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. Thus we shouldn’ t expectto see agreatdeal of revolutionaryactivity at any given time, and the prospects for `success’ (mea- suredby the seizure of state power and the initiation of a projectof social transformation)have always been poor. Nevertheless,the question posed by thecurrent craze for`globalisation’ in the socialsciences andpopular imagination is: has itbecomeharder for revolutions tooccurin aworldof globalcorporations and commodity chains, global cultural forms,instantaneous communication and swift travel, the collapse of socialism, anda nolonger bipolar political arrangement? This is thequestion which the presentarticle will take up, employing a theoryof the origins of Third World JohnForan is attheDepartment of Sociology, University ofCalifornia,Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA. 0143-6597/97/050791-30$7.00 Ó 1997Third World Quarterly 791 JOHN FORAN socialrevolutions to date. The task is toexplore the predictive utility of the comparative±historical revolutionary record, and to re¯ ect on the current con- juncturein the light of the elements of this theory. 2 Weshall do so by undertakinga briefsurvey of a numberof current and quite recent instances of non-attemptsat revolution, actual uprisings, one successful politicalrevolution, 3 andseveral potential revolutions in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.Further re¯ ections on the current conjuncture will be taken up in the conclusion. Theories ofThird World social revolutions 4 Thestudy of social revolutions, and Third World revolutions, has takena great leapforward since the 1979 publication of Theda Skocpol’ s Statesand Social Revolutions ,astructuralist tourde force thatshowed how international pressures couldcombine with state and class arrangementsto produce political crises. WalterGoldfrank, John Walton, Jeff Goodwin,Theda Skocpol, Farideh Farhi, TimothyWickham-Crowley and Jack Goldstoneand his collaborators, among others,have produced important studies of sets ofparticularThird World cases. 5 Theseperspectives have all advocated multi-causal approaches to revolutions. Thequestion today has become:what particular mix of causes is mostuseful as anexplanation across (which)cases? Allof theabove theorists have emphasised structuralapproaches to revolution, often at the expense of agency and culture (Farhihas donethe most with culture in thisgroup). ManyÐ including Goodwin, Skocpol,and Wickham-CrowleyÐ have placed great emphasis on the particular kindof statethat is mostvulnerable to revolution,often at the cost of payingless attentionto social structure and the economy. Gradually a consensushas emergedthat both external and internal factors are atwork, but in whatways and towhat degree is notyet settled. Myown work draws on a numberof the speci® c insightsof this latest generationof scholars, but with its own particular synthesis that insists on balancingattention to such perennial dichotomies as structureand agency, politicaleconomy and culture, state and social structure, internal and external factors.Elsewhere I haveargued that ® veinterrelated causal factors must combinein a givenconjuncture to produce a successful socialrevolution: 1) dependentdevelopment; 2) a repressive,exclusionary, personalist state; 3)the elaborationof effective and powerful political cultures of resistance, and a revolutionarycrisis consistingof 4) an economic downturn, and 5) a world- systemicopening (a let-upof external controls). 6 Letus brie¯y examineeach of thesefactors in turn. Theconcept of dependent development, taken from the work of Latin Americanscholars Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, is aprocess thatmay be characterised as oneof `growth within limits’ : Itrefers tocertain ThirdWorld economies, at certain moments in their history, that undergo both developmentÐas measuredby increases in GNP,foreigntrade, industrial or agriculturaloutputÐ combined with the negative consequences of the attendant socialtransformation in the form of in¯ ation, debt, growing inequality, or overburdenedhousing and educational infrastructures, among others. 7 This 792 FUTURE OFREVOLUTIONS ATTHE FIN-DE-SIEÁ CLE complexprocess de®nes achangingsocial structure that generates a fewwinners andmany losers, giving rise tosocial and economic grievances among diverse sectors ofthe population, ranging from the urban working, middle, and under- classes, toruralpeasants, farmers, andworkers, crossing gender and ethnic lines as well.Both classic dependencyand underdevelopment (as inmuchof theThird World),or realdevelopment (as inpartsof east Asia),are less likelyto produce suchsocial dislocation. Therepressive, exclusionary, personalist state which so often(but not always) accompaniesdependent development reposes onthe combination of repression oflower-class forces andexclusion of both the growing middle classes andthe economicelite from political participation. Such states possess anelective af® nityfor dependent development because they are goodat guaranteeing order, atleast for a time,but they also tend to exacerbatecon¯ ictual relations between stateand civil society. 8 Dictators,particularly of the dynastic variety (either by monarchicsuccession or imposition of new generations) or of long-lived duration(whether through patently fraudulent elections or other means), epito- mise thispersonalist type of rule. They fuel the grievances generated by dependentdevelopment, often alienating the upper classes fromthe state, and providea solidtarget for social movements from below. Because ofthis,under certaincircumstances, they facilitate the formation of a broad,multi-class allianceagainst the state, because middle and even upper classes mayjoin with lowerclasses, feelingless threatof being overturned along with the state. Conversely,collective military rule, or rule by the military as aninstitution, especiallywhen given a veneerof legitimation through regular elections, howeverfraudulent, tends to elicit more elite support and provide a less vulnerabletarget for cross-class socialmovements. Forthis to occur, an opposition must coalesce. To capture the ideological dimensionof this intervention of human agents onto the historical stage, I have developedthe notion of `political cultures of opposition and resistance’ in my previouswork. 9 Tomove from the structural determinants of the grievances producedby dependent development and the repressive, exclusionary, personal- iststate, broad segments of many groups and classes mustbe able to articulate theexperiences they are livingthrough into effective and ¯ exibleanalyses capableof mobilisingtheir own forces andbuilding coalitions with others. Such politicalcultures of opposition may draw upon diverse sources: formalideolo- gies,folk traditions and popular idioms, ranging from ideas and feelings of nationalism(against control by outsiders), to socialism (economic equality and socialjustice), democracy (demands for participation and an end to dictatorship), religion(resistance to evil and suffering), and the like. Different groups, classes andactors will embrace complex combinations of these, sometimes weaving theminto critiques of the regime with great mobilisational potential. How well thesemultiple political cultures are capableof bringing together diverse sectors intoa broadand uni® ed opposition, I shallargue, may spell the difference betweensuccess andfailure. In anycase, thisfactor insists on theirreducible role playedby human agency and meaning in the making (or not) of revolutions. The® nalelement in the model is theemergence of arevolutionarycrisis that bothweakens