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1789-1792 and 1989-1992: Global Interaction of Social Movements

Patrick Manning
Northeastern University

 
   

Events and Processes in Social Movements

1
    The years 1789 and 1989 resonate deeply in the minds of all those who know something of history.1 These years, symbolized most obviously by the storming of the Bastille in Paris and the opening of the Berlin Wall, entered immediately into the annals of world-historical interpretation. The monuments themselves soon disappeared—dismantled stone by stone, within weeks of the moment they were breached, by a mobilized citizenry. Yet their outlines remain marked on the ground and in the historical record. Most obviously, the dates of July 14, 1789 and November 9, 1989 have served to mark the end of one political era and the beginning of a new one.2
2
    These dates, marking transitions in the political history of major states, retain equal relevance for social history. In the wake of each of those historic dates there followed three or four years of global social upheaval, each leaving a rich heritage of dispute, imagery, and catch-words. It is the echoes of mass popular movements – more than the collapse of one state or another – that sustain 1789 and 1989 in historical memory. In each case social movements sought to challenge states and achieve new power at the expense of organized authority which, often, responded fiercely to retain its dominion. 3
    Social movements proceed according to both local and global dynamics. The campaigns of groups to change their circumstances arise out of local conflicts and realities, but they also build on connections with people in nearby and distant regions. Occasionally the interactions among social movements build to a fever pitch, and a continental, hemispheric or even global social movement coalesces, giving for a time the appearance that it will carry all before it and change the world. The demands and the symbols leap from one region to another, and the movements change shape as they travel. Then, after a time, the encompassing global movement subsides and disaggregates, leaving a mixture of victories and defeats for each of its constituent pieces. The succeeding generations are left to debate what has changed and what has not. Such historical dynamics and processes have appeared from time to time, and especially in 1789 and 1989. 4
    The student of history is often reminded of the difference between events and processes. Events are relatively easy to pinpoint as decisive moments of victory, defeat, birth, death, and transformation. Surrounding the events and giving them significance are the processes of organization, contestation, innovation, challenge, and retaliation. It may be that political history gives primary attention to events while social history gives more attention to processes, but any historical tale relies on both events and processes. Events are brief, though they have moments of varying length (World War I lasted from 1914 to 1918 – was it an event?).3 Processes can vary greatly in time—from the brief process of mobilizing Chinese students to honor the passing of Hu Yaobang in 1989 to the gradual coalescence of the artisan and professional classes in eighteenth-century France.
5
Research on Social Movements
6
    Sociologists and social historians have conducted substantial research relevant to explaining the significance of 1789 and 1989 in world history, using the concepts of the crowd, collective action, and social movements.4 The literature on social movements in particular has become a rich collection of analyses of social contestation in a wide range of historical situations.5 Much of this work focuses on localized communities, yet some of it addresses social movements on a larger scale. The work of macrosociologists Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Jack Goldstone clearly invokes the long-term pattern of development in social movements.6 Even these most macro-oriented of the analysts of social movements have tended, however, to focus on social revolutions as independent cases, rather than emphasize their connections to each other. In recent years, some social historians have explored social movements at transnational levels, emphasizing their long-term patterns of development.7
7
    At levels beyond localized studies of crowds, the primary emphasis of social-movement analysis has been on long-term transformations. For instance, the extraordinary study of rebellious commoners by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, while it includes much close analysis of specific contestations, focuses its principal theses on a transformation in the character of social contestation in the 1790s.8 In the view of Linebaugh and Rediker, from the 1790s forward, social movements would be constrained to work within racial and national lines that had been crossed regularly by earlier activists. A structurally similar argument is that of Eugene Genovese in From Rebellion to Revolution, in which he argued that, by the late eighteenth century, rebellious slaves went beyond the desire to escape slavery individually and launched campaigns to destroy the whole system of slavery.9 For more recent times, Peter Gran proposes that ruling elites have sought to maintain their power by choosing among four sorts of hegemonic paths: this approach, while comparing alternatives and interactions among social movements, gives more attention to long-term strategy than to short-term interaction of social movements.10
8
    The vantage point of world history provides additional perspectives on social movements, because it addresses interactions of various movements. How do social movements occasionally reinforce each other to bring a global coalescence of social contestation? This is a question in short-term analysis at a global scale, and as such it may be balanced against studies of long-term transitions in working-class movements or anti-slavery.11 The argument I advance is that social movements, while based in local and national circumstances, nevertheless interact and transform each other in occasional moments when they gain the power to spill over the limits of locality. These occasional periods of global social interaction may be rather short in duration and may suffer interruption, repression by forces of order, or collapse through internal conflicts, but they nonetheless have a history of importance during the moments of their interconnection.12 The study of social history would benefit from detailed research on social movements in interaction, in the context of the interpretive literature on social movements.
