Political Journeys E-Book

Fred Halliday

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 546

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Fred Halliday always combined the broad sweep of modern history, its currents and ideas, with a profound knowledge of modern revolutions, the Middle East and national movements. This collection of columns written for openDemocracy between 2004 and 2009 is proof of a subtle worldview that continues to generate questions: what is the relation between religion, nationalism and progress? Is a new international order possible? When is intervention a force for progress? From the big headline topics like the Iraq war or the Danish cartoons, to the unexpected comparisons, of Tibet and Palestine or Afghanistan and the Falklands, Halliday is a perennially surprising and enlightening guide to the major issues of international politics.

Leseprobe

FRED HALLIDAY

POLITICAL JOURNEYS

The openDemocracy Essays

Edited by David Hayes

SAQI

EBOOK ISBN 978-0-86356-454-3

First published by Saqi Books in 2011 This ebook edition published 2011

© Fred Halliday, 2011 © openDemocracy, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

SAQI 26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RHwww.saqibooks.com

Contents

Introduction by Stephen Howe

Preface

ONE: POINTS OF DEPARTURE

1. Lessons from Ireland

2. 1968: The Global Legacy

3. What was Communism?

4. A Lunch with Mario Soares

5. The Forward March of Women Halted?

6. Feminism in the Middle East: Two Pioneers

TWO: SHADOWS OF COLD WAR

1. The Age of the Three Dustbins

2. Looking Back on Saddam Hussein

3. Cold War Assassinations: Solved and Unsolved

4. A Conversation in Havana

5. Boadicea in the South Atlantic: The Legacies of Margaret Thatcher

6. The Vagaries of ‘Anti-Imperalism’: The Left and Jihad

7. The Dominican Republic: In Search of a ‘National Hero’

THREE: CHALLENGES OF THE MIDDLE EAST

1. Crises of the Middle East: 1914, 1967, 2003

2. America and the Arab World after Saddam

3. Al Jazeera: A Matchbox that Roared

4. Yemen: Murder in Arabia Felix

5. Navigating Mare Nostrum: The Barcelona Process after Ten Years

6. In an Unholy Place: Letter from Jerusalem

7. Lebanon, Israel and the ‘Greater Western Asian Crisis’

8. Maxime Rodinson: In Praise of a ‘Marginal Man’

FOUR: IRAN: REVOLUTION IN A ‘GREAT NATION’

1. Ahmadinejad as President: Iran’s Revolutionary Spasm

2. Miscalculations in Tehran

3. Sunni, Shi‘a and the ‘Trotskyists of Islam’

4. Iran’s Revolution in Global History

5. Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in Iran

FIVE: VIOLENCE AND POLITICS

1. Terrorism in Historical Perspective

2. A Commemoration in Atocha Station

3. A Visit to ‘Ground Zero’

4. Two Days with Hizbullah

5. Reason amid Rockets: Moral Judgement in Time of War

6. The Attorney General Comes to Town

SIX: PROFANE AGENDA: POLITICS AND PROFIT IN THE LANDS OF ISLAM

1. A Transnational Umma: Reality or Myth?

2. Faith as Business: Islam, Law and Finance

3. Finance in the Gulf: The Chimera of ‘Sovereign Wealth Funds’

4. A State of Robbers: The Jamahiriyah at 40

SEVEN: UNIVERSALISM IMPERILLED

1. The Crisis of Universalism: America and Radical Islam after 9/11

2. Letter from Euskadi

3. Post-Colonial Sequestration Syndrome: Tibet, Palestine and the Politics of Failure

4. Georgia’s War: On the Miscalculations of Small Nations

5. Letter from Yerevan: Armenia’s Mixed Messages

6. In the Darkest Place: A Morning in Auschwitz

CONCLUSIONS

1. The World’s Twelve Worst Ideas

2. The Revenge of Ideas: Karl Polanyi and Susan Strange

3. A Time in Barcelona

Books by Fred Halliday

Index

Introduction

bySTEPHEN HOWE

The essays collected here, written for openDemocracy between the start of 2004 and the end of 2009, explore many of Fred Halliday’s abiding preoccupations. He comes to them always with fresh knowledge and insights. They demonstrate how his range of interests, passions and enthusiasms continued always to broaden. And they delve into matters, like Halliday’s intense sense of place and his diverse literary loves, which his previous writing – for all its extraordinary range – had rarely touched upon. Those who come new to him with the present collection will find an ideal introduction to his brilliance in all its diversity. Beginning here, at the last stage of his journey in politics and thought, they will – one hopes – be stimulated to go back to its start and to follow all the intervening twists and turns. There is something to be learnt from every phase in his travels, just as Halliday himself was always learning even as, simultaneously, he taught the rest of us so much.

In September 2005, in an essay republished here (‘Maxime Rodinson: In Praise of a “Marginal Man”’), Halliday paid tribute to one of the writers who, for decades, he had most admired, the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson. Rodinson was, he suggested, not only the greatest of all French writers on the Middle East, ‘arguably the greatest tout court’, but an inspirational model of intellectual integrity in wider ways – in his ‘unceasing belief in universal values, in the need for intellectual aspiration beyond what one is actually capable of, and for an enduring, unyielding scepticism towards the values and myths of one’s own community.’ He praised Rodinson’s committed secularism, his lifelong refusal to indulge the iconic claims of ‘identity’, ‘community’ or ‘tradition’, as well as the remarkable breadth of his knowledge and sympathies, and the unrelenting rigour of his scholarship. Halliday could, had he been a less modest man, have been writing about himself. The qualities he praised in Rodinson were those he himself possessed, perhaps in greater measure than any other writer of his generation or any other commentator on Middle East or wider international affairs.

Halliday’s academic specialism, the field in which he taught and held his professorships, was International Relations. ‘IR’ is sometimes seen by critics as a rather self-enclosing scholarly ghetto, not to mention being in the main an ideologically conservative one. Halliday’s relation to it was thus always and inevitably a healthily sceptical and critical one; his position consciously that of an inside-outsider. Yet his contribution to it was huge. If the academic IR mainstream often seemed to emphasise, even fetishise, continuity – proclaiming the undying relevance of seventeenth-century and earlier thinkers like Hobbes, Grotius or Machiavelli – Halliday’s great enthusiasm was for exploring radical change.

If the dominant current in North Atlantic IR theory, that rather question-beggingly dubbed ‘realism’, appeared to think that states were the only important actors in the global system, Halliday always recognised the significance both of supra-state economic and political structures (here the lessons learnt from Marxist thought remained productively present in his work) and of sub-state or non-state actors, especially social movements including, crucially, those fighting for women’s rights.

He thus brought to bear an understanding both of structure and of agency – especially that of people and movements in the Global South – far richer and more complex than that available to many IR specialists. He intervened both sharply and thoughtfully in the heated debates over method and approach that marked the study of IR, after the end of the Cold War had seemingly made many of the discipline’s old assumptions obsolete. But equally, he had suitably little patience with the claims, both vague and hubristic, advanced by some in IR as elsewhere that everything had suddenly changed beyond recognition, all older theories and methods been made redundant. Such claims, usually loosely labelled ‘postmodernist’ (does anyone still remember postmodernism?), were the objects of some of Halliday’s most vigorous and frankly impatient negative polemics. Echoes of these can be found in this book, as can salutary doses of the irreverence, even mockery, he rightly brought to bear on so many received ideas about global politics and on the pomposities and the dishonesties of the powerful – as in the essays ‘The World’s Twelve Worst Ideas’ and ‘The Attorney General Comes to Town’.

Ever since the 1970s, Halliday brought together, both imaginatively and systematically, the ‘East–West’ and ‘North–South’ conflicts that have shaped our world, in a way which almost no other contemporary commentator from the Left or Right has done. He always saw the Cold War as involving a genuine and profound clash of ideologies and social systems, and as having a huge, abiding legacy. (He explores one facet of this in ‘Cold War Assassinations: Solved and Unsolved’, included here.) But the global picture, and the possibilities for illuminating transnational comparison to which he was always so alert – this collection includes many brilliant examples of that – never obscured for him a keen recognition of the distinctiveness and importance of particular places, of local conflicts and loyalties. His Irish childhood, where travelling just a few miles from his hometown of Dundalk took one not just across an international frontier but into utterly different, often antagonistic, cultural and political worlds, no doubt taught him that at an early age. (See the very first essay here, ‘Lessons from Ireland’.) Subsequently, and helped by his astonishing flair for languages, he had an almost uncanny ability to catch the political atmosphere of diverse places and spaces; one articulated in the many wonderful political travel reports collected here, as in so much of his earlier writing – read his tales from Cuba and Yemen, from Madrid, New York, Beirut, Jerusalem, and perhaps above all, those from Tehran.

And his sharp eye for change did not mean that either of the twin concepts so massively shaping Halliday’s earlier work, imperialism and revolution, had lost their relevance in the twenty-first century. He insisted on the continuing ‘pertinence of imperialism’. Sketching the history of radical thought on imperialism, he argued that it encompassed five broad themes: the ‘inexorable expansion of capitalism as a socio-economic system on a world scale’; the inevitably competitive, expansionist and warlike character of capitalist states; the global reproduction of socio-economic inequalities; the creation, also on a world scale, of inequities, which were not only economic, but also social, political, legal and cultural; and that through the very process of capitalist expansion, movements of anti-imperialist resistance would inevitably be generated.

All of these claims, Halliday argued, retained force in the world of the twenty-first century. Ironically, and of course uncomfortably for Leftists, it was the last of them – the fate of anti-imperialism, and of what are often now termed ‘anti-systemic’ and ‘anti-globalisation’ movements – which had been most thoroughly transformed.

Across the twentieth century, massive struggles against imperialism and capitalism, whether revolutionary or reformist and usually calling themselves socialist, had convulsed the world. But all had seemingly failed. More, we have witnessed ‘the deformation of anti-imperialism itself.’ Anti-imperialism had classically involved a set of shared, universalist, goals including democracy, economic development, equality of men and women, and secularism, and a belief in a potential historical alternative. Today, all this had seemingly been replaced in many quarters, around the globe, by movements of religious fundamentalism, ethnic chauvinism, romantic anti-modernism and other irrational ideologies. This historic regression, as Halliday saw it, was the most disturbing and depressing of all contemporary global developments. Militant political Islam was just one of its manifestations, though the one to which in his later writings he devoted most attention.

Imperialism, then, was alive and well, but anti-imperialism in its previous progressive forms was direly sick. This, though, did not imply that the idea of revolution, anti-imperialist or other, was defunct. Indeed Halliday devoted one of his most lastingly important works to analysing this idea: Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). This was a bold attempt to compare all the world’s major revolutions of the past few centuries, and evaluate the continuing significance of the whole phenomenon of revolution. As he often pointed out, International Relations as an academic subject has neglected the importance of revolutions in reshaping the world system. The most influential modern studies of revolutions, meanwhile, have usually been inspired by historical sociology, and have been very weak on their international dimensions.

Straddling academic specialisms as sure-footedly as he does centuries and continents, Halliday’s work corrects both deficiencies. Essays in this book like ‘1968: The Global Legacy’, ‘The Lessons of Communism’ and ‘Terrorism in Historical Perspective’ superbly exemplify those skills.

Halliday believed that the political utopianism that drove Communist dreams – or such latterday successors as faith in a morally perfect world order based on Islam – has a never-ending capacity to renew itself. We live in a world that is more unequal than ever before; and global communications ensure that more people are bitterly aware of that inequality than in any past age. For all the complacency that may reign among the world’s richer and more stable societies – a complacency, Halliday also notes, disconcertingly like that which prevailed a century ago – we have almost certainly not seen the end of the age of revolutions. What is far more doubtful is whether future revolution might hold out any rational hope of furthering the political ideals and humane values in which Halliday believed. (See, for instance, the essays here on ‘The Vagaries of “Anti-Imperialism”’ and ‘Iran’s Revolution in Global History’.)

If imperialism and revolution were two of the great overarching themes of Halliday’s work, then surely the natural third pillar was the idea of internationalism with its close relative, that of solidarity. He published, or delivered as lectures, many different reflections on aspects of this – many of his openDemocracy columns were variations on that theme – and had planned a major book on it. His premature death must mean that such a work can never appear in the way he might have wished it, though apparently there are strong hopes of bringing together the work he had already done into book form. He believed that in the course of the later twentieth century something strange, and distorting, had happened to these concepts. In their true form they depended on one central principle, that of (as he put it in a lecture on ‘The Fates of Solidarity’, which to my knowledge remains unpublished):

the shared moral and political value and equality of all human beings, and of the rights that attach to them. The concept of solidarity pre-supposes that of rights … The reason to support others within our own society or in others is that they too have rights, by dint of the humanity we share.

The contemporary crisis derived from the way so many on the Left had abandoned that principle (the political Right had never really believed in it): denigrating the very language of universal human rights; attacking the international institutions and conventions that tried to implement it; disparaging the values of rationalism and the Enlightenment which are its necessary foundation.

Militant Islamism, and those Western Leftists who entered into a tactically foolish and morally repugnant alliance with it, were again just a particularly extreme expression of these very widespread and ominous tendencies. Many must share the blame for helping undermine the better ideals of internationalism and solidarity: the legacies of colonialism and of Communism were especially culpable, but numerous contemporary intellectual currents – including ones espoused by close friends and former comrades of Halliday’s – had contributed to this moral and political disaster. (See the essays here: ‘The Crisis of Universalism’ and ‘Looking Back on Saddam Hussein’, among others.) Too many had succumbed to a regression, whereby membership of a particular community, or particularistic claims of ethnicity, nationality or religious adherence, were believed to confer special rights, or particular moral advantage. Such degenerate developments, Halliday felt – and exemplified in many detailed analyses – were especially prolific in relation to the Middle East and to the politics of Islam. He discussed them extensively in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but also reflected on them several times in relation to the Ireland of his birth.

Halliday brought the same intellectual values and qualities to bear on his discussions of Political Islam, and of Islamophobia. (See his ‘Anti-Muslimism and Contemporary Politics’ in Islam and the Myth of Confrontation [IB Tauris, 1996], and several of the essays in his Nation and Religion in the Middle East [Saqi Books, 2000], as well as the Iranian and other Middle East-related pieces in this collection.) He carefully explored the way in which, in recent years, hatred of Muslims has evidently been politically salient in several far-flung places, including America, Britain and France, among right-wing Israelis and Russians, advocates of Hindutva in India and of Heavenly Serbia.

Each of these, however, is, as he insists, an antagonism with very specific, local political roots, and is best explained and challenged in terms of each of those specific circumstances. ‘Anti-Muslimism’ is, in his words, not one ideology but several. Islamists, however, are by definition committed to the view that there is a shared, invariant, essentially timeless Islamic character, and that by the same token, any manifestation of hatred towards Muslims, anywhere, must be directed against that character. Their ideology negates the possibility of any more local, contextually and historically specific explanations. Thus there is a very ironic twist here – maybe one of the few things that really is almost unique to Islamist thought and its enemies. Islamists do not react to ‘Islamophobia’ by criticising or deconstructing the stereotypes (as blacks or Jews or gays usually do), but by accepting them as badges of pride: ‘Yes, you’re right: we really are a deadly threat to all that you hold dear – and a good thing too!’ So Halliday, writing in a spirit of sympathy and solidarity with the victims of anti-Muslim hatred, found himself under attack from those who proclaimed themselves spokespeople for a mythicised, homogenised ‘Islam’.

All this and more was brought together with characteristic breadth, boldness and humour in a short essay written at the start of 2005 (and reproduced here), where in a kind of manifesto for what proved to be the last phase of his work, Halliday proposed a new key to the contemporary international system: the ‘Three Dustbins Theory’.

The mid-1990s, he suggested, marked the end of the interregnum following the end of the Cold War, itself the third chapter, after the two world wars, in a great century-long European civil war. Today that European era is decisively finished: ‘After five centuries when the Atlantic was the strategic and economic centre of the world, the focus has now shifted to East Asia and the Pacific.’ Yet too much of our thinking remains prisoner to the Cold War’s legacy and its enduring myths, contained in those three dustbins. Dustbin One holds the legacies of communism: unresolved ethnic conflicts; corrupt, authoritarian and inept post-Soviet elites and their regimes – ‘a transition not to democracy but to post-Marxist kleptocracy’; and nuclear proliferation. The Second Dustbin, Halliday suggested:

is that of the West, the USA in particular. One of the costs of winning the Cold War is that the West has failed to rethink its assumptions about the conduct of international relations. Instead, and above all with the Bush administration, we have seen the recycling of policies that were as wrong then as they are now.

Worst of all are a ‘pervasive denial, compounded by self-righteous declamation’ about the consequences of past policies, notably America’s role in creating the ‘terrorist threat’ itself, and an imperial arrogance in the exercise of power over other peoples and instinctive resort to force. We shall now never know whether or not Fred would have seen the Obama administration as effectively breaking from those legacies, struggling out of that dustbin. The Third Dustbin, though, contains far too much of the international Left and its thinking. The contemporary global protest movement, Halliday charged, resembles ‘a children’s crusade of intellectual demagogues, dreamers and unreconstructed political manipulators.’

So, in his last years Fred Halliday was beginning to sketch a new map of the world, bringing together his multiple interests and spheres of expertise. The essays in this book, forty-five pieces written across the last six years of his life, represent perhaps the fullest flowering of that diversity – as David Hayes, his editor at openDemocracy, says:

In subject-matter, the columns embrace the world – from Jerusalem to jihadism, Finland to Libya, Iraq to Fred’s native Ireland, Cuba to his beloved Yemen and Iran; in style they combine sharp political assessment with rich personal memory and voice; in content they deploy years of concentrated learning and observation in the constant effort to understand, to get inside the reality under scrutiny. Everything in this collection exudes Fred’s immense scholarship and range, his boundless intellectual curiosity – and not least his sheer love of life, which is so movingly conveyed in the last selection of this volume, his celebration of Barcelona.

Fred Halliday’s illness, and then his heartbreakingly early death at the age of 64 in April 2010, cut short the continuing, ever-changing evolution of his thought. His was an intellectual journey that could have no ‘natural’ end, but deserved far better than so brutal, so total a break. Despite all their remarkable richness and variety, these essays can give only a taste of what would still have been to come. Those who knew Fred Halliday personally will read, or re-read, him here with sharp sorrow for all that might have been, as well as with enormous pleasure. Those who were acquainted with him only from his earlier published work will discover in this book many new, unfamiliar Hallidays. They may also catch a hint of how creative and important was the relationship between Fred and openDemocracy. He found, in his last period of active work, much to be disillusioned with, or disturbed by, in how the ‘old forms’, both of British academia and the mainstream media, were developing. The newer, more open communicative form of openDemocracy, and relations with his close comrades and collaborators there – Anthony Barnett, Tony Curzon Price, David Hayes and others – were a lifeline for him, as well as the setting for the last great flowering of his creativity.

Perhaps one might conclude by saluting Halliday’s particular combination of mutability and steadfastness, his coupling of a willingness always to question and rethink with lifelong adherence to a set of core values. In one of openDemocracy’s memorial tributes, it was recalled how he would joke (I recall him using very similar words to me): ‘At my funeral the one thing no one must ever say is that “Comrade Halliday never wavered, never changed his mind.”’

And of course no one, in all the thoughts and memories poured out since Halliday died, has dared say that. Yet he also wrote, with a characteristic hint of self-mockery:

That is my tribe, the Bani Tanwir, or what might be called the descendants of Enlightenment rationality. And, as with most tribal affiliations, seeing what a dangerous world it is outside, I do not intend to forsake it.

And he never did.

Preface

For the past five years, I have had the great pleasure and stimulus of writing a column for the website journal openDemocracy. What began as a provisional and intermittent engagement on both sides has developed into one of the most extended and challenging writing commitments I have known. No subject, no country, no awkward view has been excluded; and the editors, if at times seeking to insert some editorial good sense while keeping me to the overall mission of that fine journalistic project which is openDemocracy itself, have ultimately given me the freedom to range over the countries and topics that have engaged me. The result has been over eighty columns, at times weekly, later monthly; a selection of which, supplemented by a few pieces written elsewhere at the same time and published in other journals, forms the present book.

If there is an underlying theme in this work, beyond the eccentricity of its author, it is that of the times in which these articles were written: the time of the aftermath of 9/11 in Europe, the USA and the Middle East; the growing involution of the Bush administration; and the tension evident in so many spheres of life across the world between the claims of unilateralism and power and those of diversity and respect, ideals that are understood as much in cultural as in political terms. Inevitably, a selective vision prevails: I wrote these articles against a background of working and teaching in Britain since the 1960s, but have spent much of the past five years teaching and researching in Barcelona. In this city, I have found a different vantage point from which to observe this world of ours, at once fascinating, tragic and, in the repeated outbursts of human hope and decency that mark it, hopeful.

None of this would have been possible without the support and sustained encouragement of my editors, first at openDemocracy and later at the Barcelona paper La Vanguardia, which ran many of these pieces on its ‘Opinion’ page. At openDemocracy, it was the publisher Anthony Barnett, a friend of over forty years, who first encouraged me to write regularly for them, while David Hayes has worked enthusiastically and helpfully on my articles over the years, with an editorial professionalism, commitment and discretion I have rarely met. It was David, too, who prepared the first version of this book, carefully constructing its sections and selections, and it is to him above all that my thanks are due for the continued relationship I have with the journal. That David and Tony Curzon Price, openDemocracy’s editor-in-chief, should have proposed and encouraged this collection, to which they have shown such commitment, has been a source of great encouragement to me.

Fred Halliday

Barcelona, 1 November 2009

One

Points of Departure

1. LESSONS FROM IRELAND

26 May 2005

Dundalk, Republic of Ireland. In much of the world an optimistic, even romantic view of events in Ireland seems to prevail: a mixture of timeless mysticism around ‘the Isle of St Brendan’; neo-liberal simplification of the Republic’s recent economic record; and a naive if not opportunistic misrepresentation of what is inaccurately termed ‘the Northern Ireland Peace Process’. If in the USA this is largely a matter of pro-Catholic exilic propaganda, in other countries it takes a different form, nowhere more so than in Spain, where in addition to their affection for cerveza negra (‘black beer’, i.e. Guinness), many involved in the Basque cause seek to draw comfort from the Irish case. There are certainly lessons for the Basques and the Madrid government to draw from Ireland, but these are not examples that should bring comfort to anyone except those committed to an enduring intimidation and brutalisation of democratic politics.

The British elections on 5 May 2005 may have confirmed Tony Blair and his Labour Party in their continued, mildly reformist, hold on power in the United Kingdom, but in Ireland they have marked a watershed – welcome for some, ominous for many others – in confirming the dominance of intransigent parties within the two communities in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin on the Catholic/nationalist side and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on the Protestant/loyalist side, which promise years of confrontation to come. The DUP leader, the Reverand Ian Paisley, has called for the 1998 Belfast peace agreement to be ‘buried’. Some would suggest that with the IRA refusing for seven years to disarm, and the persistence of violence and intimidation within the Catholic community, the funeral must have taken place long since; even if, as has happened before in these parts, it was in secret. Much of this is unseen by the outside world, whether through innocence or short-term reluctance. But if one holds to the dictum that those who cannot think straight about Ireland cannot think straight about anything, then there is no better place to start than the town of Dundalk, home to 40,000 and capital of the smallest county in Ireland. (County Louth lies along the east coast of Ireland, half-way between the twin political capitals, Belfast in the North and Dublin in the South.) The Rough Guide to Ireland warns, with a vague reference to menace, that tourists should stay away from Dundalk. It is easy enough now to speed through on the road bypass or train from Dublin to Belfast. In my case this is somewhat harder to do, as Dundalk is my home town, the place where I grew up and which has been, for some five decades or more, the source of many political emotions and insights.

Beyond taking the pulse of Ireland, North and South, Dundalk is a litmus against which to test broader claims about nation and religion, state and society, politics and economics – not to mention right and wrong, peace and violence, and, let us not forget, truth and lies. Recently, talking to a wise long-term observer of the town’s affairs, I asked him if, over the past thirty years, anyone around there had changed their mind about anything. He looked at me a bit askance and replied curtly: ‘Of course not.’ That was all that needed to be said.

