Old Regimes and Revolutions in the Second and Third Worlds: A Comparative Perspective

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Abstract
When they saw so many ridiculous, ramshackle institutions, survivals of an earlier age, which no one had attempted to co-ordinate or adjust to modern conditions and which seemed destined to live on despite the fact that they had ceased to have any present value, it was natural enough that thinkers of the day should come to loathe everything that savored of the past and should desire to remold society on entirely new lines. —Alexis de Tocqueville The dissolution of empires has been one of the distinguishing and most consequential characteristics of the twentieth century. The popular struggles for national sovereignty that have helped to destroy these empires have sometimes (although certainly not always) been fused with attempts to change radically the socioeconomic institutions inherited from the imperialists. The result of this fusion has been nationalist revolution—or revolutionary nationalism—another phenomenon largely unique to the present century. Most recently, in the Eastern European satellites of the former Soviet Union, imperial domination not only generated a nationalist opposition but also unwittingly radicalized it—albeit in a very peculiar way that I explain below. Thus, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, as Pavel Campeanu (1991: 806–7) has pointed out, had “a dual nature: social, since their goal was to destroy the socioeconomic structures of Stalinism, and national, since they aspired to re-establish the sovereignty of the countries in question.”

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