9
    The present study is too concise either to demonstrate rigorously or analyze systematically the linkages and interactions among the numerous social movements of 1789-92 and 1989-92. Instead, it focuses on posing a hypothesis and illustrating it in the classroom. The narratives of each period articulate the hypothesis that social movements grew strong enough in these moments to create a global coalescence of popular contestation, in which social movements interacted and transformed each other in an overall pattern. Rather than test the hypothesis, in this essay I propose ways to document it and explore its implications through classroom exercises.
10
Classroom Exploration of Social Movements
11
    Classroom discussion of the global conflicts of 1789 and 1989 can assist students in building their analytical skills in history and their facility in interpreting large historical processes. The basic materials for this exploration comprise narratives of the unfolding processes and documents of major events. The narrative knits localized events into a world-historical framework. The documents, indicated in notes to the narrative, include declarations, constitutions, and newspaper accounts.
12
    This presentation makes the case for parallels in the movements of 1789-92 and 1989-92. These four-year periods exhibit remarkable similarities, despite their separation by two centuries in time and by immense changes in technology, political culture and social order. My focus, in this comparison, is on identifying the dynamics of change and interaction. The largest part of this essay presents narratives of the two four-year periods, which lay the groundwork for a brief, concluding analysis. The expectation is that students will read the narrative, analyze and discuss it, explore details in the social processes through analysis of documents cited, and develop interpretations of the dynamics of social movements and their occasional interaction. These exercises will provide students with practice in writing interpretations at global as well as local levels.13 13
    The narratives trace two cases of four successive cycles from winter to winter in the northern hemisphere—or four cycles from summer to summer below the equator. The seasons within these four years seem to reinforce the dynamic: spring is a time for the flowering of new movements; winter is a time for crushing the remaining blooms. There is nothing inherent or magical in a four-year cycle, yet this time frame is convenient for comparison of major sets of social movements. I compare 1789-1792 with 1989-1992 because of the fortuitous symmetry of two great movements for democratization.
14
    The moving forces in the narratives include both individuals and groups. Among the individuals are such outstanding figures such as Abbé Sieyès, Toussaint Louverture, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, and many other individuals less prominent but perhaps not less important. The social groups include such vertical strata as the economic elite, the political elite, the middling classes, and the toilers who worked on the land, in workshops, in households, and at sea. Horizontally-defined segments of society include ethnic groups, religious communities, and groups based on occupation or other shared interests.
