Halliday's revenge: revolutions and international relations

Fred Halliday saw revolution and war as the dual motors of modern international order. However, while war occupies a prominent place in International Relations (IR), revolutions inhabit a more residual location. For Halliday, this is out of keeping with their impact – in particular, revolutions offer a systemic challenge to existing patterns of international order in their capacity to generate alternative orders founded on novel forms of political rule, economic organization and symbolic authority. In this way, dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution are closely associated with processes of international conflict, intervention and war. It may be that one of the reasons for Halliday’s failure to make apparent the importance of revolutions to IR audiences was that, for all his empirical illustrations of how revolutions affected the international realm, he did not formulate a coherent theoretical schema which spoke systematically to the discipline. This paper assesses Halliday’s contribution to the study of revolutions and sets out an approach which both recognizes and extends his work. By formulating ideal-typical ‘anatomies of revolution’, it is possible to generate insights which clarify the ways in which revolutions shape international order. Halliday’s revenge1 In many ways, Fred Halliday would have enjoyed 2011. In particular, the events of the Arab Spring demonstrated the continuing vitality of two aspects of his approach to International Relations (IR): first, the centrality of revolutions to world affairs; and second, the conviction that inhabitants of Muslim-majority states were motivated by the same basic concerns as other peoples around the world: state power and legitimate authority; inequality, unemployment and corruption; freedom, justice and rights. At the same time, Halliday would have been dismayed by other aspects of 2011: the easy turn to bellicosity by both Western powers and local elites; the short-sighted commentary of those more concerned with the role of Facebook than the mobilizing power of labor movements, political parties and social movements; and the ways in which the collapse into civil war in Libya exposed mistakes made by the institution he cared about deeply: LSE.2 In many ways, therefore, 2011 was the year of Fred Halliday’s revenge. Without his presence, our knowledge of these events – and of international relations more broadly – is much diminished. Revolution was, perhaps, the issue Halliday cared about most, a conviction stemming from his wider appreciation of modernity as the starting point for social scientific enquiry – a common position in most disciplines, but less so in IR. Halliday saw nothing inevitable about a world built on dynamics of coercion and resistance, and on historical accident as well as broader determinations. As such, he saw contemporary international relations less as an ‘iron cage’ than as a ‘rubber cage’ containing some degree of ‘plastic control’ for its actors.3 Revolution was central to this understanding of ‘plastic control’, representing the most extensive means by which the oppressed rose up against conditions of servitude. In this article, I unpack Halliday’s approach to revolution, provide a balance sheet of its successes and shortcomings, and offer an extension of his argument in the form of ideal-typical ‘anatomies of revolution’. This, in 1 This paper was first presented at a Chatham House reading group in May 2011. My thanks to Caroline Soper for the invitation to take part in the group and to all the participants for their comments and contributions. Particular thanks are offered to Amnon Aran, Barry Buzan and Roland Dannreuther, who served as thoughtful, probing discussants at the reading group; their comments and suggestions substantially improved the final version of this article. 2 LSE’s difficulties arose, in large part, from gifts provided by the Qaddafi Foundation for the school’s work on global governance. Halliday’s ‘dissenting note’ to LSE’s Council urging the rejection of these gifts can be found at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/fredhalliday/memorandum-to-lse-council-on-accepting-grant-from-qaddafi-foundation. 3 Fred Halliday, International relations: a critical introduction (Unpublished Manuscript), p. 30.