Against a backdrop of the ever-changing Cooley Mountains to the north, this is the quintessential frontier town, diverse in composition (including a district named after its Huguenot settlers): an uneasy but special vantage point for observing this island’s politics. Dundalk is a town that has seen many of the vicissitudes of violence in the course of European history: the Irish poetic hero Cúchullain fought in the neighbouring mountains; the Vikings tried to settle here; in the seventeenth century Cromwell made it the outer limit of his stockaded colonial zone, ‘the Pale’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was integrated into the industrialising economies of Northern Ireland and north-west England, linked by regular shipping to Scotland and Lancashire and by rail to Ulster.

Modern Irish politics has severed it from its economic links to the industrial north. People here have long memories, going back to the British semi-criminal ‘Black and Tans’ racing around the main streets, the fighting of the civil war between pro- and anti-‘Treaty’ groups in the 1920s, and more recently, the first post-war bombing campaign, of 1956–8, during which IRA volunteers trained a few miles out of town. The war in the North, which broke out in 1969, led to many uneasy movements and sealed mouths. Yet for much of the past century it has been famous as the political and possibly more general centre of activities of the Irish Republican movement, the rear base of the IRA and, more recently, the breakaway ‘Real IRA’. Ian Paisley oft denounced it as not ‘Dundalk’ but ‘Gundalk’, or ‘El Paso’. In 1982 Margaret Thatcher famously told Ronald Reagan that if the Israelis were justified in invading southern Lebanon, she should be sending the RAF to bomb the town.

More recently, things have begun to look up. European and some US investment has brought jobs to the town; the road and rail links to Belfast and Dublin have been greatly improved; and a new Technical College – in effect a new university – with 7,000 students has just celebrated its first twenty-five years. In 2000 Bill Clinton came to town and addressed a huge crowd, citing his friendship with local pop group The Corrs in the main square. In a bid to break the image of sectarian hostility associated with its history, the local museum and the Technical College recently held a festival of Protestant culture, replete with a pipe band, drums and a visit from senior members of the Orange Lodge. One of the latter was photographed shaking hands with the Sinn Féin chair of the local council, a first indeed. The Belfast peace agreement of 1998 has certainly spawned all sorts of cross-border and commercial activities.

Yet as my wise companion’s remark to me suggested, and the British general elections have shown all too clearly, all is not quite as rosy as it would seem in this part of Ireland – or indeed in the island as a whole. To see the emergence of this polarised politics solely in terms of Northern Ireland, and with implications only for this province, would be mistaken. As has been the case for a century or so, the conflict in Northern Ireland has implications for the future of Ireland as a whole, in particular for Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, which is now developing a strategy in both North and South of Ireland designed to secure its place in a future ruling coalition in the decades to come.

All of this has been accompanied by the largely successful publicity campaign carried out by Gerry Adams and his associates in recent years. Adams has presented himself as a man of peace, even, God help us, as a statesman, offering advice to the Basques about the prospects for peace in Spain and producing mawkish autobiographies that make him out to be some sort of neo-Celtic gentleman. His policy of weakening and overtaking the more moderate, anti-violence SDLP has been greatly helped by the passage of time: the younger generation has forgotten the killings, disappearances and tortures, and admires him for getting the kind of TV coverage that the more staid and responsible SDLP leaders John Hume and Seamus Mallon never got. Yet the IRA has not changed, and the professed difference between the IRA and Sinn Féin, whereby Adams issues ‘appeals’ to the IRA, is in fact no greater than that between a ventriloquist and his dummy. As the killing of the Belfast man Robert McCartney in January and of a Dublin man some time later showed, the republican movement continues to operate on the ground as a criminal organisation. In Dublin it is deeply involved in the drugs trade. Any social momentum created by the 1996 killing of the pioneer anti-drugs journalist Veronica Guerin, later recorded in a dramatic film, has been lost. The republican movement, as supremely contemptuous as it always was of democracy or the legitimacy of law or majorities, retains its weapons and its powers of intimidation: ‘We still have the tool kit in the garage,’ as they say. In the South there is growing awareness that whilst pursuing its criminal activities, the IRA has also been engaged in a sustained clandestine campaign to infiltrate the middle ranks of the Republic’s administrative and security services.

Nor is this turn a purely Irish affair: the conflicts of Ireland may be insulated from Britain, a convenience that serves both sides quite well (and is eased by large subsidies of up to €10 billion a year for economic and security expenditures, from London to Belfast), but the polarisation in the North is very much of a piece with the rise of particularist, identity-based, nationalist politics elsewhere in Europe and indeed across the world. Like all nationalisms, Irish republicanism celebrates its difference and uniqueness, except when it suits some of its leaders to parade themselves as Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King: but what is happening beneath all the posturing, smiling and self-righteous indignation that marks Northern Irish politics is a tale of broader significance, one that will not go away. The same goes for the supposed economic success enjoyed by the Republic: the economy may have boomed, but as The Celtic Tiger in Distress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), a critical study by Dublin social scientist and journalist Peadar Kirby, documents so well, this has been at the cost of increased social polarisation and widespread poverty, all adding up to a neglect by the Irish state of much of its social responsibilities.

The polarisation in the North and social problems in the South provide a good recruiting ground for the republican movement. What Sinn Féin is aiming for is not just some entrenched blocking role in Northern Ireland, but a long-term partnership with the main ex-republican party in the South, Fianna Fáil. At the moment, the FF leadership under Bertie Ahern is critical of the IRA; its refusal to engage in visible and convincing disarmament, and its involvement in criminal activities relating to violence and drugs: but the resurgent nationalist mood in Ireland, fuelled in part by the economic boom of recent years, and the apparent domestication of Sinn Féin, the result of a sustained and mendacious public relations exercise by Adams and his friends, has shifted opinion quite substantially. Middle-ranking FF officials now talk quite openly of entering into a long-term alliance with Sinn Féin to hold power in Ireland for decades to come. This is the real significance and unstated strategic goal of the Sinn Féin strategy in Northern Ireland.