15
    The two narratives, more descriptive than analytical, list sequences of events: the events help to reveal the processes linking them. The narrative skips around, as narratives do, from place to place, and from local to global patterns of change. Students, in reading it, can divide their energies between absorbing it and analyzing it. The list of events is too compressed for me to verify that one event influenced the next, so it is appropriate for the reader to be skeptical about links among the events. I argue, however, that following up the notes will reveal numerous and detailed additional connections among the events narrated here.14
16
    The notes and references accompanying the narratives include primary documents that provide detail on individual social movements and their connections. For 1789-92 I cite published collections of documents; for 1989-92 I rely on readily available newspaper accounts.15 Some of the documents reveal specifics of local movements; others demonstrate the borrowings and other linkages among social movements in interaction. 17
The Events of 1789-1792
18
    The great events of France in 1789, from the opening of the Estates General in Versailles in May through the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August, were set in motion on July 5, 1788. On that date King Louis XVI acceded to the call of the Parlement of Paris, which represented a nobility determined to achieve some consultation in the reform of taxation and governance, for him to summon a meeting of the Estates General for May of 1789.16
19
    The calling of the Estates General alone ought not have been sufficient to unleash a national revolution, let alone a global wave of revolution. Instead one must look (as historians have long since done) for links among various processes.17 I have chosen to focus on locating social movements based in various regions of the world, each with substantial local roots, whose leaders made public claims, and whose collective actions went beyond the normal limits of political and social institutions. As the profile of each movement became progressively higher, activists in various movements began to identify common interests, to locate a common ideology, and to articulate a common rhetoric. Communication was limited by the speed of ships, carriages, and messengers on foot: from Kingston or Port-au-Prince in the Caribbean to Paris was a voyage of some six to nine weeks, and getting word on to Moscow or Istanbul required at least two weeks. Getting news from Lima (on the Pacific) and Luanda (on Africa's Atlantic coast) meant additional weeks of travel. Yet even at such a modest pace, news could spread across much of the world within three or four months. 20
    Four widely separated social movements of the late eighteenth century brought consequences that appeared to coalesce in 1789. In the first of these, rebellions of peasants against absolutist expansion of taxation and regulation shook Russia in 1773 and Spanish South America in 1780-81. Shays' Rebellion of 1786-87 in Massachusetts was arguably of the same outlook.18 The peasants of France then stepped forward, ready to take matters into their own hands. 21
    A second movement—for creation of formal, written constitutions—brought agreement on a document at a 1787 convention in the U.S., with ratification by the states assured in 1788. The new national administration formed in New York in March of 1789.19 In the booming Brazilian captaincy of Minas Gerais, a well educated group of landowners and professionals planned an uprising in 1788, intending to replicate the North American war of independence and its constitutional form of government.20 More successfully, a new session of the Polish Sejm—the parliament consisting of two houses of nobles and the king—convened in October 1788, and sought to escape dominance of Russia through alliance with Prussia. By January 1789 the Sejm had decided to govern for itself, and to raise an army of 100,000. To finance the army, the Sejm soon instituted the taxation of the lands of the nobility and of clerical estates, and then began discussion of a written constitution.21  22
    Third, an anti-slavery movement spread throughout the English-speaking lands to the lands of adjoining powers. The Anti-Slavery Society, founded in England in 1787, began submitting bills to Parliament calling for abolition of slave trade, and religious groups collected massive petitions for the same purpose.22 Other wings of this movement in France and Denmark were calling for abolition of slave trade and emancipation of slaves; in the United States, slavery had already been abolished in several northern states.23 On its formation, the Anti-Slavery Society had brought to the public Josiah Wedgwood's medallion, "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" to symbolize the oppression of slavery. In July of 1789, from drawings of the slave ship "Brookes," the committee created an image showing the tight placement of hundreds of captives during the Middle Passage. The latter graphic was especially effective: it helped collect thousands of signatures on petitions to Parliament in England, and it also created a stir in France, where the Société des Amis des Noirs, created in 1787, supported the rights of free people of color in the colonies. Also in 1789, the former slave Olaudah Equiano published his autobiographical Interesting Narrative, which became another powerful document in the antislavery campaign.24 23
