Russian Officialdom. The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century.

Pintner, Walter M.; Rowney, Don Karl; Bennett, Helju Aulik

doi:10.2307/1987779

Cited by 13 publications

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Global Waves, Local Actors: What the Young Turks Knew about Other Revolutions and Why It Mattered

Sohrabi

2002

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Do revolutions affect one another? Certainly, in light of the "velvet revolutions" of the past decade, the contagious effect of revolutions cannot be denied. Less remembered is the wave of constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century that swept across Russia (1905), Iran (1906), the Ottoman Empire (1908), Mexico (1910), and China (1911). This short-term wave was couched within a long-term one that began with the American, Polish, and French Revolutions and included such other exemplary cases as the European revolutions of 1848 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Both waves, long and short, ended with the Russian Revolution of 1917 that initiated a new and different model of revolution (Sohrabi 1995). Here I concentrate on one event within the early twentieth-century wavethe Young Turk Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire-to investigate the following questions: How is a global wave constructed at the local level, and how do actors link their local upheavals to global waves ideologically, in action, and in timing? Simultaneous commitment of revolutionary elites to a single grand doctrine across an array of countries is certainly puzzling. After all, problems are by nature local, and they vary tremendously from one national context to another. How can a single solution satisfy all? A careful answer would require identifying principal problems from the point of view of actors, and taking note of the linkages they make to global models as a way of solving those problems. Furthermore, it requires taking note of the language they use to legitimate their proposed solutions in light of local traditions. Finally, an argument that global waves affect the form and timing of revolutions requires a demonstration that actors intentionally modify their strategies to make them 45

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