One longer-term lesson of these Irish events, which has broader significance for other developed countries, is that the consequences of European civil wars take many years to be overcome. In a marked reversal of the normal, themselves ideological, allocations of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’, it is noteworthy that Third World countries are often better able to overcome civil wars, and integrate the supporters of victor and defeated alike, than the supposedly more sophisticated states of Europe. The civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s, in Yemen and Oman in that and later decades, the war in Vietnam that ended thirty years ago in 1975, and the later civil wars in Central America all produced winners and losers: but these countries have, to a considerable degree, moved on. The Biafrans are very much part of Nigerian life; few among the young in today’s Vietnam care for the bloody war between north and south. Yet in the European countries that had civil wars in the last century – Ireland, Spain, Finland and Greece – not to mention the USA after 1865, the political differences endured. Irish politics is still split between the factions that fought what were, in effect, the two civil wars of the twentieth century: that in the South, over the Treaty, from 1922 to 1924; and that in the North, between Protestant and Catholic, from 1969 to 1998. If for whatever reason others seem to have forgotten this, we can rest assured that the leadership of Sinn Féin, their eyes set on power in a reunited Ireland, have not.

2. 1968: THE GLOBAL LEGACY

11 June 2008

‘With the coming of the dawn, the promises of the night fade away’. In politics, as in love, the old Spanish saying sounds a pertinent warning; not least in regard to the memorialisation and assessment which the events of 1968 (and particularly the Paris uprising of May of that year) are receiving on their fortieth anniversary. Anyone who lived through those exhilarating and formative times – as I did at the age of twenty-two – can testify to the hurricane force of that year. Like every such phenomenon it carried multiple elements: in this case a generation’s visceral rejection of the accumulated conformism of post-1945 Europe and North America; a heady encounter with new forms of music, art, thinking and debate; and a many-centred solidarity with global movements of protest and revolt – be they in Vietnam or Latin America, in Czechoslovakia or Russia, or in the United States among African-Americans and anti-war protesters.

As one of the editors of the newly founded radical weekly Black Dwarf, I well remember the day that we decided on the front-page affirmation that to me encapsulated the aspirations and enthusiasms of that time more than any other: ‘Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. We shall fight, and we shall win!’

The problem is that in many ways, we lost. 1968 was a wonderful time. It shaped the intellectual and moral framework of my adult years. It does not deserve the sneering, partisan dismissal of some of its unacknowledged beneficiaries such as Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy. But it is equally ill-served by the kind of one-dimensional and (in the true sense) uncritical celebration that contemporary media, publishing and intellectual cultures too often regurgitate.

A recollection of the larger political currents that contextualise the experience of 1968 exemplifies the point. The theatre of Paris in May ’68 notwithstanding, the year did not alter the politics of any Western European country. France is the primary exhibit. A month after May, after all, came the mass rallies in favour of Charles de Gaulle in the Champs-Elysées; followed by the general elections of 23–30 June in which the French Right won a resounding victory. When de Gaulle resigned a year later, his successor was the loyal subordinate Georges Pompidou. It took until 1981 for a candidate of the Left, François Mitterrand, to be elected president – and this socialist was a former Vichy collaborator whose conspiratorial style of politics was the very opposite of the best of May ’68. Such tainted political advances are characteristic of the year’s ambiguous legacy.

In Britain, too, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of March and October 1968 (in both of which I was an enthusiastic participant) did not presage any wider change, either within or outside the parliamentary system. The protestors denounced the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but his replacement after the election of June 1970 was not a figure of the Left but a Conservative, Edward Heath. In the United States, 1968 marked the onset of a politically reactionary epoch rather than a progressive one. The election of Richard Nixon on 6 November, albeit narrowly won, was its augur; though it came to fruition only with Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, after the insipid administration of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s – just as the Labour governments of Wilson and James Callaghan in Britain were in retrospect an interlude in a long Conservative hegemony, confirmed by Margaret Thatcher’s election in May 1979.

True, Germany did see a momentous and long-overdue political change with the victory of Willy Brandt’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1969 (marking, as Brandt’s victory speech had it, the final defeat of Nazism). But this was self-evidently the work of an established party descended from the respectable Second International centre-left, not the ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ of 1968. Rudi Dutschke, whose rhetorical and personal appeal had enthralled me at a conference on Vietnam in Berlin in January 1968, was permanently damaged by an assassination attempt in April that year, which forced his withdrawal from the scene.

But one polity in Western Europe that was irrevocably altered by 1968 was Northern Ireland, dominated since the 1920s by the representatives of the province’s Protestant majority, the Ulster Unionist Party. The rise of a ‘civil-rights movement’ demanding equal voting, residence and employment rights for Catholics soon collided with the state’s sectarian institutions and instincts. After serious inter-communal violence exploded in 1969 and the British army was deployed to guarantee order, leadership of the Catholic community was seized by the Provisional IRA, a murderous and itself sectarian body that owed little to May 1968 and far less to the non-violent civil rights movement in its American or Northern Ireland variants. I well recall, in an interview in Dublin in 1971 with the then Provisional leader Rory O’Brady (this was before he became Ruairi Ó Brádaigh), making an inquiry about the connections between his ‘national liberation’ movement and that of its putative equivalents in Vietnam and Cuba. His brisk reply was worthy in tone and content of the schoolmaster he was: ‘Mr Halliday, in Ireland we have no need of your Che Guevaras and your Ho Chi Minhs.’ The pattern of the three decades to come was being set, whereby militarised Catholic nationalism battled its enemies to a dead end over the bodies of hundreds of innocents, its struggle finessed or cheered by ‘socialist’ fellow travellers who strained to see a trace of the dreams of 1968 in the carnage.

That the political consequences of 1968 defied its combatants’ ideas and hopes is not to our disgrace. The events were indeed extraordinary, and remain indelible. What is wrong in the memorialisation is the fetishism of the moment, and the associated loss of perspective and overall judgement, which leads to three kinds of distortion of focus. The first is that the glorification of what was and remains positive about 1968 obscures – and thus at some level perpetuates – the darker sides of the year. In retrospect, the most striking absence from the currents of the time was that of feminism: true, there was talk of ‘sexual liberation’, but the radical critique of gender came only with the ‘second-generation feminism’ of 1969 and later. (I recall attending the Dialectics of Liberation conference at London’s Roundhouse in July 1967: among thirty prominent left-wing and radical speakers there was not one woman; equally, no one commented upon this absence.)

