1989: THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF REVOLUTION

A failed effort at “reform from above” or a dramatic reassertion of “people power”? Almost thirty-five years on, studies of the Revolutions of 1989 continue to be framed by these two polarities. However, this historiographical focus has meant that scholars have often overlooked the actual content and character of protest itself. This article argues that one way of reinjecting agency and ideas back into our historical understanding of 1989 is through examining the chronopolitics of revolution: that is to say, by addressing how the control and interpretation of time became a political battlefield, a site of contention and negotiation, between Communist regimes, on the one hand, and political activists and society, on the other. Investigating events in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, the article contains two central claims: first, that an interrogation of the concept of “chronopolitics” can provide a new angle by which to grasp the revolutionary character of “1989” and the democratic transformations that resulted and, second, by way of inversion, that a study of the temporal experiences across 1989 and the early 1990s can in turn shed light on the analytical value of “chronopolitics” more generally.     

Representative democracy and the ‘spirit of resistance’ from Constant to Tocqueville

ABSTRACT

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to ‘representative government’ and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to ‘resistance theory’ as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in ‘representative governments’ or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or ‘right to resist’ oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘spirit of resistance’ since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to ‘institutionalise’ principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks.     

Violence and resistance: Joyce Lussu’s minority revolution in trans-lation

Abstract

This article explores the theme of violence in the autobiographical work of Joyce Salvadori Lussu, an Italian partisan, political activist, writer and translator, who experienced many wars and violent conflicts throughout her life: the Great War; the Second World War; the anti-imperialistic struggles; and the protests of 1968. As a premise, the author will reconsider the philosophical notions of violence and force in relation to the concept of resistance, by first situating all these categories within a physical sphere. Second, the author proposes a rethinking of the subject of violence from a female perspective, by studying Joyce Lussu’s theoretical discourse about women and war. Therefore, through the analysis of images of violence gathered from Lussu’s literary work, the author interprets the essential role of women as ‘resistants’ as well as bearers of pacifist values. Finally, the author uses the category of minority revolution, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, to underline Lussu’s political commitment on the side of renegades through her activity as a translator of minor literature. The methodological perspective adopted aims at challenging the contemporary domination of the anti-humanist discourse, by endorsing the secular values of Humanism, reemerged and theorized in Italy between the 1930s and 1960s.     

A Quiet Revolution in Diplomacy: Quebec–UK Relations Since 1960

ABSTRACT

Quebec’s modern international outlook and its current paradiplomacy can be dated largely from the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Since then, the provincial government in Quebec City and the federal government in Ottawa have had to tread a fine line in accommodating each other’s constitutional rights in the field of international relations—a line that has occasionally been breached, especially in the years following the Quiet Revolution and in critical periods such as those prior to the 1980 and 1995 referenda. Foreign governments have also had to engage in careful diplomacy in order to avoid upsetting either Ottawa or Quebec City—and this has been especially true in the case of the countries historically most involved with Canada and Quebec—France, the United States, and Britain. But whereas there has been some academic writing on Quebec’s relationships with France and the United States, very little attention has been devoted to Quebec–UK relations since the Quiet Revolution. This article seeks to fill that gap and argues that the Quebec–UK relationship since the 1960s can itself best be characterized as a “quiet revolution” in diplomacy that has largely avoided the controversies that have sometimes dogged Quebec’s relations with France and the United States.     

The Swedish journal Morgonbris on political violence in Finland 1917–1918

Women participated actively in the Finnish Civil War in January 1918–April 1918. The radicalization of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the embracing of a revolutionary discourse sent tremors also to Sweden. In this article, I investigate how the Swedish Social Democratic women’s journal Morgonbris addresses women’s political violence in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution in March 1917, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover and the following Civil War in Finland early 1918.

Morgonbris did not shun from reporting or debating women’s political violence, however, as this article shows there is a great discrepancy between how different acts of violence are understood in the greater discourse. Some violence, and especially some acts of violence committed by women, is clearly framed as more legitimate than others.     

