The Future of Revolutions at the Fin-De-Siecle
ThirdWorld Quarterly, Vol 18, No 5, pp 791± 820, 1997 Thefuture of revolutions at the ®n-de-sieÁcle JOHN FORAN Istheera ofrevolutionover? Did it end in 1989?And was thatsuch a longtime ago,in any case? Itdoesn’ t necessarilyseem tobe over in places like Mexico (Chiapas),Algeria, Peru or Zaire, and may be just around the corner elsewhere (Egypt?).The discourse of revolution may be changing; the international loci andfoci may be moving(with the demise of the Soviet Union and the tentative consolidationof democracies in Latin America); the actors may be changing (withmore women and ethnic minorities active; though both have long histories ofrevolutionary activism)Ð all of this may be (arguably) true. But this article willargue that revolutions are goingto be with us tothe end of history, andÐ pace FrancisFukuyamaÐ that is notin sight. SocialrevolutionsÐ in Theda Skocpol’ s nowclassic sense of`rapid, basic transformationsof a society’s stateand class structures¼accompanied and in partcarried through by class-based revoltsfrom below’ 1Ðare infact relatively rare eventsby virtue of thedeep degree of transformationthey require to qualify as such.While the issue of`how much’ transformation is enoughto merit the label`social’ is avexingone, most analysts can agree on the list of twentieth- centurysocial revolutions: Russia 1917,China 1949, Cuba 1959, Nicaragua 1979,Iran 1979 in the ® rst instance;and, arguably, Mexico 1910± 20, Vietnam 1945±75, Algeria 1954± 62, and Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique in the 1970s,among others, if the de® nition is relaxedsomewhat. (The dates here refer tothe making, not aftermaths, of these revolutions, which were, it should be evident,processes morethan `events’ .) Evenwith the more generous list, we haveno more than a dozeninstances in almost a hundredyears, a `rate’that wouldnot yield quite yet a singlefurther case sincethe momentous events of 1989in China and Eastern Europe, themselves not classi® ableas successful or quitesocial, respectively.
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