Abstract
No study of the international dimensions of revolutions would be complete without analysis of the ways in which international factors shape the development of post-revolutionary states. Analysis of this interaction can do much to identify the ways in which, formal interstate relations apart, the external shapes the internal evolution of states and societies: such an investigation is relevant for theory, both sociological and international. It highlights the contradictory character of external pressure: radicalising the revolutionary state in the short run, debilitating and pushing it towards conformity with an international norm in the longer run. Such a perspective is equally of historical importance, in helping to explain the outcomes of revolutions. It was Trotsky who in the 1920s perceived the importance of this dimension of competition: ‘a Ford tractor is just as dangerous as a Creusot gun, with the sole difference that while the gun can function only from time to time, the tractor brings its pressure to bear upon us constantly’.1 Revolutions are, above all, attempts to change the societies in which they occurred: beyond the assumption of power itself, they seek to implement domestic transformation — to change political system, economy, social relations. The Jacobins sought to turn French society upside down in pursuit of their rationalist goals; the Bolsheviks and their successors envisaged a socialist transformation, the production indeed of ‘new socialist man’; Ihc revolutionaries of Iran pursued Islamisation of politics and society on the model of the Prophet and his immediate successors.
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Notes
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). Systemic Constraints: Revolutionary ‘Transformation’ and Autarky. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_10
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