FROM LEFT‐WING TO COMMUNIST MELANCHOLY: TRAVERSO'S WAGER

Enzo Traverso's inspired book Left‐Wing Melancholia revisits iconic representations of revolutionary hopes and defeats not to draw up an inventory of what has been lost but rather to remind his readers that past defeats also contain the traces of unfulfilled possibilities. After the end of the Soviet Union and the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism, the communist utopian imagination of a classless society, Traverso suggests, can be reignited through memorial practices of resilient, resistant melancholy. Traverso's argument draws on Walter Benjamin's notions of materialist history, redemptive memory, and knowing melancholy. Yet the nameless vanquished masses to whom Benjamin's concept of history seeks to do justice remain marginal in Traverso's book. Instead, revolutionary defeat is cast in the tragic mold of succeeding by failing, a trope exemplified by figures such as Auguste Blanqui, Charles Péguy, or Daniel Bensaïd. In response to Traverso's reliance on the transhistorical category of the tragic, this essay argues for a more abstractly theoretical understanding of left‐wing melancholy as conditioned by historically specific class relations that constrain and challenge the engaged intellectual. Moreover, this essay questions Traverso's dualistic treatment of politically committed (Benjamin, Brecht, C. L. R. James) and elitist intellectuals (Adorno) and concludes that the concept of left‐wing melancholy must ultimately be interrogated against the backdrop of a lingering uncertainty about the relationship between theory and praxis that, as Adorno claims, one can already find in Karl Marx—an uncertainty that is hence inscribed into the history of any Marxist theory of revolution and history.     

黎萨尔与菲律宾现代政治变革模式的形成

何塞.黎萨尔被认为是菲律宾"国家和个人生活的基石"。在有关黎萨尔的研究中,黎萨尔与菲律宾政治变革的途径,即经由"改革"还是"革命"来达致国家的独立、获取全民的"福利",是争论不休的一个关键问题。从黎萨尔的著作来看,黎萨尔倾向于经由菲律宾政治精英在殖民政府内部对现有不合理的旧制度进行一场彻底的、激进的"好改革"来实现菲律宾的独立和民主。如果这一条道路走不通,那么,"暴力革命"将是最后的手段。黎萨尔所强调的"精英化的好改革"的政治思想,经由美国殖民政府的渲染,最终构成为菲律宾现代政治变革的基本模式——旧框架内的和平革命。     

党、革命动员和地域社会:论中共河北党组织(1928～1934)

大革命失败后,河北区域的中共党员数量急剧下降。由于国民党势力的打压,党的发展重心不得不转移至农村,党员的社会构成也由以学生为主变为更加多样化;党的大多数支部有名无实,组织涣散,纪律松弛,经费短缺,上下级组织间信息传递迟缓。因此在白色恐怖下其生存境遇相当艰难,屡遭重创。另外中共在河北区域的革命工作遇到极大困难,其欲动员的工农群体,自身资源短缺亦是一重要因素。在基层,革命斗争往往异化,阶级革命经常与地缘亲缘多种因素相互缠绕。     

Americanist Stratigraphic Excavation and the Measurement of Culture Change

Many versions of the history of Americanist archaeology suggest there was a stratigraphic revolution during the second decade of the twentieth century—the implication being that prior to about 1915 most archaeologists did not excavate stratigraphically. However, articles and reports published during the late nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century indicate clearly that many Americanists in fact did excavate stratigraphically. What they did not do was attempt to measure the passage of time and hence culture change. The real revolution in Americanist archaeology comprised an analytical shift from studying synchronic variation to tracking changes in frequencies of artifact types or styles—a shift pioneered by A. V. Kidder, A. L. Kroeber, Nels C. Nelson, and Leslie Spier. The temporal implications of the analytical techniques they developed—frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy—were initially confirmed by stratigraphic excavation. Within a few decades, however, most archaeologists had begun using stratigraphic excavation as a creational strategy—that is, as a strategy aimed at recovering superposed sets of artifacts that were viewed as representing occupations and distinct cultures. The myth that there was a stratigraphic revolution was initiated in the writings of the innovators of frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy.     

The lost cause: failed French ultimata and the restoration of papal rule in Rome in 1849

In one of history’s ironies, the republic that arose in Rome out of Europe’s revolutionary wave in 1848 was crushed by the new republic that had formed in France at the same time. In an additional irony, the destruction of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal theocracy were overseen by the internationally renowned champion of constitutional rights and freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville, then France’s foreign minister. This article sheds new light on this dramatic series of events through an examination of the French diplomatic correspondence, which reveals growing dismay at the direction in which events were unfolding. The correspondence also gives a sense of how close the French came to abandoning the pope, a decision that could have changed the course of Italian and French, as well as Church history.