Plaque commemorating the 'Velvet Revolution' of Czechoslovakia. Courtesy of flickr.com

Classic Revolutions: Marking the ‘First’ in History

Popular imagination has long been captured by the classic revolutions of history, and those very dates have become iconic: 1776 (America), 1789 (France), 1917 (Russia), and 1911 (China). These events astonished the world by overthrowing hereditary monarchies that had been dominant in their realms for centuries. By replacing those monarchies with republics or party-states, and ending the dominant role of privileged aristocrats in such societies, these events not only changed the governments of these states, but appeared to suddenly destroy traditional patterns of social organization and launch these societies into the modern age.

Since then, the currency of revolutions seems to have become debased. The term ‘revolution’ has been appropriated for dozens of events, ranging from anti-colonial revolts (Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique), campaigns of guerrilla war, and popular protest that brought down modernizing dictatorships (China [1949], Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, the Philippines) or one-party regimes (Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, E. Germany). The term has even been applied to urban protests that embodied aspirations for change that went far beyond their actual consequences (the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon, the ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan). A recent book on 20th century revolutions in developing nations (John Foran’s Taking Power, published in 2005) identifies no less than 39 events as ‘revolutions.’

Two distinct but important questions can be asked regarding this proliferation of events labeled as ‘revolutions:’ (1) Do the course or consequences of these events justify describing them as revolutions, that is, as social events of the same genus as the classic revolutions of history? And (2) Can academic theories of revolutions – developed mainly to account for the political upheavals and social transformations in those classic revolutions – be applied to these modern events to explain their causes and outcomes?

We should first note that the degree of change wrought by the classic revolutions is often overrated; the impression of a sudden break with traditional order and the creation of a modern world is something of a fabrication by nationalist historians who sought to glorify these events. In America, while elected state governors replaced royal appointees and a federal republican government replaced the British monarchy as sovereign, the leadership of the new republic remained controlled by the same social and political elites – mainly landholding and slaveholding white males – who had dominated colonial society. In France the traditional aristocracy retained most of its property and much of its influence throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed long after the revolution, France was led by self-proclaimed “Emperors” who ruled with the same pomp and style as aristocratic monarchs; stable republican government did not take root until 1871. In Russia, it was the Tsarist monarchy that had ended serfdom, developed railroads and factories, and initiated representative assemblies (the Dumas). Although the Tsars and aristocrats were destroyed, it was not the proletariat, but the middle-ranking elites of the old regime – intelligentsia, lesser civil and military officials, professionals and their offspring – who dominated Russia after 1917. Finally, although in China Sun Yat-sen sought to create a modern republic in place of the hereditary imperial regime and its Confucian-trained social and political leaders, what followed 1911 were decades of traditional warlordship, as in previous eras of imperial decline in China. A modernizing nationalist government did not emerge until Chang Kai-shek’s ‘nationalist’ revolution in 1927.

Then why did these revolutions – 1776, 1789, 1917, 1911 – assume such iconic status? The answer lies less in the realm of political or social transformation than in the shift in the ruling ideas in these societies, for in each case the principles on which power rested were dramatically and permanently transformed. In each case, the claims of individual merit against inherited rank to determine a person’s place in society – and especially to determine the rulers of that society – finally triumphed. Citizens (or comrades) claimed legal equality in place of the subordinate role of subjects, and rationally-designed constitutions replaced religious or military authority as the basis of government. Elites came to see themselves as leaders of the people, rather than servants of the state or Crown.

In this regard, each of these revolutions also marked a ‘first’ in world history. The American Revolution was the first large continental state to recreate itself as a republic, rather than a monarchy, and the most successful republic since ancient times (Switzerland, though long a democracy, was more a federation of self-governing cantons than a large republic; and both the Polish elected monarchy and Cromwell’s experiment in Commonwealth, the latter never having produced an elected chief executive, were considered failures by 1700). France was the first large European state to take the same steps, establishing a rationally-designed constitutional state and administrative system in lieu of traditional religious/monarchical authority. China was the first large state in Asia to follow in this path, overthrowing its traditional Emperor to proclaim a constitutional republic, and Russia was the first state to replace its traditional regime with an even more radical innovation, the vanguard party-led state and socialist economy.

Comparing Modern Revolutions

Do other modern ‘revolutions’ compare in these regards? Yes, some definitely do, although they have not been appreciated for various reasons. The overthrow of the Ottoman sultanate/caliphate by the Young Turks and then Kemal’s secular Turkish Revolution similarly replaced a centuries-old imperial regime claiming absolute authority based on religious and hereditary principles with a modern secular republican government. Yet perhaps because of the tragedies for Greece and Armenia – two Christian societies with historic ties to the West – that accompanied these events, the Turkish Revolution has never been seen as a great classic revolution in the West, even though the Turkish people themselves regard Kemal Attaturk as their Napoleon or Washington, and see the Kemalist revolution as the great break or turning point in their history.

In Japan, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was a far more radical political and social transformation than any of the European Revolutions of 1848, and was more comparable to the classic social revolutions. It destroyed the centuries-old authority of the shogun and daimyos, abolished the hereditary privileged order of the samurai, and replaced them with a formally egalitarian, republican, and meritocratic regime. Yet this event too is only rarely treated as one of the great revolutions of history, in part because the leaders of the Restoration deliberately sought to downplay the change. For reasons of nationalist strategy, they preferred to portray themselves as reasserting loyalty to the Japanese emperor (a nationalist figurehead under both the shoguns and the Meiji regime), and bringing down the shogun in the name of restoring the Emperor’s traditional authority. Thus a radical modernizing revolution was cloaked in kimono robes, and made to seem more meek and traditional than it was.