On realpolitik and its limitations

Abstract

A largely peaceful collapse of dictatorships both in the communist world and beyond occurred in 1989. That year also saw one notable failure: the violent suppression of peaceful protest in Tiananmen Square, raising the perennial question of how far dictatorships can be effectively undermined by non-violent methods. This review article offers no definitive answer to the question but provides a series of specific case-studies from different countries, each chapter written by an expert on the country concerned. Besides covering the collapse of communist rule in the Baltic states, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, it examines the role of non-violence in four post-communist revolutions: in the rump Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine. But its scope goes far beyond the former communist world. The authors demonstrate that non-violence has, with varying degrees of success, played a role in many regions—in India under British rule; in the US civil rights campaign; in Northern Ireland prior to the troubles; in Portugal during the transition to democracy in the 1970s; in Iran before the overthrow of the Shah; in the Philippines before the removal of President Marcos in 1986; and in Chile in the late 1980s, gradually ending the Pinochet dictatorship. The negotiated dismantling of apartheid in South Africa is the subject of a long chapter. The book also examines two conspicuous failures of peaceful protest—China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. The book's conclusions are understandably cautious, but the authors concede that civil resistance has proved a more potent weapon than was previously supposed. At all events, so the reviewer argues, the notion that civil resistance can only work in free societies has been proved demonstrably wrong.