The second distortion of the 1968 events is the way that the indulgence of violence is filtered out of consideration. Much of the Left thought little about the ethics and politics of violence beyond regarding it as permissible (and even beyond criticism) as long as it was the weapon of the oppressed; but a small section of the movement in Europe and North America, intoxicated by self-glorifying rhetoric and unable to face the blockage of their own politics, opted for proclaimed ‘urban guerrilla warfare’. The Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in Germany, the Brigate Rosse in Italy, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground in the United States were (as much as hippies, anarchists and proto-environmentalists, though with far more damaging effects) also the children of 1968.

The third distortion of judgement in regard to 1968 is the absence of political realism: the ability to match aspiration and imagination with a cool assessment of the balance of existing political forces. It was the political ‘winners’ who were to benefit from the events of the year (among them Georges Pompidou, Richard Nixon and Edward Heath) who in this respect showed a political capacity that their adversaries in the lecture halls or on the barricades more often lacked.

The inability of many leftist ’68ers to anticipate or comprehend the conservative reaction to their own initiatives represented by these ‘statesmen’ is telling here; as is the unreflective tendency of those who espouse some variant of revolutionary Marxism to laud 1968 as a single moment of glorious resistance without looking too closely at its dynamics. This fatal lack of political realism, however, is only part of a wider absence of understanding of the whole period: in particular, the inability of those who prefer the myths to the realities of 1968 to see that this was a time not of ‘world revolution’ but of international, indeed ‘tricontinental’, counter-revolution.

The years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s had seen a spate of revolutions and less dramatic but real changes across what was becoming known as the ‘Third World’: in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos); in the Arab world (Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Yemen); in Africa (the Congo, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya); and in Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba). From the mid-1960s, however, a series of events indicated that the tide was beginning to turn. The coup in Brazil in 1964; the fall of the moderate Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the same year; the coup in Indonesia; the invasion by the United States of the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam in 1965; the coup that ousted Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966; the coup in Greece; the six-day Arab-Israeli war; and the death of Che Guevara in 1967: all heralded a global shift to the right, of which Richard Nixon’s victory in the US presidential election of 1968 represented the culmination.

It took until the mid-1970s for a further sea-change to occur, with the end of fascism in Portugal and Spain in 1974–5 and a spate of revolutionary victories (Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Iran, Nicaragua) in what was not yet known as the ‘Global South’. The ‘Second Cold War’ of the 1980s closed one cycle and opened another. By then, many veterans of 1968 had long exchanged thinking through the present for romanticised celebration of the past.

The most dramatic events of 1968, and the ones with the greatest long-run consequences were not, however, in either Europe or North America, nor in the Third World, but in the Second (that is, communist) World. Two events in particular – the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which crushed the liberalising ‘Prague spring’ under Alexander Dubcek, and the apogee of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1967–8 – signalled the brutal imposition of authoritarian and coercive bureaucratic communism. In Prague, Moscow and Beijing – all a world away from the liberal and culturally experimental milieu of Paris or Berkeley – it was not the emancipatory imagination but the cold calculation of party and state that was ‘seizing power’. Yet in the longer run the counter-cyclical reinforcement of hard-line communist rule in its two major centres proved less durable than appeared likely at the time.

Indeed, the repression of 1968 contained the seeds of the demise of the regimes that deployed it. In Europe, the decision by Leonid Brezhnev and his associates to invade Czechoslovakia in effect killed the last threadbare hopes that a progressive evolution of communist societies was still possible. The casualties included the next generation of intra-party reformers, who thus had few reserves of loyalty or enthusiasm to call on beyond the party nomenklatura and who were challenged by dissidents now hardened by experience to contemplate only the demise of communism rather than its reform. The brief flowering of optimism under Mikhail Gorbachev proved as evanescent as that under Nikita Khrushchev, but this time with far more serious results for the communist edifice. In Western Europe, the collapse of faith that the Soviet system deserved even a modicum of trust was even more damaged by the Red Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia than by that of Hungary in 1956. At least the wholesale evacuation of members from Moscow’s ‘brother parties’ in 1956 did not damage their core; but Prague led the communist leaderships (in Italy especially) onto the road of coalition-seeking ‘Euro-communism’ and thence to effective oblivion.

In China, the violence, fear and societal damage inflicted by the Cultural Revolution were on such a vast scale that the generation which came to power after Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976 sought to pursue a moderate and reforming path. The system survived, but it lost its inner doctrinal conviction. What is left is nationalism and fear of the people: whom it can appease only as long as ‘market socialism’ delivers the goods. For all their zealotry, the years following 1968 spelt the end of revolutionary commitment.

Much of the Left in Western Europe and the United States feted China’s Cultural Revolution in displays that mixed political misjudgement, exoticist fascination and infantile irresponsibility in equal measure. The warnings of older and wiser observers such as Isaac Deutscher and Herbert Marcuse against the dangers of collectivist frenzies were heard, but also ignored.

It is clear in retrospect that 1968 did not bury European capitalist democracy or American imperialism. It did, however, set in train the death and burial of the Russian and Chinese revolutions and of communism in Western Europe: a fine example indeed of the cunning of history.

3. WHAT WAS COMMUNISM?

16 October 2009

Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of at least temporary improvement in relations between Russia and the West, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues History has given its ultimate verdict: the Cold War, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914–91, will not return; the USSR, both as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the West, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story, the worldwide communist movement, the verdict is, as yet, less clear.

Communism, embodying the ideology and the social aspirations underlying the Soviet challenge, and the worldwide echo evoked by that challenge remain to be interred. To bury communism can only be done on the basis of a recognition of what it represented; why millions of people struggled for and believed in this ideal; and what it was they were struggling against. It can also only be done when the legacy of this ideology and movement is assessed, and not simply forgotten or conveniently – and in violation of all historical evidence – dismissed as an ‘illusion’.

Judging by the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative have carried out such an assessment: between the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, on one side, and the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative on the other, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated.

