Revolutions and international relations: Rediscovering the classical bourgeois revolutions
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | Alexander Anievas |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066114565721 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2014
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Revolutions and international
2015, Vol. 21(4) 841 –866
© The Author(s) 2015
relations: Rediscovering the
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066114565721
classical bourgeois revolutions
ejt.sagepub.com
Alexander Anievas
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
In the modern era, revolutions have been central to the structure and dynamics
of international affairs. They have always been international events: international in
origin, ideology, process and effect, supercharging the rhythms and logics of any given
international system. Yet, within the discipline of International Relations, the study
of revolutions has remained something of a secondary subject. Not only have there
been relatively few studies theoretically engaging with revolution and international
relations, but the dominant theoretical frameworks in International Relations have
largely bracketed out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics.
Yet, if revolutions have been, in part, international in both cause and effect, thereby
transcending the confines of ‘second-’ and ‘third-image’ conceptions of international
relations, we require theoretical tools capable of capturing the sociological and
geopolitical dimensions of these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension
to the other. Drawing on the theory of uneven and combined development, this
article provides such a conception, organically uniting both ‘sociological’ and
‘geopolitical’ modes of explanation. It does so, in particular, by re-examining two of
the key ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions of the early-modern epoch: the English and
French revolutions.
Keywords
Bourgeois revolutions, capitalism, critical theory, international system, Marxism,
political economy
Corresponding author:
Alexander Anievas, University of Cambridge, The Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3
9DT, UK.
Email: a.anievas@gmail.com
842
European Journal of International Relations 21(4)
Introduction
In Martin Wight’s (1966) classic Power Politics, he estimated that as of 1960, the period
generally considered to span the history of modern international relations had witnessed
‘256 years of international revolution to 212 unrevolutionary’ years (Wight, 1966: 92).
Since that time, the world has experienced a near-perpetual state of revolution, as exem-
plified by the vast array of popular revolts, guerrilla wars and resistance movements
emerging over the period. It would seem, then, that the default setting of modern interna-
tional relations has been one of revolution: an epoch perhaps best understood as a series
of continuing attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution
wrought by the international expansion of capitalist relations: in short, an era of perma-
nent counter-revolution from which the discipline of International Relations (IR) itself
crystallized out of (cf. Van Pijl, 2014).
In the modern epoch, revolutions have been absolutely central to the changing struc-
ture and dynamics of international affairs. They have always been international events:
international in origin, ideology, process and effect, supercharging (both ideologically
and politically) the rhythms and logics of any given international system. The co-consti-
tutive nature of revolutions and international relations is well captured by Arno Mayer
(2000: 534, 533), when he writes of how ‘at every point’ in a revolution’s development,
‘international politics impinges on’ its course, while the creation and consolidation of
revolutionary states ‘perhaps best dramatizes the centrality of interstate relations and
war’ to modern social development.
Yet, within the discipline of International Relations (IR), the study of revolutions has
remained something of a secondary subject. Not only have there been relatively few stud-
ies theoretically engaging with revolution and international relations, but the dominant
theoretical frameworks — notably, realism, liberalism and constructivism — have largely
bracketed-out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics (but see
Armstrong, 1993; Halliday, 1999; Walt, 1997). In the extreme case of structural realism,
revolutions have been altogether excluded from the study of international relations as they
remain outside Kenneth Waltz’s discretely conceived international system, which abstracts
from the sociological terrain (the so-called ‘domestic’) through which revolutions are sup-
posedly formed.1 Hence, revolutions remain at the margins of the discipline, constituting
‘the great anomaly’, as Fred Halliday (2001: 693) put it, as they are continually viewed as
‘aberrations’ and/or ‘abnormalities’ to the regular anarchic dictates of the international
system conceived as a realm of perennial great power struggles over the balance of power.
Yet, if revolutions are, in part, international in both cause and effect, transcending the
confines of ‘second-’ and ‘third-image’ conceptions of international relations, we require
theoretical tools capable of capturing the sociological and geopolitical dimensions of
these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension into the other. One might think
that historical sociology, which has commonly pointed to ‘the international’ as a cause of
revolutions (see, especially, Foran, 2005; Skocpol, 1979), would show us the way.
Nonetheless, here too, ‘the international’ remains ‘powerfully acknowledged but analyti-
cally unpenetrated’, leading to continual charges of ‘attaching an essentialized, Realist
conception of the international onto historical sociology’ (Rosenberg, 2006: 310).
Anievas
843
What we need, then, is a theory of socio-historical development that organically fuses
both sociological (‘internalist’) and geopolitical (‘externalist’) modes of explanation into
a single unified theoretical apparatus. It is perhaps no surprise that the most attuned
scholar of revolutions in IR, Fred Halliday (1999), would come to identify ‘uneven and
combined development’ (U&CD) as one such possible theory. Nonetheless, within
Halliday’s work, the concept remained something of an afterthought; Halliday never
systematically integrated the concept into his theoretical understandings of revolutions,
thus never realizing the potential of U&CD as a unified theory of socio-historical devel-
opment. This task was left to one of Halliday’s students, Justin Rosenberg, who has
sought to rework Trotsky’s concept as a historical sociological theory of ‘the interna-
tional’ (Rosenberg, 2006). What Rosenberg has demonstrated is that the concept of
U&CD uniquely interpolates a distinctly international dimension of causality as intrinsic
to the historical process of development itself (Rosenberg, 2010). This then renders ‘the
international’ historically and sociologically intelligible, overcoming both realist reifica-
tions of the international system as an absolutely autonomous (‘supra-social’) sphere and
classical sociology’s tendency to falsely subsume its distinctive causal dynamics and
behavioural patterns to unisocietal abstractions.
Given U&CD’s origins as a theoretical tool to explain the Bolshevik Revolution
(Trotsky, 1959 [1930]), it is, then, surprising that the theory has yet to be deployed in
explaining these international dimensions of revolutions (but see Matin, 2013). This is
the aim of the following article, which seeks to draw on and further develop the theory
in explaining two key instances of ‘bourgeois revolution’, the English and French. In
doing so, the article seeks to further tease out the theory’s implications for understanding
pre-capitalist periods of international relations, as demonstrated in the English case,
while remaining sufficiently attuned to the qualitative transformations that occurred over
the capitalist epoch.
The article is developed in four movements. The first section reconsiders the con-
cept of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in terms of the effects of revolutions in creating and
consolidating territorially demarcated sovereign centres of capital accumulation, rather
than defining them in terms of their agents. This ‘consequentialist’ interpretation of
bourgeois revolutions subverts revisionist and Political Marxist critiques of the con-
cept while providing a more apposite framework to understand their differential effects
in their domestic and international dimensions. The section then concludes by spelling
out the main causal components of the theory of U&CD in explaining modern revolu-
tions. The second section turns to examine the English Civil Wars of 1640–1651 and
the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, highlighting the largely overlooked interna-
tional origins and effects of the revolutions theoretically captured by the notion of
U&CD. The third section analyses the French Revolution of 1789–1815, arguing that
the revolution was, indeed, bourgeois and capitalist in both origin and outcome, subse-
quently transforming the character and dynamics of the European international system
over the Long Nineteenth Century. The conclusion then teases out the implications of
the preceding theoretically informed empirical analysis for understanding the relation-
ship between revolutions and the modern international system for both IR and Marxist
theories.
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European Journal of International...
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