![]() ![]() ![]() I will also confine myself mostly to revolutions of Europe and the Americas. This essay generally bypasses the literature on transitions because I believe that revolutions in the past seldom ended in a way naturally described as a transition, as if one knew where one was headed. But they implicitly do not consider the state of uncertainty, and the special problem of creating certainty when a revolution is going on, to be the central phenomenon. O'Donnell & Schmitter (1986) recognize that in modern transitions, it is very uncertain when and how a government will be created. In much of world history, empires seldom bargained with colonies about bringing their own sovereignty to an end conquerors in world wars did not rebuild democratic regimes using occupation governments military juntas did not peacefully organize elections and bargain about the constitution under which such elections would take place and totalitarian governments did not explicitly introduce perestroika. ![]() In the extreme, one might bargain with an existing government about what sort of constitution a new government might have ( Przeworski 1986, Linz & Stepan 1996, O'Donnell et al 1986, Linz 1978b). This suggests that, although there may be a “time of transition,” it is the natural order of things that people and territories have governments. The recent literature on building new governments has mostly used the language of “regime transition” rather than the language of revolution. God be praised, not all thousand-year reichs last a millennium. Some of the other postrevolutionary regimes analyzed below had medium-run instabilities. In fact, the Leviathan of Charles II did not last long, although no doubt 28 years seemed longer to his contemporaries than it does to us three centuries later. The better one is situated in the revolutionary “state of nature,” the more suspicious one is of the creation of a Leviathan. As Hallam argues, creating a Leviathan to get out of such a situation is not a matter of political philosophy so much as of each party comparing the proposed constitutional bargain and its coercive imposition with what one can expect in a continued state of anarchy. We conceive the core of revolution to be uncertainty about who, and what policies, will rule in the near and medium-run future-a Hobbesian state of the war of each against all. ![]() 210–53) of the discourse of the late eighteenth-century constitutional conventions in the United States and France I comment on the stability of both bargains below. The best portrait I know of the process of bargaining on the creation of governments in revolutionary situations is Elster's study ( 1994, especially pp. A major assumption of my argument below is that many of these bargains are not stable treaties bargained among the warring parties ( Licklides 1995). In general, the more autonomous coercive power a party has in the revolution (as military bodies often have), the more precarious the balance between the bargains proposed by the new regime and what they can expect by continued revolution. Each party to the Restoration (or other government-creating bargain) had to balance the uncertainties of trying to continue the revolution and trying to get in on a stable regime being bargained out. The passage gives a synopsis of the difficulties of finding a set of bargains among the interests contending in a revolution and a reliable apparatus to enforce them, of adapting those bargains thereafter to changing circumstances, and so of stably regenerating the authority of the government being created. The restoration of a banished family, concerning whom they knew little, and what they knew not entirely to their satisfaction with ruined, perhaps revengeful, followers the returning ascendance of a distressed party, who had sustained losses that could not be repaired without fresh changes of property, injuries that could not be atoned without fresh severities the conflicting pretensions of two churches-one loth to release its claim, the other to yield its possession the unsettled dissensions between crown and parliament all seemed pregnant with such difficulties, that prudent men could hardly look forward to the impending revolution without some hesitation and anxiety. As the moment approached, men turned their attention more to the obstacles and dangers that lay in their way. Veryone spoke of the King's restoration as imminent, yet none could distinctly perceive by what means it would be effected, and much less how the difficulties of such a settlement could be overcome. Writing on the Restoration of Charles II coming in 1660, after the death of Oliver Cromwell, Hallam, a historian sensitive to the “defensible claims” of parties to the English Revolution, described the problem of constructing a government as follows ( Hallam 1854 2:286–87, footnotes omitted): This article is one of 13 articles in the Domestic Political Violence and Civil War compilation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |