Sometimes Providence condemns the world with universal and evident calamities, whose causes we cannot know. This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world.
Count-Duke of Olivares, 16431
Introduction
In previous chapters, we charted the changing geopolitical conditions condu-cive to the emergence of capitalist social relations in Northwestern Europe. In doing so, we sought to demonstrate how ostensibly ‘internal’ processes of social transformation were rooted in broader intersocietal dynamics; that intrasocietal forms of sociality were continually overlain by distinctly intersocietal determi-nations. In accounting for this persistently ‘overdetermined’ nature of social structures by their interactions with one another, we have drawn on the concept of uneven and combined development. This chapter extends our analysis to an examination of the causal role of ‘the international’ in the making of the
‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions in Holland, England and France.
In Martin Wight’s classic Power Politics he estimated that there were ‘256 years of international revolution to 212 unrevolutionary’ years.2 This was written in 1960. Since that time, the world has experienced a near-perpetual state of revolution, illustrated by the vast array of popular revolts, guerrilla wars and resistance movements emerging time and again over this period. It would then seem that the default setting of modern international 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, this is an era of permanent counter-revolution, out of which the discipline of International Relations (IR) itself crystallised.3
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 (both ideologically and politically) the rhythms and logics of any given geopolitical system. The interactively co-constitutive nature of revolutions and interna-tional relations is well captured by Arno Mayer 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 ‘best dramatizes the centrality of interstate relations and war’ to modern social development.4
Yet within the discipline of IR, the study of revolutions has remained some-thing of a secondary subject. Not only have there have been relatively few studies theoretically engaging with revolutions and international relations,5 but the dominant theoretical frameworks in IR – realism, liberalism and construc-tivism – have largely bracketed out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics. In the extreme case of structural realism, revolutions have been altogether excluded from the study of IR, as they remain outside Kenneth Waltz’s discretely conceived international system, which abstracts from the historical sociological terrain (the so-called ‘domestic’) through which revolu-tions are formed.6 Hence revolutions remain at the margins of the discipline, constituting ‘the great anomaly’ as Fred Halliday put it, as they are continu-ally viewed as ‘aberrations’ or ‘abnormalities’ to the anarchic dictates of an international system conceived as a realm of perennial great power struggles over the balance of power.7 Yet if revolutions are in part both international in cause and effect, transcending the confines of ‘second’ (domestic) and ‘third image’ (geopolitical) conceptions of international relations,8 we require theo-retical tools capable of capturing the sociological and geopolitical dimensions of these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension into the other. We might think that the historical sociological literature on revolutions, which has commonly pointed to ‘the international’ as a structural cause of revolutions,9 would show us the way. Yet here too, ‘the international’ remains ‘powerfully acknowledged but analytically unpenetrated’, leading to continual charges of
‘attaching an essentialized, Realist conception of the international onto historical sociology’.10
What we need then is a theory of sociohistorical development that organi-cally fuses both sociological (‘internalist’) and geopolitical (‘externalist’) modes of explanation into a single unified theoretical apparatus. And it is perhaps no surprise that the most attuned scholar of revolutions in disciplinary IR, Fred Halliday, came to identify uneven and combined development as one
possible theory.11 Nevertheless, in Halliday’s work the concept remained something of an afterthought; Halliday never systematically integrated the concept into his own theoretical understandings of revolutions, thus never realising the potential of uneven and combined development as a unified theory of sociohistorical development as an interactive whole. 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 international’.12 For as argued in Chapter 2, what the concept of uneven and combined devel-opment uniquely provides is a theoretical internalisation of the distinctly international determinants of social development. This then renders ‘the inter-national’ historically and sociologically intelligible, overcoming both realist reifications of the international system as an absolutely autonomous (‘supra- social’) sphere and the classical sociological tradition’s tendency to falsely subsume its distinctive causal dynamics and behavioural patterns to unisocietal abstractions.
It is surprising that given uneven and combined development’s origins as a theoretical tool to explain the Russian Revolution13 and its recent revival in disciplinary IR, the theory has yet to be deployed in explaining revolutions.14 This is the aim of this chapter, which seeks to further draw out the theory’s implications in explaining three instances of bourgeois revolution: the Dutch, English and French. The chapter is developed in four movements. The first section reconsiders the concept 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 primary agents.15 This ‘consequentalist’ interpretation of bourgeois revolutions subverts revisionist and Political Marxist critiques of the concept while providing a more apposite framework to understand their effects in their domestic and international dimensions. The next section turns to examine the origins of Dutch capitalism – a highly disputed subject – and the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburg Empire, highlighting the critical importance of the changing geopolitical conditions throughout the course of the Revolution.
The third section analyses the English Civil Wars of 1640–51 and Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, again paying close attention to the often overlooked international origins and effects of the revolutions theoretically captured by the notion of uneven and combined development. The final section then moves to an analysis of the French Revolution of 1789–1815, arguing, against revisionist and Political Marxist accounts, that the revolution was both capitalist and bour-geois in origin and effect, subsequently transforming the character and dynamics of the European international system over the Long 19th Century. The conclu-sion then teases out the implications of the preceding theoretically informed empirical analysis for understanding the relationship between revolutions and the modern international system.