marxism, vol. 1: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto, 1992), pp. 93–132. 282 Maryam H. Panah politics and economics, takes us some way towards understanding the dynamics of modern social revolutions in their international context.

Capitalism, revolution and IR: an alternative framework

As various parts of the globe have come to be subsumed under the logic of capitalism, the tendency has been to invest the social power to extract surplus and exploit labour and resources outside the boundaries of the juridical state in the ‘international market’. As Justin Rosenberg has argued, the major implication of this analysis for the international system has been that ‘aspects of social life which are mediated by relations of exchange in principle no longer receive a political deﬁnition’.55 In other words, where social power is exercised in the international market place, it appears to have little to do with political relations and everything to do with purely ‘economic’ considerations. But following and extending our previous argument regarding the capitalist mode of social organization, power at the international level has two aspects: (1) public/state: the management of the state system and interstate relations; (2) private/market: the exploitation of resources and extraction of surpluses; and these two ‘spheres’ are internally connected as social forms of a uniﬁed mode of social organization. Nowhere is the internal connection of these aspects clearer than in the emergence of social upheaval and revolutions in the modern world. The expansion of the capitalist market has universally had a disruptive impact on the lives of populations across the globe.56 Under conditions of uneven global capitalist development, the prime movers of this expansion have, as we noted before, more often than not been states—both local ones and external imperial or colonial ones. The state has directly and visibly been involved in the socioeconomic transformation and upheavals of various societies. Often those in control of the state have carried out these changes at the behest of foreign powers or collaborated with international actors and the latter have assumed a direct or indirect role in the exploitative process.57 The ‘expansion’ of capitalism, in other words, has been mediated by the geopolitical institutions of the international system. These processes all disrupt the lives of populations by uprooting old modes of social existence: having an impact on prevailing social structures, throwing peasants

55 Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, p. 129. 56 The exception to the ‘external’ influence in the development of capitalism remains the English case, although this does not detract from the its turbulent, violent and revolutionary origins. Despite various critiques, the analysis by Barrington-Moore is still of relevance here. See The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. On the exceptional English case see also Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1995) and Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development’, New Left Review (1977). 57 This is what distinguishes an approach based on social relations from the neo-Weberian sociological definition of the state as an ‘administrative and coercive’ organisation. While the latter is an advance on the legalistic one adopted by IR, many historical sociologists have reified the state to explain the evolution of the administrative and coercive apparatus of the state independently of wider social interests. We argue that the state cannot be studied in abstraction from the mode of social organization of which it is a part. For the similarities and differences of the Weberian and Marxist conceptions of the state, see Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 68. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 283 off the land, creating massive urban migration, giving rise not only to a modern working class but also to large unemployed populations who then join the ranks of ‘urban marginals’ and so on. All these give rise to grievances, which may then be traced to the role of the local state and its international collaborators as the source of change and dislocation. Social struggles against the effect of the expanding capitalist market have repeatedly led to contest and ultimate overthrow of ‘modern- izing’ states. Where the impact of the social power of capital to extract surpluses has been borne by populations, this has emerged as a political contest that has revealed the inner connection of ‘political’ and ‘economic’ social forms. Where this connection has been more visible and obvious, in other words where political institutions have taken a more active part in altering the mode of social organization, the occurrence of revolution aimed at overthrowing those institutions has been all the more imminent. This is clearly the case where exploitation is not merely mediated but actually exercised directly by the state—the fusion of social and political power —but also where a local or external (colonial, imperial) juridical power intervenes to create the conditions for the exercise of social power within the market. Thus, potential revolutionary coalitions have emerged as anti-colonial struggles and revolutions on the periphery of global capitalism, where the object of revolutionary overthrow has not merely been the state apparatus, but also imperialist powers, which have intervened to create the conditions for the extraction of surplus by forcing open ‘free markets’ and thereby acting in the capacity of the state-backers of international capital. Of course, these social processes cannot be sufficiently explained in abstract terms, but depend on the particular historical circumstances of the particular social formation concerned. Moreover, revolution is not the necessary outcome of a particular balance of forces, but also requires the formation of a ‘collective will’ in which cultural and ‘national-popular’ elements play a crucial part.58 The specificities notwithstanding, the social structural dynamics which have resulted in revolutionary upheavals in this century lend support to the impact of global processes set out above. Thus considered, the international dimension of various modern social revolutions comes into better light. For instance, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was preceded by social structural changes resulting from rapid state-led industrialization using foreign capital and technology. The role of foreign or imperial powers in altering the social matrix of many colonies or semi-colonial areas laid the ground for anti-colonial and radical nationalist movements of which the Vietnamese, Egyptian, and Cuban are examples. In the final section of this article, however, we focus on one case study as an instance of how the framework can be useful in an explanation of the emergence of a revolutionary movement. The case of the Iranian Revolution

