Abstract
The world of ideology and rhetoric, and the world of the real, have never coincided, in revolutionary or tranquil times. Yet to a considerable degree they did develop in some rough combination: the ideas of the previous chapter were to a remarkable extent realised in the practices of solidarity and more specifically in the export of revolution. ‘Export of revolution’ conventionally meant the active promotion of revolution in other countries by a revolutionary regime. Revolutionaries were caught, by dint of their own ideology, in the conflict between asserting their obligation to encourage change elsewhere, and their recognition of the limits which any such external assistance could have. Equally, they were divided by their desire to affirm solidarity, often far in excess of what they were capable of, and the wish to fend off the hostility of counter-revolutionary states. Hence, protestations to the effect that such states were not violating international ‘norms’ by assisting revolutionaries abroad, were accompanied by claims that such assistance in any case was not possible, since revolution could not be exported. From the French revolutionaries in the 1790s to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s, all such states have expressed innocence when accused of promoting revolution abroad.
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Notes
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899’1919 (London: Fontana Press, 1992) p. 669.
Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1960) p. 341.
Jaap van Ginneken, The Rise and Fall of Lin Piao (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 115–17.
David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993)
On China and Vietnam, Bernard Fall, Le Viet-minh (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960) pp. 195–6
Yemen and Dhofar, Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen 1967–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 142–57.
Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers. Ritual in Industrial Society — the Soviet Case (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981) pp. 289–90.
Wilfried Buchta, Die iranische Schia und die islamische Einheit 1979–1996 (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institute, 1997) pp. 102–4.
On Brest-Litovsk, Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 374
K. S. Karol, The Guerrillas in Power (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970) p. 383.
Quoted in R. K. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran: Challenge and Response in the Middle East, second edition (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) p. 25.
Text of decree in Jacques Godechot, La Pensée Révolutionnaire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964) pp. 120–1.
George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe 1783–1815 (London: Fontana, 1964) p. 208.
Marcel Merle, Pacifisme et Internationalisme XVIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966) p. 154.
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London: Sphere Books, 1967) vol. 3, pp. 303–4.
John Reed in Ten Days That Shook the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) pp. 129–34.
A. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection (London: NLB, 1970)
Alexander Orlov, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963)
Fred Halliday, ‘Revolution in Iran: Was It Possible in 1921?’, Khamsin (London: Ithaca Press) no. 7 (1980)
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901–1941 (London: OUP, 1963) p. 256.
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) pp. 698–703
For the largest such unacknowledged operation see Jon Halliday, ‘Air Operations in Korea: The Soviet Side of the Story’, in William J. Williams (ed.), A Revolutionary War: Korea and the Transformation of the Postwar World (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1993).
Heinrich Bechtoldt speculates on the Chinese plans for a new international organisation, a ‘Fifth International’, in the period 1963–5: but this came to nothing (Chinas Revolutionsstrategie mit der dritten welt gegen Russland und Amerika, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1969, pp. 111–13).
Jaap van Ginneken, p. 115. Chen Yi gave sobering advice, warning against leftist and provocative slogans, to a visiting delegation of revolutionaries from the newly established People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (Hashim Behbehani, China and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. A Report, London: KPI, 1985).
Gabriel García Marquez, in his One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1970) pp. 138–9
‘The Duty of a Revolutionary is to Make the Revolution: the Second Declaration of Havana’, in Fidel Castro Speaks, ed. M. Kenner and J. Petras (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972) pp. 164-5. For the background, see Andrés Suárez, Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959–1966 (London: MIT Press, 1967) pp. 143–6.
K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970) p. 364.
In the following I have based myself on the excellent discussion in Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) pp. 51–67.
‘Benigno’ (pseudonym of Dariel Alarcón Ramírez), Vie et Mort de la Révolution Cubaine (Paris: Fayard, 1996) p. 122.
For general analyses, see Jorge Dominguez, To Make the World Safe for Revolution; Susan Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)
Nicaragua, for its part, sustained its own internationalist commitments, to the guerrilla movements in Guatemala and El Salvador. This was, more than in other cases, balanced by an attempt to maintain dialogue with other American and European bodies. For this latter dimension see Hazel Smith, ‘The Conservative Approach: Sandinista Nicaragua’s Foreign Policy’, in Stephen Chan and Andrew Williams (eds), Renegade States (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
Anoushiravan Ehteshami, After Khomeini, The Iranian Second Republic (London: Routledge, 1995) p. 32
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). Internationalism in Practice: Export of Revolution. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_4
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