Revolution In Europe Research Articles

The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (review)

Reviewed by: The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict Timothy Mason Roberts (bio) The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. By Andre M. Fleche. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 204. $39.95 cloth) Andre M. Fleche shows how Americans and Europeans of the mid-nineteenth century compared the Civil War to preceding wars of liberation and revolutions in Europe, especially the revolutions of 1848. Fleche's work complements previous studies of Americans' reactions to nineteenth-century European revolutions and independence movements, particularly my Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (2009) and Paul Quigley's Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865 (2011). Different from these works, however, The Revolution of 1861 extends the "age of revolution" to encompass America's erstwhile peculiar epic conflict (p. 8). An Atlantic focus, Fleche argues, rids us of parochialism in showing how both Northerners and Southerners, in order to understand their great national crisis, compared themselves to peoples around them. Fleche argues that European struggles for self-determination offered Southerners a contemporary model with which to justify secession and international recognition, and European labor and class conflicts strengthened Southerners' opposition to abolitionism. These same conflicts, however, influenced Northerners to support emancipation, even when they were hostile to black equality. Most important, European failures to achieve liberal democracy through challenges to traditional authority prodded supporters of the Union to redefine American liberalism to account for and justify their wartime expansion of central authority, even through military conquest. The Revolution of 1861 begins with a study of the immigrant politics of St. Louis during the outbreak of the war, showing how [End Page 585] "forty-eighters," European revolutionary refugees, organized and divided over the outbreak of "the American 1848," according to a Republican newspaper editor (p. 44). German-Americans tended towards the Union and antislavery, some hoping that the Civil War could precipitate a world democratic revolution. Meanwhile, Irish-Americans split, perceiving that fighting in America for either North or South might help liberate Ireland—the revolutionaries Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel, escaping banishment in Australia for 1848 conspiracies, fought against each other in the Civil War. Alternating chapters then explore how trans-Atlantic advocates of either northern national unification or southern national independence, called upon ideologies of European nationalism to explain Americans' wartime political objectives and to recruit international support. Of course, sometimes trans-Atlantic analogies did not easily fit American circumstances. Unionists struggled to show that secession jeopardized, rather than maintained, the American revolutionary origins. Instead, they recalled how the American Revolution had launched a global attack on aristocracy; the Union destruction of slavery could embolden ordinary Europeans to renew the assault in the Old World. Moreover, northern victory would ensure the American capacity as a great power to bring free-labor democracy to the world—thus justifying both exceptionalism and imperialism. Meanwhile, champions of southern secession drew inspiration and justification "from a half-century's worth of revolution in Europe" (p. 84). Liberty-seeking Greeks, Belgians, Poles, Hungarians, and Italians all furnished prototypes for Confederates' reminding British policymakers of their general sympathy for continental rebels. On the other hand, Southerners struggled to show their likeness to European peoples who were different ethnically from the empires or majority populations that besieged them. And slavery remained the great chink in Southerners' search for international solidarity. Paradoxically, as Fleche shows, the appeal of the Confederacy to European revolutionaries was contradicted by the insistence of southern ideologues that in its defense of slavery the South was the [End Page 586] global bulwark of property-preserving conservatism, immune from the embrace of dangerous notions of human equality. Given the windup of the narrative in 1865, Fleche perhaps reaches too far in asserting that resituating the Civil War in a global context allows us to see "the disturbing side of the rhetoric of nationalist self-determination" and to see how easily "liberal arguments could justify racial subordination" in the postwar imperial age (p. 9). Perhaps, alternatively, liberal arguments were simply defeated by a conservative, subjugating Atlantic counterrevolution, played out in imperial conquests in Africa...

Complete Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Neolithic Expansion into Europe

The Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to farming and cattle breeding marks one of the most drastic cultural changes in European prehistory. Short stretches of ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from skeletons of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers as well as early Neolithic farmers support the demic diffusion model where a migration of early farmers from the Near East and a replacement of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers are largely responsible for cultural innovation and changes in subsistence strategies during the Neolithic revolution in Europe. In order to test if a signal of population expansion is still present in modern European mitochondrial DNA, we analyzed a comprehensive dataset of 1,151 complete mtDNAs from present-day Europeans. Relying upon ancient DNA data from previous investigations, we identified mtDNA haplogroups that are typical for early farmers and hunter-gatherers, namely H and U respectively. Bayesian skyline coalescence estimates were then used on subsets of complete mtDNAs from modern populations to look for signals of past population expansions. Our analyses revealed a population expansion between 15,000 and 10,000 years before present (YBP) in mtDNAs typical for hunters and gatherers, with a decline between 10,000 and 5,000 YBP. These corresponded to an analogous population increase approximately 9,000 YBP for mtDNAs typical of early farmers. The observed changes over time suggest that the spread of agriculture in Europe involved the expansion of farming populations into Europe followed by the eventual assimilation of resident hunter-gatherers. Our data show that contemporary mtDNA datasets can be used to study ancient population history if only limited ancient genetic data is available.

Stumbling its way through Mexico: the early years of the Communist International

Stumbling Its Way through records the early attempts by the Moscow-based Communist International to organize and direct a revolutionary movement in Mexico. The period studied, from 1919 to 1929, was characterized at the beginning by a wave of revolutions in Europe that the Bolsheviks expected to grow into an international phenomenon. However, contrary to their expectations, the revolutionary tide ebbed, and the new age they had expected receded into an uncertain future. In response, Moscow sent agents and recruited local leaders worldwide to sustain and train local revolutionary movements and to foment what they saw as an inevitable seizure of power by Communist-led workers.Unlike the Soviet seizure of power in Russia, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 1920 had not changed the fundamental character of the nation-state. However, it did represent a sea change in the relationship between the state and society. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Mexican workers already had generations of experience in the struggle against oppression, in forming class solidarity, in organizing strikes, and had tasted both success and failure. For decades in their workplaces, Mexicans had debated how to end the exploitation of labor and practice international solidarity. Mexico had an indigenous labor movement acting with some success to establish a place in a new Mexico. The agents that Moscow chose to lead the Communist movement in Mexico lacked an understanding of the local situation and presumed a lack of indigenous confidence and experience that doomed to failure their efforts to impose external control over the labor movement.Based on documents found principally in the Soviet archives recently opened to the public, Stumbling Its Way through is an invitation to rethink the history of Communism in Mexico and Latin America.Copublication with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social.

Why Germany Wanted EMU: The Role of Helmut Kohl's Belief System and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

In light of the current Euro-crisis and seemingly erratic German response to it, the question of why Germany wanted EMU has gained new relevance. While EMU entailed economic and political benefits for Germany, this article indicates that taking into account the German shared historical consciousness, and the combined effect of Chancellor Kohl's beliefs and 1989 Eastern European revolution provides a more adequate answer to this question. More specifically, such an explanation provides an answer to remaining questions concerning the timing of the German acquiescence, and the ambiguous and inconsistent behaviour of the Kohl government on the road to Maastricht.

England's wars of religion, revisited

Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England's Wars of Religion, Revisited. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. £95.00.It is a mark of John Morrill's enduring influence over historical interpretations of the civil wars of the mid seventeenth century that what he terms a ?throwaway line', delivered at the end of his 1983 Royal Historical Society lecture, should have gone on to shape scholarly debate for the next thirty years. The English civil war ?was not the first European Revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion'. This collection demonstrates that, even if the formulation offered by Morrill ought to be subjected to criticism, the idea that religion was ?a motivating force' as well as ?a language of legitimation' (p. 19) now seems uncontroversial. Glenn Burgess, in an introductory survey, and Morrill, in a reflective final essay, usefully remind us of the all-important context in which the thesis was first presented. All of the essays are illuminating on an important debate, even if some contribute less directly than others to the issues most closely associated with Morrill's body of work. Excellent essays by Ronald Asch and Robert von Friedeburg put the English civil war into a European context, by focusing respectively on sacral monarchy and confessional confrontation. These two essays pre-empted what is now an established vogue for investigating European interactions, driven with gusto in recent years by scholars of print cultures. Some readers may wonder why an approach that was not central to Morrill's intellectual development has been privileged over his pioneering arguments in favour of an integrative 'British' account of the wars; Morrill himself notes this point. Since the publication of the book, new studies have emerged - in edited collections such as that by Robert Armstrong and Tadgh O hAnnrachain, in monograph studies by, amongst others, Hunter Powell, and in work on the Westminster Assembly - that demonstrate how religious interests were cross-border and complicated 'national' politics. Consideration of the British angle would undoubtedly have enriched the collection.The best of these essays go beyond the limitations of Morrill's original formulation, by blurring the boundaries around categories of analysis and offering original interpretations of motivation and mobilisation, perception and self-identification. Puritan-parliamentarians are represented by two superb studies of Oliver Cromwell by Rachel Foxley and Blair Worden, and an incisive reassessment of Simonds D'Ewes by Sears McGee. Making a useful distinction between personal motivations and the more complicated business of justifying war, Foxley expertly unpicks the seeming paradox that a man so clearly driven by religious imperatives as Cromwell nonetheless recognised widely-held doubts about the legitimacy of raising the sword for solely spiritual ends. Interpretations of 'liberty' are at the heart of both Foxley's analysis and Blair Worden's elegant essay, which details Cromwell's role in turning 'civil and religious liberty' into the 'catchphrase' beloved of later Whig historians (p. 231). McGee uses the well-known figure of D'Ewes to question Morrill's characterisation of religion as the 'critical divide' between royalists and parliamentarians. D'Ewes was committed, not to further reformation, but to the recovery of an Elizabethan church polluted by 'impious bishops' such as Matthew Wren (p. …

Heroic Collective Action: A People's Blessing?

Is the tendency to think of heroism as the activity of an individual rather than of a collective merely a matter of prejudice? Perhaps the European revolutions of 1989 and the Arab Spring of 2011 will foster more careful scrutiny of that assumption. Are the heroic figures so often featured in journalistic as well as historical accounts only individuals who are witnesses to a communal transformation and empowerment? Will a greater appreciation for heroic collective action promote a more nuanced perspective on the development of Jewish-Christian relations? The author proposes a shift of focus to communal heroism through an examination of four examples: the Yad Vashem project of recognizing the "Righteous among the Nations"; the Hungarian Revolution; the historical development of religious toleration; and, finally, the place that the Holocaust has taken on in contemporary reflection.

Un duel entre deux romantiques : Herzen et Herwegh

Дуэль двух романтиков Герцен и Гервег В 1849-1852 годы Герцен пережил семей-ную драму, символически отразившуюся в его интерпретации неудавшейся револю-ции 1848 года в Европе. Немецкий певец революции Георг Гервег, давний единомы-шленник Герцена, вторгся в его семью, соблазнив жену Герцена Наталью, у кото-рой в ноябре 1849 года случился выкидыш – ребенок, о котором Герцен до конца жизни оставался в неведении, был веро-ятно от Гервега. Эту семейную трагедию оба изобразили в литературных сюжетах, заимствованных у Жорж Санд. Отталки-ваясь от различных романов и персонажей, и тот, и другой старались представить свою роль в наиболее выгодном свете. Их частное и публичное поведение было основано на романтической концепции, долженствующей легитимировать сложив-шуюся ситуацию. Литературное кодиро-вание этого конфликта оказалось столь мощным, что Герцен передумал включить сцену супружеской неверности в свою автобиографию, а Гервег и в 1872 году отказался предать огласке любовные послания Натальи Герцен к нему.

Why We Were Surprised (Again) by the Arab Spring

Why We Were Surprised (Again) by the Arab Spring

The Revolution for Law: A Chronographic Analysis of the Constitutional Revolution of Iran

This paper brings together a description and analysis of various aspects of the constitutional revolution, as a revolt by society in favour of the law and against arbitrary rule by the state, rather than by the lower against the upper classes as in European revolutions, this being characteristic of major Iranian revolts both before and after that event. It includes a discussion of aspects which have generally been neglected, notably the ‘politics of elimination’ pursued by both Mohammad Ali Shah and the radicals of the revolution, how neither side would relent until it was too late, and how the revolutionaries rejected the shah's offer of reconciliation, to their later regret when they became disillusioned by the results, much like many participants of the revolution of February 1979, 70 years later.

Alain Badiou and authentic revolutions

This study explores new philosophical foundations for democracy in revolutions. Alain Badiou’s thought is in focus, but this essay is not just an exegesis. The thought of Alain Badiou is appraised (and adapted) in this essay in the light of the main currents of European thought on the hopes and history of European revolutions. This essay dismisses Badiou’s ultra-gauche Maoism, focusing instead on Badiou’s ways to reconcile revolutionary change, social inclusion and human freedom. These ways are important. By overcoming hegemonic traditions of study, Badiou’s methods promote democratic ethics of restraint. They also help re-invigorate methods in the social sciences privileging participant perspectives.

Europe Gears Up for the Shale Gale

The European shale gas revolution is still in its infancy and though its commercial potential could rival that of North America, significant challenges lie ahead. France has put a moratorium on shale gas activity while a comprehensive study into its environmental impact is being carried out, and its National Assembly has voted in favor of a ban on hydraulic fracturing. The potential for shale gas production in Europe is undoubted, as consultancy IHS CERA estimates that Europe’s total shale gas in place could be 6,115 Tcf. Among the key challenges that will determine the ultimate productivity in Europe is a regulatory environment that is currently ill-suited to unconventional gas, the company said. “Regulations designed for traditional exploration and production in Amsterdam. “We expect Europe to be a significant part of future activity.” Poland Leads the Way Poland plays host to Europe’s largest known reserves of shale gas. Leasing activity in the country’s three main basins—the Baltic Basin, the Podlasie Basin in the east, and the Lublin Basin to the south—is well under way. The country is keen to push forward with shale gas production as it looks to break away from its reliance on Russian gas supplies. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that Poland has 792 Tcf of risked shale gas in place, with 514 Tcf in the Baltic Basin, 222 Tcf in the Lublin Basin, and the remainder in the Podlasie Basin. Chevron and ExxonMobil have been joined by a large number of smaller players such as DPV Service, Cuadrilla, EUR Energy, and Mazovia Energy in securing acreage across the country. Talisman is carrying out seismic acquisition on con-cessions in the Baltic Basin and it is on track to spud its first two shale gas wells in the fourth quarter of this year, the company said. It moved into the Polish plays through a farm-in arrangement with San Leon Energy for a 60% interest in San Leon’s three concessions. Talisman is committed to drilling a minimum of three wells—Gdansk-W, Braniewo-S, and Szczawno—which cover 600,000 acres. Three optional wells with horizontal sections will be drilled after a successful first phase of testing. San Leon is also engaged in a five-year exploration and development program on its two concessions, Nowa Sol and Wschowa in the Permian Basin South. Both concessions are on trend with prolific Rotliegendes gas and Zechstein oil production. Nexen recently entered into an agreement with Marathon to jointly explore 10 concessions in Poland’s Paleozoic shale play and it says it will pump USD 100 million into shale-related activities. Nexen will acquire a 40% working interest in the concessions, which encompass more than 2 million acres. Marathon is acquiring 2D seismic this year and plans to drill one or two wells in the fourth quarter and potentially seven or eight wells during 2012.

The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present

The Feminist Promise contributes to a burgeoning body of critical literature on the history of woman's rights and feminism in the United States. Elegantly crafted, the book offers a spirited argument for the place of feminism in the American democratic tradition. The author of two acclaimed studies of sex, class, and culture in New York City, Christine Stansell once again integrates vivid portraits of key figures into a sweeping narrative and illuminates the sources and consequences of crucial ideological conflicts. The Feminist Promise also provides astute assessments of the global context in which U.S. feminism took form, from the European revolutions of 1848 to the United Nations World Conferences on Women. Stansell deftly weaves together this complex history via three connecting threads. First, she traces tensions between “the politics of the mothers and the politics of the daughters” (p. xv), with mothers “lean[ing] toward responsibility, propriety, and pragmatic expectations” and daughters voicing “contempt for the status quo” and embracing “utopian, flamboyant, [and] defiant” positions (p. xvi). Second, she highlights structures of male governance in the family and the polity. And third, she analyzes feminist deployments of universal constructs of woman. Throughout, Stansell presents feminism as “an argument, not received truth,” illuminating the dynamic, even volatile, debates among advocates as well as with adversaries (p. xix).

A Rights Revolution in Europe? Regulatory and Judicial Approaches to Nondiscrimination in Insurance

In a recent decision, the European Court of Justice has ruled that insurers cannot discriminate on grounds of sex in setting premiums or determining benefits. This paper discusses the background to this decision. It asks whether we are seeing a US-style ‘rights revolution’, fuelled by judicial activism, as suggested by Dobbin et al’s hypothesis of ‘the strength of weak states’ or Kagan and Kelemen’s account of ‘adversarial legalism’. It is shown that neither of these theories captures the distinctive nature of the ECJ’s intervention. An industry-friendly policy was pursued in regulatory venues, but this was overridden by the ECJ’s interpretation of the fundamental right of equal treatment. However, it is also shown that the judicial defence of fundamental rights is a weak basis for social policy, and does not foreshadow a revolution in the development of social rights in Europe.

Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (review)

Reviewed by: Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism David Prior (bio) Keywords 1848 revolutions, Europe, international relations Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. By Timothy Mason Roberts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 256. Cloth, $40.00.) Timothy Mason Roberts has written a thoughtful and well-researched analysis of American reactions to the European revolutions of 1848. While this topic has long garnered attention from American historians, it is only with Roberts's Distant Revolutions that we have such a comprehensive [End Page 347] yet concise interpretation of it. In particular, Roberts's work distinguishes itself within an already impressive literature by spanning the range of European revolutionary activity and, even more so, the variety of American perspectives. In so doing, his work serves as an excellent introduction to this subject and advances the drive to place U.S. history in global context. Instructors would do well to consider Distant Revolutions for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on the Atlantic world, the nineteenth-century United States, and the international dimensions of U.S. history. Roberts's overarching argument is that the revolutionary developments of 1848, and the wave of repression that followed, were distant from Americans in two key ways. First, most Americans understood Europe to be not only geographically separate but also distinctive from the United States. In terms of society, cultures, and politics, Americans were aware of, and often fixated on, European differences. Second, Roberts demonstrates that because Americans were chronologically distant from their own revolutionary past, they could falsely believe their country had achieved independence through a rational, orderly process conducive to peace and prosperity. This mythic history proved integral to American judgments of Europeans, especially as reports and rumors of violence and chaos in the revolutions of 1848 became widespread. As Roberts shows, the reactions of different groups of Americans largely revolved around these basic presumptions. Roberts begins by looking at Americans in Europe in 1848, noting that most were initially optimistic, even exuberant, about the movements, but that many soon soured at the specter of revolutionary violence and radicalism. The bulk of the book then focuses on the responses of Americans in the United States, including northern and southern whites, political partisans, northern reformers, and several religious denominations. Roberts's second chapter, which explores popular culture, is particularly noteworthy for its fascinating and novel evidence, although all of his chapters are trenchant and rich with sources. Throughout, one gets a detailed understanding of the giddiness of many American onlookers, especially Democrats and reformers, as well as the greater anxiety and suspicion of more conservative Americans, including Whigs, southern slaveholders, orthodox Calvinists, and Catholics. Roberts also traces change over time, illuminating how many Americans quickly began to express doubts about the prospects for republican government in Europe. As they did so, these Americans began to speak less of the role of [End Page 348] the United States as an example for aspiring republicans and more of its alleged exceptionalism. Finally, Roberts also attends to the diversity of American opinions concerning the various European movements that together made 1848 and the following years such a dramatic period. Americans were often, for example, worried about French radicalism and disdainful of Italy's Catholics. Insightfully, Roberts points out that Americans seemed to invest their greatest hopes in precisely those European rebels, the Hungarians, about whom they knew the least. His eighth chapter then turns to the legacy of 1848, arguing that "Bleeding Kansas" convinced many antislavery Americans that their country was succumbing to European-style despotism. Such fears, he avers, prompted some northerners to reconsider whether their country remained exceptional. His brief epilogue carries his analysis into the Civil War years by looking at the influence of European revolutions and revolutionaries on John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. None of this, of course, is meant to imply that Distant Revolutions is, or claims to be, the final word on the connections between Europe and the United States in the period surrounding 1848. In fact, despite Roberts's impressive historiographical legwork, he misses the opportunity to more clearly situate his study within the literature. Specifically, while Roberts is correct to suggest that earlier publications...