58 There is no space here to discuss in detail the process of formation of collective wills and ideology. Suffice it to say that ideologies inform the structure of institutions, the nature of social co-operation and conflict and the attitudes and predisposition of the population. These ideologies however may be conceived of as a ‘mix’ made up of the fusion of ‘popular’ elements and global ideological structures that are articulated in particular ways and may give rise to revolutionary discourses which mobilize the aggrieved populations. G.Rude, ‘Ideology and Popular Protest’, in H.J. Kaye, The Face of the Crowd: Studies in Revolution, Ideology and Popular Protest. Selected Essays of George Rude (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 197. See also William H. Sewell, ‘Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case’, in Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 169–98. 284 Maryam H. Panah of 1979 is particularly pertinent here as it is often set up as the model par excellence of a revolution rooted in culture or religion. In what follows, we aim to show how the social structural changes brought about through the externally induced development of capitalism were of primary importance in the emergence of the ‘Islamic’ Revolution. 59

International causes of the Iranian revolution

Since its outbreak, the Iranian Revolution has attracted much commentary. However, the international dimensions of the Revolution and Islamic Regime remain understudied or shrouded in myth. The myths about the Iranian Revolution have ranged from the conspiratorial idea of a ‘hidden foreign hand’ behind events that is widespread in much Iranian commentary, to the myth of an Islamic monolith in confrontation with the West.60 The so-called Islamic resurgence, of which the Iranian Revolution is commonly regarded a component, has recently been addressed in such essentialist terms with attendant implications for the global order. The broad assumption is that Islamic movements may all be understood as part of a single process explained in terms of a common culture or civilization. 61 This section aims to dispel some of these myths and to show how the framework set out above can be useful in explaining the Iranian Revolution. We attempt to address the neglect of international aspects in the scholarly literature on the Iranian revolutionary movement. We show how international pressure affected the social structural changes in Iranian pre-revolutionary society, and had a major inﬂuence on the formation of the revolutionary coalition which overthrew the Pahlavi State in 1979. We noted above that the expansion of capitalism, a disruptive process, has been mediated by the geopolitical institutions of the international system—largely through the actions of local or external states. This was nowhere more true than in Iran where the corollary to the strategic alliance with and integration into the ‘Western alliance’ was the development of capitalism. The roots of these processes are to be sought in the social changes in the country during the preceding decades. In the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, Persia (later Iran) was for both strategic and commercial reasons the scene of incessant Great Power rivalry. Economic interests revolved around the oil industry, controlled by the British owned Anglo- Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), while from the 1940s, Iran became a locus of the

