Revolutions and International History

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s formulation of the twentieth century as that of wars and revolutions needs revising only in that previous centuries have also, to varying degrees, been influenced by such upheavals. Reformulated, Arendt’s observation could read: the whole history of the modern international system is one of wars and revolutions. Underlying each is the shifting, irresolvably contradictory, character of modern social and economic evolution itself: they are both products of the conflicts of modernity. Wars and revolutions are the defining crises of modernity, the products and punctuation marks of the process of international history. A survey of that relation in historical narrative terms may serve as a prelude to examining both the general impact of revolutions on international relations and the ways in which this impact has hitherto been analysed. If the subject of the previous chapter was the international as cause, this chapter seeks to analyse consequence, how revolutions have affected relations between states and the course of international history in general.