    Fourth, a movement of artisans and mechanics arose to claim liberty and equality. The skilled artisans of economies growing in Europe and the Americas had been expressing demands for political liberties equal to those of landed aristocracies. One such group in Bahia, Brazil, planned an armed rising in 1798: they saw themselves as "the Republican Bahian people," but have become known in history as "the Tailors' Revolt."25 24
    Thus, when the Estates General convened on May 5, 1789, delegates were prepared to debate the place of the various social strata in France (as prompted for instance by the pamphlet of Abbé Sieyès, published in January, "What is the Third Estate?").26 But they were also prepared to debate the abolition of slavery and slave trade, the formal drafting of constitutions as initiated in the United States, and the formal recognition of the rights of citizens. The small delegations from the French colonies on every continent brought their own concerns into the discussion. The range of the debates of the time, in addition to the economic difficulties of the moment, helps to explain why delegates to the Estates General took the initiative of declaring themselves to be the National Assembly on June 17, and swore on June 20 that members would continue their work until they had completed a constitution. The July 14 seizure of the Bastille raced ahead of that logic in a sort of popular sovereignty.27 This event determined unmistakably that a revolution was in course. 25
    In July the Great Fear (meaning peasant fear of brigands) spread through the French countryside: peasants rose with fear and hostility toward the nobles, rebelling against paying their taxes and tithes, and destroying documents recording their feudal obligations. The nobles, in turn, found that their representatives in the Constituent Assembly (as the National Assembly had renamed itself) had formally given up their aristocratic privileges in August. In one of the most remembered events, the Constituent Assembly promulgated on August 26, 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.28 Remarkably, France adopted this declaration at almost exactly the moment of the defining debates over the Bill of Rights in the United States, which were to add ten amendments to the new U.S. constitution. While the general dimensions of these rights had developed out of the debates in 1788 over the constitution, James Madison's June 1789 proposal was debated and revised into August and adopted formally by Congress in September of 1789.29 26
     In September of 1789 the Polish Sejm appointed a commission to draft a constitution. By November, delegates from Polish towns asked for admission to the Sejm, alongside the nobility, and their request was granted. When in the fall of 1789 the Constituent Assembly in France confiscated property of the Catholic Church, and proclaimed a civil constitution of the clergy, it was treading ground already cleared by the Polish Sejm.30 27
    By the beginning of 1790, the events of 1789 resonated unmistakably among those known as "patriots," who claimed devotion to the cause of their community. In January a band of patriots in the Austrian Netherlands declared independence as the "United States of Belgium," but was easily put down. Yet also in January Joseph II of Austria gave way to popular demand for reforms in Hungary, and returned the crown of St. Stephen to Buda.31 Across the Atlantic in French St.-Domingue, a colonial assembly convened in St. Marc and made claims for home rule. In Paris, a committee on colonies began to discuss the abolition of slavery in the colonies, or alternatively the possibility of separate constitutions for the colonies. Free people of color, as numerous and sometimes as wealthy as the whites of the colonies, struggled for equal rights at home in the colonies and in Paris. In October 1790, Vincent OgŽ, a lawyer and leader of the free people of color, landed in the north of St.-Domingue with American arms and a call for elections by all free men; he then took up arms but was soon captured and given a long, public execution.32 28
    The tide of social movement seemed still to be rising in 1791. William Wilberforce brought an anti-slave-trade bill to the British Parliament, gained 88 votes in support against 163 in opposition, and vowed to continue the struggle. On May 3 the Polish Sejm adopted a constitution: the resulting constitutional monarchy, a compromise between monarchical and republican interests, brought a moment of national unity.33 The king of France, in contrast, chose in June to flee the country, but was seized at Varennes and brought back to Paris. 29
    In the north of St.-Domingue, as the factions of free people continued their struggle for dominance, Boukman Dutty presided over a late-night meeting of slaves at Bois Caïman on August 21.34 The slave uprising resulting from Boukman's proclamation succeeded in changing the relations of power all around the Atlantic. By November, French troops and planters had killed Boukman had reversed the initial advances of the rebels. A delegation from Paris negotiated an agreement with several rebel leaders, but the provincial assembly at Le Cap rejected it, and the struggle continued. 30
    By 1792, black sailors arriving at Salvador in Bahia were reputed to have worn medallions celebrating the slave uprising.35 Word spread similarly to every coast of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. We cannot yet document the spread or impact of the news in African ports, but sailors always carried news, and sailors on slave ships usually included Africans knowledgeable in local languages. The contemporaneous critique of the enslavement of Muslims, by Shehu Usuman dan Fodio in what is now northern Nigeria, may thus have resonated with news of Caribbean struggles.36 31
    In early 1792 the move to abolish slave trade appeared to be gaining irreversible momentum. In March the Danish government announced that slave trade by Danish subjects would be abolished in ten years. In Britain, nearly 600 anti-slave-trade petitions circulated in 1792, with as many as 400,000 signatures. In response to this unprecedented campaign, in April the British House of Commons voted 230 to 85 to abolish slave trade by a process to be completed as early as 1796. But the House of Lords, largely opposed to the bill, was able to delay further consideration.37 32
    National competition thus cut across the ideas of universal human rights. Threats of war arose as early at August of 1791, when Austria and Prussia threatened France through their Declaration of Pillnitz.38 Within France, legions began to form out of refugees from various parts of Europe, preparing for an opportunity to change regimes in their homelands. In April of 1792 a Belgian legion formed, followed in July by a Batavian legion, then by a legion of Germans and one composed of a mix of Swiss, Savoyards, and Piedmontese. On April 20 the French Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria, and fighting began soon thereafter.39 33
    In May 1792 Russian troops, rested after their successful seizure of the Black Sea coast from the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1791, entered Poland to repress the constitutional regime that had been created a year earlier. The Poles put up an unexpectedly strong resistance, and it took until August 1793 for the Russians to force them to accept the second partition, cutting the size of the country in half.40 34
    On August 10, 1792, the Commune of Paris led an insurrection that effectively abolished the monarchy and led soon thereafter to the election of the National Convention by universal manhood suffrage, and on September 22 to the proclamation of the French Republic. In December 1792 Louis XVI was formally accused of treason. On January 16, 1793, the king was executed by guillotine at Place Louis XV (later named Place de la Concorde).41 35
    This act of regicide at once confirmed the path of the republic and ensured the firmest of opposition by monarchs everywhere. Events continued for the coming years within the parameters set during these four years. The year 1793, the fifth year of this revolutionary upheaval, brought the Committee for Public Safety, the Terror, British landings in several territories of the West Indies, the formal abolition of slavery in St.-Domingue, and the collapse in the campaign against slave trade in Britain.42 In 1794 and thereafter, a renewed series of revolutionary movements arose in Poland, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Grenada, and England.43 The Polish insurrection of 1794 advanced revolutionary rhetoric including the freeing of the serfs, but met with suppression and the third partition—the Russian, Prussian and Austrian annexations that snuffed out Poland's existence as an independent state for over a century.44 Most of the uprisings were conspiracies rather than mass movements, and they had little hope of success. After 1792, revolution and social change moved ahead only where it was carried by force of arms. Still, the language of the rights of man, the forms of the republic, and the ideals of liberation from oppressive rule (by absolutist monarchs, feudal aristocrats, or slave owners) continued to echo widely. The images and rhetoric of these movements became enshrined in the minds of those hoping to change the world. 36
    The events of 1789 brought about the confluence of a set of social movements that found ways to provide mutual support for each other during at least three tumultuous years. The new ideas and institutions generated by the social movements of 1789 included large-scale petitions to governments, public festivals and popular iconography, the formation of national citizen armies, the expansion of constitutional government, and further codification of the ideas of citizenship, republicanism, and anti-monarchism. These social movements, through the vigor of their claims, brought reaction and counter-movements from those defending the regime of property and existing states, and they created a growing anxiety and debilitating caution among those who felt caught between opposing sides as the conflicts became more severe. The links among the collaborating social movements had begun to decline by the end of 1792, and declined further thereafter. Throughout the remainder of the 1790s there were numerous movements of rebels and republicans for social change, but in most cases the protagonists were on their own rather than being able to call on the support of allies. 37
The Events of 1989-1992  
     The great events of 1989 may be documented through contemporary newspapers as well as through original documents and historical analyses.45 The rising tides of popular protest began to gain wide recognition – and to form links with each other - through the demonstrations of Chinese students in favor of democratic reforms. The Chinese movement began in April as a memorial upon the death of Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, who had been sympathetic to reform efforts, but it soon expanded to call for immediate changes.46 In this well-publicized mass movement, students, professionals, and workers combined in an effort to bring change to state policy through public appeal. 38
    As in 1789, these events of 1989 gained in recognition because they precipitated a confluence of several different types of social movement and the formation of transnational links of sympathy and mutual support.47 The first such social movement was decolonization, which had been largely successful by 1989, but for which numerous peoples could still claim rights to self-determination. A second set of social movements, carrying forth a similar logic, called for recognition of ethnic rights and offered a critique of racist ideology: these were generally calls for full citizenship rather than for independence. 39
    A third social movement was reflected in the widespread distress with the autocratic power of governments: this campaign against government regulation had various sorts of resonance at all levels of society. Wage workers, while rarely at the cutting edge of this wave of social movements, joined the rising movements insofar as they could gain recognition of their rights. Most prominent of all the engaged social groupings were the professionals, including university students – well educated, holding or seeking positions in government, in large firms, or as independent professionals. They sought a social order based on merit and established procedures rather than on the arbitrary power of political elites and police forces, and sought alliances with all other social fractions who might accept such a program. 40
    The tendency of various social movements to coalesce grew as the opportunities for advance appeared more promising. Each movement built its hopes on contemporary changes in other regions where governments were withdrawing from unpopular positions. Such changes at the beginning of 1989 included the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, South African withdrawal from its long occupation of Namibia, Vietnamese withdrawal of troops from Cambodia, and the agreement of the communist-led government in Poland to elections that would surely cause it to step down.48 The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was especially important in indicating that change was possible, but all of these changes reinforced one another. Earlier political events laying the groundwork for encouraging popular contestation had been those of Iran in the 1970s and events of the 1980s in the Philippines, Haiti, and South Africa. 41
    Throughout May of 1989, print and electronic media around the world showed Chinese demonstrators using fax machines and telephones to circumvent government efforts to cut off their communication, and governmental caution about repressing the demonstrations. In the waning days of the movement, a ten-meter-tall, styrofoam "Goddess of Democracy" was sent from Shanghai to Tiananmen. The demonstrations were repressed on June 3 and 4.49 42
    But June 4 was also the date of the Polish election, in which the adherents of Solidarity, the opposition trade union and political party, gained a majority of parliamentary seats.51 The combination of these two processes helped unleash a second wave of great events in 1989, in Europe. The growing efforts of citizens of the communist-led German Democratic Republic (GDR) to leave their country during the summer led the Hungarian government, also communist-led, to announce in August that it would begin granting asylum to GDR citizens requesting it. On September 10 Hungary opened the border to Austria, so that GDR citizens could move freely to Austria and West Germany.52 Within the GDR, Monday evening meetings in Leipzig of those calling for reforms grew, ultimately exceeding 100,000. In Czechoslovakia a forum of critical activists took shape.53 43
    Parallel events were unfolding in a third wave in southern Africa, though from an opposite end of the political spectrum. Under United Nations protection, resistance leader Sam Nujoma returned to Namibia in September after years of exile, to campaign for the presidency.54 At the end of August P. W. Botha resigned as president of South Africa; his replacement, F. W. DeKlerk, promised reforms, and in October he released African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu from prison.55 44
