Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T13:37:58.268Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Revolutionary Origins of Political Regimes and Trajectories of Popular Mobilization in the Late Communist Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2019

Nebojša Vladisavljević Open the ORCID record for Nebojša Vladisavljević [Opens in a new window]
Nebojša Vladisavljević*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Serbia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: n.vladisavljevic@fpn.bg.ac.rs
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

Keywords

political regimesrevolutionary legaciespopular protestauthoritarianismYugoslaviathe Soviet UnionPolandChina
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , July 2019 , pp. 545 - 561
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ash, Timothy G. 1999. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Banac, Ivo. 1988. With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Beissinger, Marc. 2002. Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bianco, Lucien. 1971. Origins of the Chinese Revolution: 1915–1949. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bokovoy, Melissa K. 1998. Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Archie. 1996. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brownlee, Jason. 2007. Durable Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bunce, Valerie. 1999. Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burg, Steven L. 1983. Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making Since 1966. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Xi. 2012. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Lenard J. 2001. Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Connor, Walker. 1984. The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Crowley, Stephen. 1997. Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers from the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Maura E., and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey. 2011. “Interpreting Protest in Modern China.” Dissent (Winter): 13–18.Google Scholar
Đilas, Aleksa. 1991. The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ekiert, Grzegorz. 1996. The State Against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Kubik, Jan. 1999. Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fairbank, John K., and Goldman, Merle. 2006. China: A New History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Steven M. 1995. Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Geddes, Barbara. 1999. “What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?” Annual Review of Political Science 2: 115–144.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Jeff. 2001. No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grdešić, Marko. 2016. “Serbia’s Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution as Manipulation? A Cultural Alternative to the Elite-Centric Approach.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (3): 774–803.Google Scholar
Hough, Jerry F. 1997. Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, John. 2017. Nationalism and War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Chalmers. 1962. Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kubik, Jan. 1994. The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Laba, Roman. 1991. The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A.. 2012. “Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion, and Authoritarian Durability.” Perspectives on Politics 10 (4): 869–889.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A.. 2013. “The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes.” Journal of Democracy 24 (3): 5–17.Google Scholar
Lieven, Dominic. 2003. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. London: Pimlico.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug, Tarrow, Sidney, and Tilly, Charles. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Musić, Goran. 2016. “‘They Came as Workers and Returned as Serbs:’ The Role of Rakovica’s Blue-Collar Workers in Serbian Social Mobilizations of the Late 1980s.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Archer, Rory, Duda, Igor, and Stubbs, Paul, 132–154. Farnham, Burlington, VT: Routledge.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Kevin J., and Stern, Rachel E.. 2008. “Introduction: Studying Contention in Contemporary China.” In Popular Protest in China, edited by O’Brien, Kevin J., 11–25. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Kevin J., and Li, Lianjiang. 2006. Rightful Resistance in Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
O’Leary, Brendan, and McGarry, John. 2012. “The Politics of Accommodation and Integration in Democratic States.” In The Study of Ethnicity and Politics: Recent Analytical Developments, edited by Guelke, Adrian and Tournon, Jean, 79–116. Opladen, Berlin, and Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers.Google Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J. 2008. “Permanent Rebellion? Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese Protest.” In Popular Protest in China, edited by O’Brien, Kevin J., 205–215. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J. 2010. “Popular Protest in China: Playing by the Rules.” In China Today, China Tomorrow: Domestic Politics, Economy and Society, edited by Fewsmith, Joseph. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Prazmowska, Anita J. 2004. Civil War in Poland, 1943–1948. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Rothschild, Joseph. 1993. Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Selden, Mark. 1995. “Yan’an Communism Reconsidered,” Modern China 21 (1): 8–44.Google Scholar
Service, Robert. 1998. A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smolar, Aleksander. 2009. “Towards ‘Self-limiting Revolution:’ Poland, 1970–1989.” In Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, edited by Roberts, Adam, and Ash, Timothy Garton, 127–143. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, Edgar. 1968. Red Star Over China. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1984. Poland’s Self-limiting Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald G. 1993. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Svolik, Milan. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tarrow, Sidney. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tucker, Robert C. 1992. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Urban, Michael, Igrunov, Vyacheslav, and Mitrokhin, Sergei. 1997. The Rebirth of Politics in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vladisavljević, Nebojša. 2008. Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Vujačić, Veljko. 2015. Nationalism, Myth, and the State in Russia and Serbia: Antecedents of the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilbur, Martin. 1985. The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar