Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (review)

In the older tradition of the study of revolution, the focus was always on the classic or "great" revolutions of the West – the English, the American, the French, the Russian. Later the 20th century Chinese Revolution was added, but in at least one influential strand of theory this continued to be regarded within the perspective of the earlier European revolutions, as a "creative modification" of the European revolutionary tradition adapted to the conditions of a peasant society. Such in essence were the accounts of Crane Brinton, L.P. Edwards, Charles Tilly, Barrington Moore, Jr., Theda Skocpol and Jack Goldstone. For obvious reasons, this also tended to be the Marxist approach, in the work of such historians as Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan and Eric Hobsbawm.

More recent students of revolution have broken with this approach by asserting the distinctive character of non-European, "Third World," revolutions. This has marked the work of such scholars as Jeff Goodwin (No Other Way Out) and Parsa Misagh (States, Ideologies and Social Revolutions). It has also been a central aspect of the contribution of John Foran, in a number of publications over the past decade and more (Fragile Resistance and the edited volume, The Future of Revolutions). Now, in this ambitious new volume, Foran aims to synthesize his own work and that of other leading scholars in a wide-ranging consideration of Third World revolutions of the 20th century.

One of the problems of the older, Europe-based, approach was the so-called "small-N problem", the fact that one had so few examples to reflect on. Foran by contrast can call on some three dozen examples of Third World revolutions, ranging from the Mexican and Chinese revolution of the earlier part of the century to the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions of the latter part, by way of Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. He also takes in a number of what he calls "reversed revolutions," as in Bolivia and Chile, and failed revolutionary attempts, as in En Salvador and Peru. If, as Hannah Arendt said, the 20th century was "the century of revolution," this has been in no small measure owing to the Third World (revolution in the industrial world, despite Marx's expectation, being conspicuous mainly by its absence).

And yet, as Foran points out, "while most world revolutions have been in the Third world, most Third World countries have not experienced revolutions." (p. 17) Part of the purpose of his enterprise is to explain why, despite so many apparent factors tending towards revolution, Third World revolutions have in fact been relatively rare, and that even when they have occurred many have been aborted or reversed, often quite speedily. The answer has to be found in the complexity and "conjunctural" quality of the causes that Foran identifies in his model of Third World revolutions. Drawing on world system and dependency theory, the primary causes are seen as the strains set up in the economies and societies by the pattern of dependent development, together with the repressive nature of most Third world states, and the "opening" or opportunities created by temporary relaxations in the control exercised by core states of the world system (e.g., due to war or depressions). Economic downturns are also a more or less regular feature, though Foran shows how often that downturn has been the result of revolution rather than its immediate cause. More important for Foran are the "political cultures of opposition" that these structural inducements give rise to. They are significant not simply because they contribute the necessary ingredients of agency and ideology but because they are to a large extent made up of coalitions of classes, thus explaining both the initial success of the revolution and the propensity towards fragmentation and competition after its outbreak: hence one major source of failure or reversal.

The reason therefore why revolutions are so rare, and why so many of them are short-lived or blown off course, is not simply because of the...