The question of what kind of political and social system communism was has occasioned several candidate explanations. These explanations include: a dictatorial tendency whereby revolutionary elites seized control of societies; a flawed movement for the self-emancipation of the working class; an expression of messianism; a product of oriental despotism; and a failed developmentalist project.

Communism embodied features of modern politics that should not be abandoned: a belief in mass participation in politics; a radical separation of religion and state; a promotion of public, political and economic roles for women; hostility to inter-ethnic conflict; and an insistence on the need for the state to intervene in the economic and social affairs of its people. Joseph Stalin and Gosplan may have discredited a particular form of ‘planning’, but the general application of rational scientific, managerial and political thinking to human affairs, the better to manage the future, is an entirely legitimate and necessary aspiration, not least in an age of resource depletion and looming ecological crisis. Communism had no monopoly on these ideas – any tough-minded liberal could have supported them – and the interpretation given to these values was authoritarian, bloody, in some cases criminal. This does not mean, however, that these goals, democratically and humanely conceived, are not necessary parts of a contemporary politics.

On the other hand, we have to look unambiguously at the failure of communism, rather than avoiding the issue which too many retrospective analyses have dodged: the fact that its failure was necessary, not contingent. This system, denying political democracy and based on the command economy, did not just fail because of a false policy here or there, let alone because classical Marxist theory was abandoned. As even sympathisers like Rosa Luxemburg realised in 1917 itself, it was bound to fail from the beginning.

It is common, and somewhat too easy, for defenders of Marxism in the contemporary world to argue that Marxist theory and communist practice were divergent, hence the theory bears no responsibility for the communist record. This raises the question whether another Marxism, a more liberal, ‘genuine’ or ‘democratic’ version – or, if you incline in the other direction, a more resolute, militant and disciplined one – could have prevented the collapse of the communist states. The answer is no.

There were certainly choices for the Soviet system throughout its seventy-year history: the New Economic Policy (NEP) could have been continued after 1928; there could have been a different trajectory in the mid-1930s if Stalin and not Sergey Kirov had been assassinated, or Nikolai Bukharin had become party leader; if Nikita Khrushchev had not been ousted in 1964, economic reform of the kind Mikhail Gorbachev would attempt after 1985 might have begun twenty years earlier. And so on. As for the final period, the Soviet system could certainly have continued for another generation if another Soviet leader, a conservative like Grigory Romanov or Viktor Grishin, had come to power in March 1985 instead of Gorbachev. But, in the longer run, neither the prevailing CPSU ideology, nor, in my view, any variant of the Marxist tradition remotely related to 1917 could have saved, let alone developed that regime. It had reached a dead end, but that aporia, although contingent in timing and form, was inevitable sooner or later.

The revolutionary socialist movement was not, however, some mistake, some aberrant illusion: it was at once a global movement of collective purposive action across all continents and a product of the structural tensions within the development of capitalism over the past two centuries. It is therefore pointless to begin a critique of it by seeing it in those terms. It had its illusions, but so do the capitalist ideology which posits that everyone can become a millionaire, the newly fashionable ‘wellbeing’ fantasy that the process of ageing can be halted or reversed, and the irrational belief in divine beings and afterlives that much of humanity still espouses and in many societies, East and West, tries to impose on others. Like these fantasies, socialism was an inevitability, as much as the other features of the development of capitalist modernity – be they democratisation and scientific change, authoritarian capitalism, war between states or colonialism.

For that reason, the revolutionary socialist movement was, in its very illusions and delusions, itself a creature of its times and of some of the chimeras that beset those times, not least a belief in a ‘science’ of human evaluation and action. That there were and to some extent remain elements in the Marxist tradition that contributed not just to the revolutions, but to the particular bloody and criminal records of these regimes is due especially to four central elements of the communist programme: the authoritarian concept of the State; the mechanistic idea of Progress; the myth of Revolution; and the instrumental character of Ethics.

First, and as central to revolutionary Marxism as it is to the radical politics of the Islamic world, is the anti-democratic Jacobin theory of politics and of the ‘state’: this, rather than the self-emancipation of the masses, or workers, or oppressed Muslims, is the core concept, indeed the core goal, of all modern revolutionary politics, secular or religious, from Lenin to Osama bin Laden. Secondly, and equally central to modern revolutionary thought, is the supra-historical concept of ‘progress’. Of course, it can, in certain ways, be defended: there has been progress in, for example, medical knowledge, or human wealth, or the development of capitalist democracy. This does not mean, however, that history has a destination, an ‘end’ in the sense of a goal or telos, and of the kind implicit in most nineteenth-century thought. Even less does it imply that the pursuit of such a telos guides or legitimates political action or, in more than a few cases, the killing of ‘reactionary’ people.

Closely related to the myth of ‘progress’ was the third dangerous myth, that of ‘revolution’, not just ‘revolution’ as a historical moment of transition and a means of making the transition from one historical epoch to the other, but ‘Revolution’, indeed ‘The Revolution’, as a historical myth, a cataclysm that was both inevitable and necessarily emancipatory. Part of the rethinking of the socialist tradition has to be a re-evaluation of this myth, one that is almost as powerful and surely as destructive in modern times as that of ‘nation’. As with nations, it is possible to make a distinction between what one may term ‘actually existing revolutions’ (such as Russia, 1917; China, 1949; Cuba, 1959; Iran, 1979) and the broader ideological, myth: this latter myth, included within which was the idea of the ‘irreversibility’ of socialist revolutions, was shattered between 1989 and 1991.

The related myth that somehow ‘Revolution’ in the mythic sense remained possible within developed capitalism was disproved long ago, arguably by the failure of the German revolution in the early 1920s but in my view much earlier, in the failure of the revolutions of 1848. What Marx termed ‘the sixth great power’, in contrast to the five powers that dominated nineteenth-century Europe, became more and more confined to the semi-peripheral world. On the other hand, the reality of revolutions as historical moments – inevitable and voluntaristic, emancipatory and coercive – is central to the history of the modern world. Not only did these revolutions transform the countries in which they occurred; by forcing the dominant classes in the counter-revolutionary states to reform, they transformed capitalism in considerable measure as well.