59 For a fuller exposition of the international causes and consequence of the Iranian Revolution see my unpublished Ph.D. thesis (London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999). 60 For an exposition of the conspiratorial myth see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (London: Tauris, 1993). The ‘myth of confrontation’ is discussed in Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London: Tauris, 1996). 61 Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (Summer 1993) and The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). The notion of a ‘Clash of Civilisations’, for instance, was adopted by the orientalist, Bernard Lewis, prior to Huntington’s article. See Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, The Atlantic Monthly (September 1990), pp. 47–60. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 285 emerging Cold War.62 Towards the century’s second half, a period of domestic turbulence and increased political activity threatened capitalist interests.63 Alongside increased trade unionism and radicalism, a movement whose core demand was the nationalization of the oil industry clearly dealt a blow to the immediate interests of the AIOC and the British state, but also a broader threat to the interests of the capitalist world order. It threatened to limit the extraction of surpluses and profits of foreign enterprise; it could potentially have led to the complete withdrawal of Iran from the capitalist market; and the model of Iranian nationalisation could have damaged capitalist interests elsewhere.64 Imperialist intervention, manifested in a coup d’etat engineered jointly by American and British intelligence, served thus to protect these interests by re- instating the Pahlavi Monarchy in 1953. This was the dawn of a close relationship between various Administrations in Washington and the Iranian regime which was to last almost three decades until the 1979 Revolution. From 1953 to 1977, the Iranian regime became visibly and explicitly dependent on the political support of the US while serving the latter through guaranteeing the tight integration of Iran into the capitalist market and the military and security system of capitalist states.65 This relationship also had implications for the direction of internal social develop- ments in Iran that contributed to the structural prerequisites of the revolution: the development of capitalism. Capitalist development in Iran was influenced by external or international forces in two senses, which are nevertheless not unique to the Iranian case. Firstly, international actors, more specifically the United States under the Kennedy Adminis- tration, encouraged social structural changes in Iran, which inaugurated the spread of capitalist social relations. Secondly, industrial development was undertaken by the regime in imitation of more advanced forms and by adoption of techniques prevailing in the advanced countries. Thus, the specific world historical conjuncture and structural conditions of the global economy made a decisive impact on the shape of this evolution in Iran, though mediated through the state. The resulting changes to the socioeconomic structure of the country were immense. The major impact of a programme of rural land reform was the establishment of capitalist social relations with the creation of a rural bourgeoisie and a class of rural wage labourers. 66

62 See Keddie, Roots of Revolution, pp. 79–112. See also Wilfrid Knapp, ‘1921–1941: The Period of Riza Shah’, in Hossein Amirsadeghi (ed.), Twentieth Century Iran (London: Heinemann, 1977). 63 Keddie, Roots of Revolution, pp. 113–41. Val Moghadam, ‘Making History But Not of Their Own Choosing: Workers and the Labour Movement in Iran’, in Ellis Jay Goldberg (ed.), The Social History of Labour in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). See also Sepehr Zabih, The Communist Movement of Iran (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 109–110. 64 James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1988), p.78. 65 Keddie, Roots of Revolution, pp. 146–8, Bill, Eagle and the Lion; Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, pbk, 1979), pp. 78–90. See also Harald Irnberger, Savak oder der Folterfreund des Westens (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977), pp. 23–5; Mark Gasierowski, US Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999). 66 Eric Hooglund, Land and Revolution in Iran 1960–80 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change in Iran (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987). 286 Maryam H. Panah