On the Evolution of Collective Enforcement Institutions: Communities and Courts

We analyze the capacities of communities (or social networks) and courts to secure cooperation among heterogeneous, impersonal transactors. We find that communities and courts are complementary in that they tend to support cooperation for different types of transactions but that the existence of courts weakens the effectiveness of community enforcement. Our findings are consistent with the emergence of the medieval Law Merchant and its subsequent supersession by state courts as changes in the costs and risks of long-distance trade, driven in part by improvement in shipbuilding methods, altered the characteristics of merchant transactions over the course of the Commercial Revolution in Europe. We then contrast the European experience with the evolution of enforcement institutions in Asia over the same period. JEL classification: D02, D71, N43, P48

Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

Important works such as Walter Nugent's Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (2008) counter popular notions of American exceptionalism through systematic analysis of how patterns of national territorial acquisition, from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, mirrored those of other empires. Timothy Mason Roberts, in this excellent intellectual history of responses in the United States to Europe's 1848 revolutions, helps explain the resilience and flexibility of America's enduring faith in its own benign uniqueness. As the European revolutions began to unfold in 1848 most Americans took a positive view, imagining their Atlantic world cousins operating within the tradition of the American Revolution and anticipating “America and Europe growing together as democratic republics” (p. 15). As the landscape of revolutionary violence and violent reaction unfolded in Europe, however, as American perspectives shifted toward rejection of the possibility that Europe might follow the U.S. example and many Americans embraced and reaffirmed America's enviable and inimitable peaceful postrevolutionary heritage.

Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker. Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary. Translated by Diane Webb. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. 556 pp. $158.00 (cloth). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐17269‐2

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 47, Issue 1 p. 109-111 Book Review Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker. Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary. Translated by Diane Webb. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. 556 pp. $158.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-90-04-17269-2 Adriana S. Benzaquén, Adriana S. Benzaquén Associate Professor of History, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3M 2J6Search for more papers by this author Adriana S. Benzaquén, Adriana S. Benzaquén Associate Professor of History, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3M 2J6Search for more papers by this author First published: 04 January 2011 https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20476Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume47, Issue1Winter 2011Pages 109-111 RelatedInformation

Workers of the World, Unite! Franchise Extensions and the Threat of Revolution in Europe, 1820-1938

This paper tests the hypothesis that the extension of the voting franchise was caused by the threat of revolution, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson [Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1167-1199, 2000]. We approximate the threat of revolution in a given country by revolutionary events happening in neighboring countries. We investigate the relationship between this new measure of the threat of revolution and measures of suffrage reform in two samples of European countries covering the period from 1820 to 1938. We find strong support for the ‘threat of revolution theory’. We also find some evidence that war triggered suffrage reform, whereas other theories of the extension of the franchise, including ‘modernization theory’, receive little support.

The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context

AbstractDuring the debates in Bolshevik party circles after Lenin's return to Russia in early April 1917, one central issue was the status of "Old Bolshevism." According to Lenin, Old Bolshevism was outmoded, whereas other Bolsheviks such as Lev Kamenev and Mikhail Kalinin defended its relevance. The central tenet of prewar Old Bolshevism was "democratic revolution to the end," a slogan that implied a vast social transformation of Russia under the aegis of a revolutionary government based directly on the narod. Far from being rendered irrelevant by the overthrow of the tsar, Old Bolshevism mandated a political course aimed at overthrow of the "bourgeois" Provisional Government. Lenin's innovative vision of "steps toward socialism" in Russia, prior to and independent of European socialist revolution was not a radical break with Old Bolshevism and it was not the central issue during the debates of April 1917. The actual Bolshevik message of 1917 (as documented by pamphlets issued by the Moscow Bolsheviks) was closer in most respects to the outlook of Lenin's opponents, as he came close to explicitly admitting. The usual characterization of the April debates as Lenin's successful attempt to imbue the Bolsheviks with a radically new vision of socialist revolution must therefore be rejected.

The Crossroads of the European Revolution: Ukrainian Social-Democrats and Communists (Independentists), the Ukrainian Revolution and Soviet Hungary 1917–1920

When considering the fate of the revolutionary wave in Europe during 1916–1921 the traditional view has been that the failure of European communism to carry the revolution beyond its point of origin decided the fate of the infant Soviet Union negatively. This article seeks to demonstrate that in 1917–1919 the Ukrainian question was pivotal to the success of the revolution in Europe. It examines the role of the Ukrainian Social-Democrat and Communist Independentists, the Ukapisty. These Ukrainian Marxists challenged both the Russian Communist Party and the Ukrainian nationalists in their quest for an independent Soviet Ukraine. Their campaign had international significance and gained the support of Soviet Hungary, their alliance brought into question the role of the Russian Communist Party in undermining the communist project in Europe. An appreciation of the causes of these little known events is essential to understand the subsequent fate of the revolutions.