January 2007, Volume 18, Number 1 $11.00 How Democracies Emerge Thomas Carothers Sheri Berman Revolution Reconsidered Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. The Perpetual Crises of Democracy Guillermo O’Donnell Benjamin Reilly on the Asia-Pacific Gideon Maltz on Presidential Term Limits Thomas B. Pepinsky on Malaysia Axel Hadenius & Jan Teorell on Paths from Authoritarianism Gideon Rahat on Candidate Selection The Mexican Standoff Andreas Schedler Luis Estrada & Alejandro Poiré Jorge G. Casta~neda & Marco A. Morales REVOLUTION RECONSIDERED Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., serves on the editorial board of the Journal of De- mocracy. He recently was a Fulbright Fellow in Georgia and served as an election observer there in November 2003. In the winter of 2006 Georgians and Ukrainians will be marking, and many celebrating, events that they have labeled by the somewhat old- fashioned term, “revolution”: the Rose and Orange Revolutions. It is surprising that these historic upheavals have not spurred any reconsid- eration of the once popular concept of revolution. Modern liberal de- mocracy as we know it today emerged when a “right of revolution” began to be widely asserted in the century leading up to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Over the next two centuries, revo- lution was a hope always cherished somewhere on the globe, consoling believers in popular rule and guiding their efforts. Some of the subse- quent revolutions were amazing successes, like the American, while others turned out to be cruel deceptions. Partly because the last wave of revolutionary enthusiasm after the Second World War had proved de- ceptive, the collapse of communist rule in the Soviet bloc was accom- panied by a feeling that revolutions might be dying out. The recent “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union give us an opportunity to ask ourselves whether this is so, and whether revolution is a good or bad idea overall. Revolution in the strict sense (what we may call “classical revolu- tion”) has a number of essential features. First, there is a public discred- iting of the old order, which leads to a quick change of the ruling body—the class or group of people (rich people, the people as a whole, communists, mullahs) that participates politically and therefore rules. Second, it involves a quick change of the ruling group in the name of, but also by means of, the whole community as represented by its major- ity. Third, the new rulers are specified and legitimized by a body of Journal of Democracy Volume 18, Number 1 January 2007 © 2007 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. 43 doctrine or ideology. Fourth, it installs a new system that is created by the state: The characteristic tendency of revolutions is to seize control of the state and to use the state to produce wider changes. Fifth, in revolutions the new rulers and institutions take power by violence or by the threat of violence. Three elements of this definition deserve to be underscored: 1) A revolution must be fairly brief and well demarcated from the periods before and after in order to differentiate it from a process of gradual reform. 2) Moreover, it must be achieved not only by leaders but by the energies of a broader group of people. Rulers sometimes may relax and broaden their rule, often doing so under some form of pressure, and leaders of coups d’état may proclaim their desire to create a democratic system (as in Mauritania in August 2005), but these are not revolutions in the traditional sense. Because a wide group of people participate in carrying out a revolution, they can take pride in what they accomplish. 3) Finally, violence has been quite important to revolutions. This con- clusion was powerfully restated by Simon Schama on the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution: “The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count. From the first year it was apparent that vio- lence was not just an unfortunate side effect . it was the Revolution’s source of collective energy.”1 There is a case for violence. Outside the Muslim world, modern man is no longer attracted by revolutionary violence (or by war). As we will discuss, such violence holds great dangers for democratic transforma- tion. But to appreciate the case for classical revolution it is essential to examine the function of violence in past democratic revolutions. Vio- lence heightens the drama of political change, vividly defining friends and enemies. It creates examples—tragic, heroic, and villainous—on the basis of which citizens remodel their characters. One should picture here revolutionary icons such as Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting The Death of Marat. If we ask how passive victims of politics become the owners and operators of politics, these images and stories of revolu- tionary violence, heroism, and sacrifice must play a great role. It is not clear whether nonviolent substitutes for revolutionary symbolism are as memorable as those that recall violent clashes. In any case, nonvio- lence relies for its symbolism on the violence of the regimes it opposes, and offers few clues to the character of the nonviolent world to which it aspires. Violence creates a clear dividing line between the past and the fu- ture. We have become accustomed to the fact that Japan, Germany, and Italy are democracies, but this is one of the most astonishing facts of modern history. It surely has something to do with the long frenzy of violence during the Second World War, which not only created bad associations with the past, but also substituted for revolutionary vio- lence by creating a very clear dividing line between past and future. 44 Journal of Democracy Postcommunist Russia, in contrast, is caught in a gray, indeterminate state that hoists and honors both the red flag and the imperial tricolor, a state neither communist nor anticommunist. The Case Against Revolution There is a powerful case against revolution, obscured in the last cen- tury because it was best articulated by older philosophic historians such as Thucydides, David Hume, Hippolyte Taine, and François Guizot. These thinkers perceived the concrete problems that arise from revolu- tion in a way which is more thoughtful and truer than the analyses offered by contemporary social science. To begin with, many of these writers argued that revolution disrupts the respect for institutions and the obedience to law that derive from habit. A wonderful statement of Thomas Babington Macaulay in his History of England serves as a text for understanding much about revolution, both its positive and nega- tive aspects: “In revolutions men live fast. The experience of years is crowded into hours; old habits of thought and action are violently bro- ken.”2 He goes on to say that revolution’s “own principle is that rebel- lion may be justifiable. Its own existence proves that revolution may be successful.”3 So revolution can easily issue in a process of endless inno- vation, both inconclusive and exhausting. As Hume put it in his own earlier History of England, “every successive revolution became a pre- cedent for that which followed it.”4 Our contemporary Charles Tilly concludes that France “went through four somewhat separate revolu- tions between 1789 and 1799.”5 One can wind up with a situation where, again according to Macaulay, “the whole political world was without form and void—an incessant whirl of hostile atoms which every moment forms some new combina- tion.”6 That is, politicians cannot appeal to any stable parties, constitu- encies, or interests to gain power, nor can they have access to predictable and effective levers of power if they temporarily gain control of the state. This was the sad reality of Russian politics during the 1990s. We hardly ever mention the names of our former democratic heroes (Gavriil Popov, Sergei Stankevych, Anatoly Sobchak, Oleg Rumyantsev, and others). We were enchanted with these people, but then dropped them at a certain point without explaining why. What happened to them? Many simply disappeared from sight; others, sadly, turned into opportunists or thieves. A big part of the explanation of why they changed is that the political environment was so random, and the footing of these politi- cians so slippery, that they tended to give up politics or to go with every wind. Revolutions also tend to bring to power people who are not experienced in exploiting the political resources that are available (for example, Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia and Abulfaz Elchibey in Azerbaijan). The modern state consists almost entirely of a structure of Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. 45 habits and expectations that certain officials will obey other officials and that official acts will have certain results. These habits and expecta- tions are disrupted by revolution. Revolutions do stir enthusiasm, creating huge hopes and inevitable disappointment. Thus they are a fluctuating and fragile basis for gov- ernment. As Hume puts it, “it is the nature of passion gradually to de- cay, while the sense of interest maintains a permanent influence and authority.”7 In other words, interest is a better basis for political institu- tions than enthusiasm. Enthusiasm can easily lead to more and more extreme political positions and to competing extremisms—the story of many revolutions. Once the enthusiasm cools, the disappointment can easily issue in political cynicism. In modern societies, politics is rarely the preoccupation of the whole society. After extremist politics emerges, even most of the revolutionaries themselves gradually withdraw from the political scene. One Jacobin legislator complained that after a few years, “Instead of seeing the friends of the Revolution increase as we have advanced on the revolutionary path .