Adam Kirsch: Some revolutions fail when the enlightened misread the national mood
Certain years in history carry a nearly sacred halo, so deeply are they associated with the idea of democratic revolution. Say 1848, and you summon up the springtime of nations, the rise of barricades in Paris and Frankfurt and Venice; say 1989, and it’s the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of Communism in East Berlin and Prague and Warsaw. Few people have such fond memories of the years between 1905 and 1915, which we more commonly associate with the various crises leading up to the First World War. Yet as Charles Kurzman reminds us in Democracy Denied, those years actually saw “a wave of democratic revolutions . . . consuming more than a quarter of the world’s population.”
The wave began with the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to grant his people a constitution and a parliament. Inspired by the Russian example, Iranian democrats rebelled against the Shah in 1906; the Young Turks forced the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to grant a constitution in 1908; the Kingdom of Portugal became a republic in 1910; the 30-year-old Porfirio Diaz regime in Mexico was overthrown in 1911; and the ancient monarchy of China gave way to a republican government under Sun Yat-sen in 1912.
These democratic movements spanned the globe, and the intellectuals leading them were strongly aware of one another’s example. Kurzman’s mastery of a wide range of sources and languages allows him to draw surprising connections: some rebels in Portugal called themselves Young Turks, while an Ottoman newspaper urged the Turks to “strive like Russians.” On the face of it, so many national revolutionary movements occurring within the same period seem to belong, as Kurzman writes, “alongside other clusters of democratic revolutions, such as the wave triggered by the French Revolution of 1789, the uprisings of 1848 . . . and the democratic movements of the late twentieth century.”
Yet as Kurzman’s title suggests, these six revolutions are not remembered as a glorious chapter in history. In each, pro-democracy activists scored dramatic initial successes, only to surrender quickly to infighting, resentment, and apathy, setting the stage for counterrevolutionary coups. The Tsar did grant a Duma in 1905, but once the revolutionary danger passed, he effectively neutered it, and Russian autocracy was back in the saddle by 1907. In Turkey, the Young Turks themselves abolished the democracy that they had helped create, preferring to modernize the creaky Ottoman state along authoritarian lines. Francisco Madero, who overthrew Diaz in Mexico, was himself overthrown and killed by the army commander, Victoriano Huerta, in 1913. Similarly, Sun Yat-sen was unseated by the powerful general Yuan Shikai, paving the way for decades of civil war. Only in Portugal did the republic stagger on, despite repeated coups and royalist invasions—until 1925, when a dictatorship replaced it.
Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, does not set out simply to tell the story of these revolutions (though since they are unfamiliar to most American readers, his book might have benefited from a little more straight narrative). Instead, he undertakes a comparative analysis of the six cases, seeking to construct a model of how democratic revolutions succeed or fail. His insight is that conventional Marxist theories of revolution, based on class conflict, are insufficient to explain what happened in the years 1905 to 1915. In the classic Marxist view, liberal democracy is the political expression of the rising economic power of the urban middle class; the bourgeoisie contends against reactionary forces (landowners and the military), with the inconstant support of radical workers. But in the revolutions of 1905 through 1915, Kurzman finds, “these characters played their roles inconsistently. . . . Viewed in terms of the classic social-scientific scripts, the democratic revolutions of this period were a jumble.”...
Read entire article at City Journal (winter issue; accessed 3-6-09)
The wave began with the 1905 Russian Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to grant his people a constitution and a parliament. Inspired by the Russian example, Iranian democrats rebelled against the Shah in 1906; the Young Turks forced the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to grant a constitution in 1908; the Kingdom of Portugal became a republic in 1910; the 30-year-old Porfirio Diaz regime in Mexico was overthrown in 1911; and the ancient monarchy of China gave way to a republican government under Sun Yat-sen in 1912.
These democratic movements spanned the globe, and the intellectuals leading them were strongly aware of one another’s example. Kurzman’s mastery of a wide range of sources and languages allows him to draw surprising connections: some rebels in Portugal called themselves Young Turks, while an Ottoman newspaper urged the Turks to “strive like Russians.” On the face of it, so many national revolutionary movements occurring within the same period seem to belong, as Kurzman writes, “alongside other clusters of democratic revolutions, such as the wave triggered by the French Revolution of 1789, the uprisings of 1848 . . . and the democratic movements of the late twentieth century.”
Yet as Kurzman’s title suggests, these six revolutions are not remembered as a glorious chapter in history. In each, pro-democracy activists scored dramatic initial successes, only to surrender quickly to infighting, resentment, and apathy, setting the stage for counterrevolutionary coups. The Tsar did grant a Duma in 1905, but once the revolutionary danger passed, he effectively neutered it, and Russian autocracy was back in the saddle by 1907. In Turkey, the Young Turks themselves abolished the democracy that they had helped create, preferring to modernize the creaky Ottoman state along authoritarian lines. Francisco Madero, who overthrew Diaz in Mexico, was himself overthrown and killed by the army commander, Victoriano Huerta, in 1913. Similarly, Sun Yat-sen was unseated by the powerful general Yuan Shikai, paving the way for decades of civil war. Only in Portugal did the republic stagger on, despite repeated coups and royalist invasions—until 1925, when a dictatorship replaced it.
Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, does not set out simply to tell the story of these revolutions (though since they are unfamiliar to most American readers, his book might have benefited from a little more straight narrative). Instead, he undertakes a comparative analysis of the six cases, seeking to construct a model of how democratic revolutions succeed or fail. His insight is that conventional Marxist theories of revolution, based on class conflict, are insufficient to explain what happened in the years 1905 to 1915. In the classic Marxist view, liberal democracy is the political expression of the rising economic power of the urban middle class; the bourgeoisie contends against reactionary forces (landowners and the military), with the inconstant support of radical workers. But in the revolutions of 1905 through 1915, Kurzman finds, “these characters played their roles inconsistently. . . . Viewed in terms of the classic social-scientific scripts, the democratic revolutions of this period were a jumble.”...