The Calm Before the Storm? Revolutionary Pressures and Global Governance

Abstract

Has the era of revolution passed? Many scholars think globalization and democratization make a recurrence of the great social revolutions unlikely, now that global webs of economic interest bind states together and democratization absorbs popular discontent. I argue against these views here. The present climate is the calm before the storm. Precisely those factors that make national revolutions unlikely (economic, political, and cultural globalization) may lead to a global revolutionary crisis in coming decades. Despite the lack of a global state to capture, transnational political institutions are creating a global political arena for future upsurges of revolt. They lock in policies favorable to global capital, while remaining unresponsive and hence brittle. The loss of democratic legitimacy within nation-states, combined with rising inequality, make the world system quite vulnerable to crisis in the long run. A future profound economic crisis, if it overlaps with the cultural fault lines of our time, may recreate globally many of the dynamics that led to earlier revolutionary ruptures within nation-states.

The rise of the cosmopolitan traditionalists: From the Arab Spring to a global countermovement?

“…What factors might narrow the gap between abstract cosmopolitan framing and practical transnational mobilisation? Here I shall extend my argument from some years ago (Webb, 2006b) that the age of revolutions is not over merely because most countries are now formally democratic and embedded in the global market. Rather, in a deep enough global economic crisis, popular frustrations could bypass neutered national governments and cause a global rupture.…”

Revolutionary mass uprisings in authoritarian regimes

“…Another conceptual problem with the extant scholarship of revolutionary change is that the specific empirical subject field—for example, Grand Revolutions, agrarian rebellions, class-based revolutions—has often informed the way in which the term ‘revolution’ is employed and defined, with very different scholarly expectations about the means (violent vs. peaceful), agents (workers, farmers, youth, and urban middle classes), and outcomes (fundamental social change, regime break-down, and fall of incumbents) of contentious processes. Scholars have therefore identified regional or historical clusters of revolutionary events (Hess, 2016; Webb, 2006), including the ‘Great Revolutions’ (England 1688, France 1789, Russia 1918, and China 1949); prominent ‘periphery revolutions’ (Kowalewski, 1991; Paige, 1975) (Mexico 1910, Cuba 1959, and Iran 1979); the revolutions in Eastern Europe that triggered the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s (East Germany, Hungary, and Poland) (Kuran, 1991; Lohmann, 1994); the ‘Color Revolutions’ in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during the 2000s (Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan) (Beissinger, 2007; Baev, 2011; Hale, 2005); and the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain) (Beissinger et al, 2015; Brownlee et al, 2015; Weyland, 2012).…”

“…Another group of scholars in this tradition emphasizes broad economic development or specific socio-economic structures—industrialization in late capitalist societies; quasi-feudal means of production in peripheral societies; and population growth—as factors conducive to revolutionary upheavals (Davies, 1962; Gurr, 1970; Kurer et al, 2019). This point of departure often produces narratives of world development as a life cycle of sorts creating moments in history that make revolutions particularly likely or unlikely (Goldstone, 1991; Kowalewski, 1991; Webb, 2006). Most influential among structuralist explanations of revolutions are those brought forward by modernization theorists (Huntington, 1968; Trimberger, 1978) who believe that revolutions are most likely to happen in modernizing societies where crises and shocks slow down or halt socio-economic development.…”

Regional Cooperation for Whom? A Study of ASEAN–India FTA in the Context of Plantation/Tropical Products

“…But, to conserve the national/local habitats and the economic diversity, they need international support because otherwise competition among nation-states to attract investment will force them to go beyond national treatment and to relegate all interests other than that of monopoly capital to the junk bin. The growth of people’s movements in many parts of the world, to protect environment, and to establish their rights, is likely to motivate their leaders and the governments to work for mobilising support for preserving economic diversity (Webb 2006). In fact, if consensus on global coordination is eluding, there should be attempts to bring together interested countries to enter into plurilateral agreements, in which more countries may join later on account of pressure from the people to protect democracy and accountability.…”