The other aspect of structural change in Iran entailed a state-led programme of industrialization aimed at advancing Iran towards the more developed capitalist countries and creating an indigenous capitalist class. Government economic strategy in this period focused on the transformation of the economy from a backward oil- dependent one to a mature industrial structure.67 The Shah was himself quite explicit about the necessity to ‘catch up’ with the West and the central role of the state in this process with the ultimate aim of nurturing a full blown advanced capitalist industrial society by adopting and adapting advanced technology.68 The regime’s economic strategy was to develop large capitalist enterprises by relying as much as possible on modern technology. Thus, using the more industrially advanced countries as a model of development and by importing vast quantities of high technology and employing foreign experts, the Shah embarked on a ‘hot-house’ programme of rapid industrialization and technological development. 69 State policy favoured capitalist industrialization with the participation of both foreign and domestic capital. It protected the interests of foreign capital by placing few restrictions on it and, by law, allowing the free repatriation of profits. While domestic private investment took place in the service sector, the state dominated agricultural and industrial production by pouring oil rents into these latter sectors such that often inefficient industries evolved whose profits rested upon state subsidies. This led to the evolution of a form of capitalism dependent on the state, with the state playing a direct and dominant role in both rural and urban industries.70 State policy served to protect not only the interests of foreign and domestic capitalist enterprise, but also the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’—the upper strata of the state bureaucracy at the top of whom stood the Shah himself and who increasingly encroached upon the other sectors of the dominant capitalist class.71 On the other hand, the socioeconomic changes instigated by the Pahlavi State gave birth to the revolutionary coalition of classes that eventually overthrew the regime. The irredeemable upheaval of the Iranian social structure and the disruption to the previous mode of life of the major part of the population gave impetus to the emergence of a heterogeneous coalition with diverging grievances, but united by the common thread of state policies. By playing a direct role in economic processes the Iranian state was the self-evident source of social ills and the natural object of censure and incrimination. The revolutionary coalition was composed of different social classes including the rural and urban working class, an increasing population of urban migrants, and the middle class, stratified into modern and traditional sectors, both rural and urban. One outcome of the attempt to ‘catch up’ by importing technologies from more advanced countries was a reduced demand for labour due to capital-intensive industrialization. This resulted in an increasing rural and urban unemployment problem. The rural proletariat suffered poor living conditions and rural unemployment resulting in an ever-increasing population of migrants to the cities in search of

67 Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, pp. 149–50. 68 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ‘Westernisation: Our Welcome Ordeal’, in Mission for My Country (London: Hutchinson, 1961), pp. 132–60, passim. 69 The following section draws on Keith McLachlan, ‘The Iranian Economy 1960–1976’, in Amirsadeghi (ed.), Twentieth Century Iran, pp. 129–170. 70 McLachlan, ‘The Iranian Economy 1960–1976’. 71 Bizhan Jazani, Capitalism and Revolution in Iran (London: Zed Books, 1980), p.87. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 287 employment and better living conditions. Migrants streaming to the main urban centres constituted a ‘surplus rural labour force’ which largely joined the increasing mass of poor urban unemployed.72 Where the migrants managed to gain employment, therefore, was not in stable wage-earning positions in urban industries, but in low paid and temporary jobs in the service and construction sectors.73 Thus, rural migrants often joined the poor urban unemployed living in squalid conditions at the outskirts of cities and margins of urban life, and during the 1970s, confrontations between the population living on the outskirts of cities and the municipal authorities were frequent. The relatively small urban working class also suffered from oppressive conditions.74 The adverse conditions of the working class in the workplace were characteristic of an organizational structure and labour relations in the backward periphery where capitalist development is grafted onto the pre-existing social relations, including various forms of domination.75 Meanwhile, the traditional urban middle class, which was largely concentrated in the bazaar and engaged in artisanal or trading activities, suffered the state’s industrialization policies, which served the interests of modern industrial and financial capital at the expense of the small commodity producers and traders of the traditional bazaar.76 As recipients of religious taxes from traditional sectors of the population largely coterminous with landowners and bazaaris, the religious establishment was also affected by the economic decline suffered by these sectors, and the cumulative impact of state policy was to stir significant antagonism from within religious institutions.77 Finally, while the growth in state activities during the pre-revolutionary decades resulted in the expansion of a relatively affluent modern middle class, the post-1973 oil boom years resulted in inflationary pressures which adversely affected large sectors of this class. A large proportion of this class were increasingly educated at university level, able to travel abroad, and developed greater political and economic expectations of the state. Despite its relative prosperity, therefore, the modern middle class formed a hotbed of political opposition to the state. Thus, by the mid to late 1970s a large sector of the population, albeit heterogeneous in class terms, had considerable grievances against state policies. Having shouldered a palpably visible role in the changing social conditions of various social classes in Iran, the state came to be targeted by them. We may now turn to the emergence of a revolutionary discourse and movement able to appeal to this broad

72 For a systematic study of the ‘urban marginals’ or ‘sub-proletariat’, see Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); this sector is also emphasized by Masoud Kamali, Revolutionary Iran: Civil Society and State in the Modernisation Process (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998). 73 Ibid., p. 176. 74 For a detailed discussion of the working class, see Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran: A Third World Experience of Workers’ Control (London: Zed, 1987). See also Halliday, Dictatorship and Development, pp. 173–210, and Jazani, Capitalism and Revolution in Iran, pp. 125–31. 75 For a history of workers’ collective action, see Moghadam, ‘Making History But Not of Their Own Choosing’; see also Fred Halliday, Dictatorship and Development, pp. 197–202. 76 Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution, p.118, Michael Fisher, ‘Persian Society: Transformation and Strain’, in Amirsadeghi, Twentieth Century Iran, pp. 171–196. 77 For a detailed account of clergy-state relations in this period, see Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: SUNY, 1980), pp. 117–58. 288 Maryam H. Panah base of opposition and to unify and mobilize it to overthrow the state. We specifically focus on the international influences on this movement. The structural factors which underlie the outbreak of revolutions and their subsequent development are as important to the Iranian case as to any other, but one must also take on board the series of particular circumstances—the formation of a ‘collective will’—enabling the forging of the popular coalition composed of diverging and often contradictory interests, which led eventually to the toppling of the old regime. The ideas of the Iranian Revolution were heavily influenced by the conjuncture of international revolutionary ideologies centred around anti-imperialist struggles and attempts to ‘delink’ from the capitalist world economy. The development of the Iranian Left through the 1970s paralleled that occurring in other parts of the Third World, centring on ‘underdevelopment’ and seeking the roots of the latter in participation in the capitalist world economy. The rise of the ‘new revolutionary movement’ echoed an earlier development in Latin America sharing a similar revolutionary discourse of ‘anti-imperialism, dependent capitalism, neo-colonialism and armed struggle’.78 However, what distinguished the Iranian Revolution and is in need of explanation was the role of Islam and the religious establishment which eventually assumed its leadership. The reasons underlying the emergence of an activist Islam are to be sought in domestic and international changes of the period. Arguably, the most potent source of the new Islamic activism may be sought at the international level in the ‘shared intellectual culture of contemporary revolutionaries’ and the very same ideologies that made such an impact on the secular opposition. For as religious figures came into contact with secular ideologies, especially Marxism and neo- Marxist theories prevailing at the time, they appropriated many modern concepts into their discourse, bringing their political vocabulary into concordance with that of many secular groups. At a time when the prevalent world-view of opposition forces was framed in terms of national liberation, anti-imperialism and socialism, by incorporating secular concepts, a new language of Islam began to emerge which closely corresponded to the secular Third Worldist rhetoric in its condemnation and denunciation of the role of the ‘West’ and in the gradual evolution of its revolutionary discourse.79 Faced with the challenge of rival secular ideologies, Islamic modernists began to seek new ways of opposition to the advances of the regime without identification with conservative Islamic tradition. The neo-Marxist theories prevailing at the time were perceived as rivals to religion and began to be studied even in religious seminaries.80 Islamic activists came into contact with their secular counterparts in a variety of ways including imprisonment in common cells under the Shah where they conducted debates regarding the social and economic system and forms of political actions and contact with Palestinian revolutionaries during periods abroad or in exile.81

78 Val Moghadam ‘The Left and Revolution’, in H.Amirahmadi and M.Parvin, Post-Revolutionary Iran (Boulder, CO and London: Westview, 1988), pp. 25–6. 79 Nikki Keddie, ‘Islamic Revival as Third Worldism’, in Keddie (ed.), Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 212–19. 80 Houchang Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1990), pp. 214–8. 81 Hashemi Rafsanjani, Dowran-e mobarezeh: khaterat, tasvirha, asnad, gahshumar (Tehran: Daftar-e nashr-e ma’aref enqelab, 1374), pp. 239–258. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 289

Religious leaders targeted the West as the principal enemy while, by incorporating modern concepts, presented Islam as a progressive and activist religion able to enjoin social change and deal with the question of social justice. They wrote on socioeconomic questions concerning the role of private property in Islam and its egalitarian disposition.82 A transformation occurred in Iran creating an activist version of religion enriched by the plethora of modern concepts. The need for freedom, independence, national liberation, anti-imperialism and the establishment of a more egalitarian society gradually entered the language of the religious hierarchy. While writing almost as if modern Western political thought never existed, the compatibility of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s ideas with modern concepts is evident.83 He drew, albeit implicitly, on modern sociological concepts of ‘state’, ‘people’ and ‘nation’, and adopted the terminology of the left to speak of warring classes.84 The themes incorporated into this discourse included national independence and anti-imperialism; a commitment to the deprived and downtrodden and the banner of universalism and unity with the oppressed of the world. Such slogans resonated with the social condition and grievances of the various classes which were antagonized by the policies of the state and the imperatives of state-led accumulation perceived to be directed by external powers. By 1978 state policies of accumulation and capitalist development had antagonized large sectors of the population who were not experiencing the material rewards promised by the Shah’s grandiose claims for the rapid socioeconomic development of Iran. A popular cross-class coalition of opposition forces emerged. The coalition which came together and led to the successful outbreak of the Iranian Revolution reflected a heterogeneity of social forces and diverging interests bound together by the perception that the Pahlavi state and its chief supporter the United States were the root cause of Iran’s problems. The significance of state intervention in capital allocation and accumulation in pre-revolutionary Iran made it the central target for the collective action of various classes and groups who were antagonized by state economic policies. The policies of the pre-revolutionary state had imposed a heavy cost on large sections of the peasantry, urban poor and the urban working class, the traditional middle class of the bazaar and sectors of the modern middle class. These pressures were magnified as a result of the rising inflation of the post-1973 oil boom years. The potential for cross-class opposition to the state thus existed. Secular leftist political organizations and the religious figures led by Khomeini shared a political language that could mobilize this popular force. The organizational advantage, however, lay on the side of the latter. While many secular activists were repressed by the Shah’s security apparatus, trained and bolstered by the United States, the clergy, equipped with the extensive network of mosques and an independent financial base, were able organizationally as well as intellectually to assume the leadership of the opposition movement. The clerical hierarchy maintained its financial stability,

82 Seyyed Mahmoud Taleqani, Islam and Ownership, trans. by Ahmad Jabbari and Farhang Rajaee (Kentucky: Mazda, 1983). For one analysis of Taleqani’s work and role, see Mangol Bayat, ‘Mahmud Taleghani and the Iranian Revolution’, in Martin Kramer, Shi’ism, Resistance, Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987), pp. 67–93. 83 Zubaida, Islam, People and the State, pp. 13–20. 84 Abrahamian, ‘Khomeini: Fundamentalist or Populist’, pp. 112–3. 290 Maryam H. Panah independence and robust organizational structure. Opposition to large capitalists and their Western backers earned them the support of a large proportion of the traditional domestic merchant class. The bazaar ﬁnanced many mosque activities and some bazaaris actively promoted ceremonies and gatherings held in Mosques preceding the revolution.85 A network of politically engaged clerics had formed during the decades preceding the revolution. Thus, when the ﬁrst revolutionary protests broke out in 1978, a nucleus organization of religious revolutionaries was in place. However, the revolution was made possible by the participation of a broad coalition of social classes each with its own interests and motives for the overthrow of the old order, and the old regime was brought down by a combination of the strike activities of the working class, supported by the bazaar, combined with popular demonstrations and the eventual breakdown of the Shah’s military and security apparatus.

Conclusion

This article began by observing the traditional neglect of revolutions within our discipline. While a research agenda has, somewhat painstakingly, been forged in this area by a number of scholars in recent years, the prevailing accounts have shown to be wanting in several respects. The causes of social revolutions that may be of interest to researchers in our field have generally been forsaken in favour of consideration of the disruptive influence of revolutionary states on the international order. Scholarship has been geared towards a limited study of the process of ‘normalization’ of the behaviour of revolutionary states. We have called for a historically informed and theoretically controlled analysis of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on a world scale. Our analysis suggested that the underlying cause of social crises in the modern world has been the global impact of capitalism and the subsumption of different pre-existing modes of life under the capitalist market. The development of capitalism on a global scale has far-reaching effects on various social formations and is a crucial underlying cause of social change and crisis. Of course, our discussion opens the possibility of revolutionary outbreak in the advanced liberal-democracies to greater question. We have argued that successful revolutions have often been responses to the visible source of exploitation traced back to the state. Where there is a separation of political institutions from extractive and coercive social processes—as in the advanced capitalist states—this connection is obscured. The implications of this conclusion are beyond the scope of this article, as are the international dimensions of the consequences of revolutions which, nonetheless, offer up further areas for research. Where revolutions have in fact broken out, they have often shown hostility to the prevailing status quo and attempted to promote a global alternative. These activities have then met with severe international responses. It is the threat to prevailing social and political interests that triggers the drive to contain the radical content of revolutions and their spread internationally. This then has a significant impact on

85 Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution, p. 114. Social revolution: an emerging agenda in IR 291 the internal organization of revolutionary states including the development of the instruments of domestic repression or their military organization. It may well be that revolutions have indeed been ‘socialized’, but the underlying reasons and the mechanism of this process need to be analysed. If social revolutionary movements emerge in response to social changes rooted in global processes, it should come as a small surprise that the revolutionaries should consider the international system and its corresponding socioeconomic and political structures with hostility. As the impact of the international expansion of capitalism is felt by populations and is seen as the source of exploitative processes, post- revolutionary regimes have often sought to withdraw from the realm of the capitalist market and follow an alternative trajectory of socioeconomic development, although this disposition has been expressed in a variety of forms of rhetoric—the evils of international capitalism, Yankee imperialism, Westernization, global arrogance, and so on—and may take different trajectories depending on the local and global conjunctural circumstances. In every case, however, there has been an effort to establish a qualitatively different type of society and to promote this internationally as the solution to the social problems of the world. Various social forces, including the coercion of status quo powers, stand in the way of the internationalist drive of revolutionaries.86 However, if as we have argued, the incessant global drive of capitalism is a continuously disruptive process and leads to the dislocation of various populations through changes in their previous modes of life and therefore has potentially revolutionary implications, then the ideological rhetoric of revolutionary regimes under such circumstances may have considerable appeal to populations across the globe who countenance these pressures. This is not to corroborate the idea of a domino-like spread of revolution. Rather, revolutions and revolutionary states contribute to the development of the international system by becoming part of its history, with effects which are unpredictable and which diverge from the original intentions of those who participate in the revolution, as their ideas are appropriated by others and transformed in numerous ways—an impact which eludes theories which stop at the foreign policy of the state when considering the external effects of revolutionary states. These repercussions may be observed across the globe and long after the original crisis and revolutionary outbreak. Social revolutions within particular states thus change the international system not just by triggering pre-emptive measures by actors wishing to preserve the status quo, but also by contributing to the uneven historical development of that system by simply existing within it. The framework suggested here for the study of revolutions within IR suggests that we should aim to seek the socioeconomic changes rooted in international processes which lead to social revolutionary upheaval. The contrast with conventional theories in IR is stark both in the case of realist responses which deny revolutionary causes as a subject matter of IR and deal with revolutionary states only in their disruption of the international order, as well as the recent turn to culture as the explanation for revolutionary behaviour.

86 The clearest instance is US policy towards revolutions throughout the Cold War. See David Horowitz, Containment and Revolution (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967); Gar Alperovitz, Cold War Essays (New York: Anchor, 1970); Fred Halliday, From Kabul to Managua [also published as Cold War, Third World] (New York: Pantheon, 1989).