Abstract
If revolutions are international in their causes, programmes and consequences, the same is equally true for attempts to overthrow or prevent them. The fear of such an overthrow haunts all revolutionaries. Two months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin wrote to Trotsky ‘This is a moment of triumph. We have lasted a day longer than the Paris Commune.’1 Counter-revolution, a universal accompaniment of all revolutions, is as international as revolution itself: it is, as much as revolution, a constitutive element in the modern history of international relations. Like revolution, counter-revolution often has international causes. Moreover, it is international in that it seeks to affect politics across state frontiers. It is international above all because, like revolution, counterrevolution is both product and further stimulant of a generalised crisis of the state system that engulfs a range of countries and that forms the focus for international politics in a particular epoch.2
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Notes
Quoted in A. J. P. Taylor, Revolutions and Revolutionaries (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980) p. 141.
There is little general literature on this subject: one exception is Arno Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956: An Analytic Framework (London: Harper Torchbooks, 1971).
William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Jacques Godechot, La Contre-Révolution: Doctrine et Action 1789–1804 (Paris: PUF, 1961).
Henry Kissinger A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973).
Hedley Bull (ed.), Intervention in International Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
Clemens von Metternich, ‘A Confession of Faith’, in Peter Viereck (ed.), Conservatism (London: Van Nostrand, 1956) pp. 135–6.
Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (London: New Park, 1967) p. 189.
For analyses of Nazi ideology see Arno Mayer, Why did the Heavens Not Darken?. The ‘Final Solution’, in History (London: Verso, 1990)
Enzo Collotti, La Germania Nazista. Dalla repubblica de Weimar al crollo del Reich hitleriano (Turun: Einaudi, 1962)
Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: OUP, 1987) p. 230.
On the counter-revolutionary crisis of Germany in the 1920s see Arno Mayer, ‘Internal Crisis and War Since 1870’, in Charles Bertrand (ed.), Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922 (Montreal: ICES, 1977)
Gabriel Kolko, Century of War, Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914 (New York: New Press, 1994).
Robert Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
James Scott, Deciding to Intervenue: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (London: Duke University Press, 1996).
Fred Northedge, Britain and Soviet Communism. The Impact of a Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 29.
George Kennan in Fred Halliday, From Potsdam to Perestroika: Conversations with Cold Warriors’, Hans Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
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© 1999 Fred Halliday
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Halliday, F. (1999). Counter-Revolution. In: Revolution and World Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27702-5_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-65329-6
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