Revolutions Reloaded: Updating the Literature

REVIEW BY PATRICK VAN INWEGEN

Department of International Political Economy, University of Puget Sound

Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe. By Mark R. Thompson. New York:Routledge, 2004. 192 pp., $104.95 (ISBN: 0-41530415-6).

Mark Thompson’s Democratic Revolutions is a much-needed update that seeks toaddress a variety of conceptual challenges that recent revolutions around the worldhave created for the comparative revolution literature. Unfortunately, the book isjust a patch and not a truly significant work that helps us understand revolutions ina new way. The greatest drawback of this interesting book is that it could have beenso much more. Thompson’s introduction positions the book among other recentcomparative studies of revolutionFsuch as Jeff Goodwin’s No Other Way Out (2001)and Misagh Parsa’s States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions (2000). However, Dem-ocratic Revolutions does not measure up to these works. The key difference betweenThompson’s democratic revolutions and Goodwin’s peripheral revolutions orParsa’s social revolutions is that Thompson has no overarching theoretical frame-work. He does not give us an explanation for democratic revolutions.

What Thompson does do, however, makes Democratic Revolutions an interestingaddition to the revolution literature that suggests new applications of old ideas.Rather than setting out a theoretical framework, Thompson is content to make thecase that democratic revolutions do exist and are valid objects of study. He definesdemocratic revolutions as ‘‘spontaneous popular uprisingsFpeaceful, urban-based, and cross-class in compositionFwhich topple unyielding dictators to begina transition process which leads to the consolidation of democracy’’ (p. 1). Tohighlight the fact that democratic revolutions exist, Thompson reviews the Phil-ippine people power revolution of 1986 (with some discussion of the later peoplepower II revolution in 2001) and the East German revolution of 1989. In eachcase several interesting questions are asked and answeredFsuch as why citizensrebelled, why they won, and why democracy prevailed. All the explanations arestraightforward, and many references are made to other cases. For example,Thompson argues that dissidents in the Philippines had to rebel against Marcosbecause he was not willing to engage in a negotiated transfer of power. In thePhilippinesF‘‘as well as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Nicaragua, and Romania,among other countriesFwarnings to initiate a transition before it was too late wereignored because of the highly personalistic nature of these regimes’’ (p. 20). Thisstate-centric explanation (that revolutions can be explained primarily by the natureof the state involved) is used to explain a wide variety of regularities in democraticrevolutions. The focus on states is nothing new in the literature.

From his basic argument, Thompson suggests some common phenomenaof democratic revolutions. Each phenomenon is given its own chapter and focuseson a particular case, but each study also draws significant parallels to othercases, including contrasting ones (for example, failed or repressed revolutionarysituations). Thompson draws freely on case studies and comparative works by areaspecialists, following the trend of much of the comparative revolution literature.Because the discussion of the cases is never more than a few pages, this approachprovides more than enough material to make his various points. However, because

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International Studies Review (2005) 7, 114–116

he relies on the works of other scholars, his discussions contain little that is new,other than the comparisons across cases.

The first phenomenon of democratic revolutions that Thompson analyzes is theeffects of moral leadership on democratic revolutions in Asia, using female leadersas a lens to focus his argument. The traditional societies in the Philippines, Bang-ladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma, and Malaysia all saw females lead revolution-ary movements. Women rose to leadership positions in these movements because oftheir ties to prominent politicians who were killed or imprisoned by the state. Thus,they made powerful symbols of the regimes’ repression without posing a seriousthreat to those in power because, as females, they were assumed to be politicallyimpotent.

Next, Thompson turns to the state’s decision whether to shoot demonstrators bycomparing China and Eastern Europe. This chapter answers the question of whydemocratic revolutions were successful in Eastern Europe but not China. Afterreviewing the inadequacies of previous explanations that focus on opposition strat-egies, culture, societal modernization, and leadership behavior, Thompson arguesthat the crucial difference was the regime type of the states in power. All were post-totalitarian and thus allowed some dissent within society. However, China was ruledby people who were involved in the revolution that brought about Mao’stotalitarian rule, a ruling elite that Thompson labels ‘‘early post-totalitarians.’’ Incontrast, many of the Eastern European countries were stuck in ‘‘frozen post-totalitarian’’ systems devoid of political or economic reform programs. Thisdifference meant that those who decided whether or not to repress the demonstra-tors had different perceptions of their own legitimacy. The early post-totalitarianswere true believers whereas the vast majority of the frozen post-totalitarians didnot believe their own ideology. The result was that China acted to repress thepro-democracy movement whereas most East European countries put up only half-hearted resistance. The interesting contrasting case is Romania, in which securityforces did fire on demonstrators. Thompson explains this by arguing that Romaniawas a sultanistic post-totalitarian regime. In other words, the Ceausescu regime hadpersonalized power, and his personal security forces tried to defend his control.Other sultanistic post-totalitarian regimes include North Korea and Cuba.

The last aspect of democratic revolutions that Thompson analyzes is the triggereffect of stolen elections, primarily using Serbia’s 2000 ‘‘October revolution’’ as thefocus for his discussion. The calling of democratic elections often allows consoli-dation of the opposition, which then beats the dictator, forcing the regime to choosebetween annulling the results or stepping down. When dictators choose the former,a revolutionary situation arises because of the outrage of those who voted him outof power.

Unfortunately, each of these observations remain disconnected from the others.They are never woven together into a theory of democratic revolutions. Given thislack of integration, the last chapter of Democratic Revolutions is oddly out of place. Itdiscusses the differences between Samuel Huntington’s waves of democracythesis (Huntington 1991) and his later clash of civilizations thesis (Huntington1996). Thompson argues that the earlier thesis is a better description of the world,but, coming as it does at the end of the book, he does nothing to build on thisargument.

Despite these drawbacks, Democratic Revolutions does give good, although brief,explanations of a number of vexing problems that recent revolutions have createdfor the comparative revolution literature. It updates the existing literatureby addressing a variety of issues from recent revolutions, but it does not providea new way of looking at revolutions. Hopefully, what Thompson has donehas pointed to the types of issues that a new theory of revolution must address.When that book is written, this update will no longer be needed to patch theexisting literature.

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References

GOODWIN, JEFF. (2001) No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman:University of Oklahoma Press.

HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York:Simon and Schuster.

PARSA, MISAGH. (2000) States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Iran, Nicaragua,and the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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