With the fortieth anniversary of the GDR in October, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev visited Berlin but expressed his critique of the government; Erich Honecker, head of the GDR government, soon resigned.56 When Egon Krenz's new government issued a revised set of travel regulations on November 9, large numbers of GDR citizens showed up at the frontier of East and West Berlin, and officials simply opened the gates. They did not close again, and the wall linking the gates soon was chipped to pieces in the weeks and months thereafter. When police in Prague took the contrasting approach of attacking a group of demonstrators eight days later, the doom of the communist government of Czechoslovakia was sealed immediately.57 45
     It was under these circumstances that presidential elections took place in Brazil in November and Chile in December. Both countries were recovering cautiously from periods of military rule. Patricio Aylwin, the moderate victor in Chile, immediately set up a modest Truth and Reconciliation Commission to report on the period of military rule.58  46
     Large-scale violence broke out in two regions in December: in Romania, where the government and the security police sought to repress any public protests, and in Panama, where the U.S. government occupied the country and seized president Manuel Noriega, a former ally, on charges of drug-running. Almost all the events of Romania, including the capture and execution of Nicolae Ceaucescu, head of state and of the communist party, were recorded on videotape.59 47
     On February 2, 1990, South African president de Klerk announced that Nelson Mandela (the African National Congress leader imprisoned, like Sisulu, since 1964) would be released from prison. On February 11 Mandela walked out of Pollsmoor Prison.60 In a whirlwind of activity, Mandela spoke first to a crowd in Cape Town, then traveled through South Africa, around the African continent, and in May and June to Europe and North America. In Katmandu, Nepal, political activists celebrated Mandela's release in the streets on February 12, and thereafter demanded reconstitution of Nepal's parliament, which had not met for years.61 48
     A sixth chapter in democratization movements opened in the Republic of Benin, one of many African and Asian countries where IMF structural adjustment policies had led to dramatic cutbacks in the public sector. A threatened general strike was averted on December 8, 1989, by the announcement that a national conference would be convened to address the country's outstanding issues. Television screens, meanwhile, were dominated by Romanian civil strife.62 49
     From February 19 through 28 the national conference of Benin met in Cotonou. In a process that echoed the Estates General of 1789 in its decisions and in its elegant and impassioned rhetoric, delegates were selected from a panoply of constituencies, the conference declared itself sovereign, achieved the acquiescence of President KŽrŽkou in its sovereignty, and set up an interim High Commission which would plan for a new constitution and national elections. Videotapes of the conference circulated, and immediately the demand for national conferences arose in most French-speaking African countries and in such English-speaking countries as Zambia.63 50
     By October of 1990, a constitution had been adopted and elections scheduled in Nepal, elections in parliaments of the Soviet republics brought confirmation of Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia, Germany had been unified, and president Wojciech Jaruzelski had stepped down in Poland, enabling a December special election that brought Lech Walensa to the presidency.64 On the other hand, while parliamentary elections were held in Myanmar, the military government declined to convene parliament; in Algeria the government prepared to crack down on the Islamic Front that had won in municipal elections, protests against the government of Liberia turned into civil war, and the U.S. broke off the recently opened discussions with the Palestine Liberation Organization.65 51
Most centrally, on August 2 Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait and president Hussein of Iraq announced its annexation.66 The U.S. responded by building a consensus at the United Nations, insisting on Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, imposing sanctions and preparing a military alternative. In November the U.S. unilaterally doubled the size of its forces in the Persian Gulf.67 Meanwhile, as the U.S. focused on its troop buildup in the Persian Gulf, the elections scheduled in Haiti took a surprising turn. With the U.S.-supported World Bank economist Jean Bazin poised to win with little opposition, Jean-Bertrand Aristide entered the race at the last moment and won an overwhelming victory. Aristide, a former Catholic priest with an outlook based on liberation theology, had launched the Lavalas ("avalanche") movement among the common people of countryside and city.68 52
     The January Gulf War itself can be seen as a moment further chilling the movement for democracy. While it was a statement of democracy in reversing Iraq's occupation of a sovereign nation, and an implementation of a momentary global political consensus, it was also a demonstration of great-power coercive action and therefore of the limits of popular movements.69 Yet popular complaints against governmental authority continued. The widespread broadcasting of a videotape of the police beating of motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles on March 3, 1991, confirmed common impressions about police brutality.70 Later in March, the armed assault of police in Mali on a group of mothers and children who were demonstrating against the government led to insurrection, overthrow of the government, and convening of a national conference by a social movement that was already victorious.71 53
     The place of the Soviet Union in this complex set of developments was at best precarious. In December 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's closest ally, had resigned as foreign minister, and on March 31 the Georgian Republic, Shevardnadze's home, voted for independence. Gorbachev sought to restrain public demonstrations, but his efforts only brought larger demonstrations in Moscow.72 In April of 1991 Boris Yeltsin gained powers to govern Russia by decree. The effort to form a new union of nine republics plus the central government did not halt the slide of power to the level of republics. A major coal strike Russia was resolved only by transferring control of the mines from the Soviet to the Russian government, and the latter arranged a settlement in May. Now Yeltsin was ready to present himself in a popular vote, and won confirmation as president of Russia with 60% of the vote on June 12.73 54
     In the French-speaking African nations, the dance of national conferences continued, with "civil society" calling for convening and empowerment of such conferences, and "the power" straining to substitute party conferences and quick elections for open-ended conferences.74 In Ethiopia, militarized through civil war and Cold War, popular discontent took the form of a military rising, and president Mengistu fled the country on May 21. On the same day, the two contending military and political parties in Angola, MPLA and UNITA, agreed to national elections at a conference brokered by Portugal.75 55
     In June the last Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and on July 1 the Warsaw Pact disbanded. But the opposition within the Soviet leadership to Gorbachev's acquiescence to change solidified, and on August 17 Gennady Yanaev announced that Gorbachev had been replaced.76 By August 21, the coup had crumbled for lack of public support, and Gorbachev had returned to Moscow. On August 24 he called on the Communist Party to dissolve itself. Within two months the Soviet Union ceased to exist; its resources and powers were divided among the republics.77 This dissolution of a powerful confederation and of the Cold War itself took place, for the moment, peaceably. 56
     As the strength of popular movements for new democratic rights ebbed, previously powerful governmental and military authorities were able to reassert themselves: the military displaced President Aristide of Haiti in September 1991, and in October, president Eyadema of Togo and military forces under his control launched the process of reversing the results of that country's national conference, ultimately regaining full administrative power.78 57
     In January 1992 the United Nations debated how its organization might respond to the changes in the balance of world power. Despite the substantial campaigns for establishment of new permanent memberships on the Security Council, on behalf of Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and even Nigeria, the remaining four of the "big five" of the Security Council moved rapidly to pass the Soviet seat on to Russia in order to prevent creation of any new permanent memberships.79 58
     The breakup of Yugoslavia followed that of the Soviet Union. Slovenia and Croatia announced their secession from Yugoslavia in June, 1991. Serbian elements of the Yugoslav army then began incursions into Croatia, to link up to Serbian populations. Following the lead of Germany, the European Community nations recognized the governments of Slovenia and Croatia in January, 1992, and of Bosnia-Herzegovina in April. Hardening communal boundaries led suddenly to full-scale war and genocidal killings, with the military struggle centered on the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. In May the United Nations declared an embargo on the remains of Yugoslavia, but the fighting throughout the region and especially at Sarajevo continued throughout 1992.80 59
     In this atmosphere of national dissolution, a campaign for the division of Czechoslovakia developed in mid-1992, and the country split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the beginning of 1993. Nationalistic "skinheads" in Germany supported Neo-Nazi demonstrations and attacked long-term German residents of Turkish ancestry. Famine and fratricidal strife in Somalia brought another U.N. resolution and U.S. occupying force. In December, Hindus destroyed a major mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya.81 60
     The June 1992 global conference on the environment in Rio brought a substantial consensus on major issues, but the big powers declined to cut back on their pollution. Soon after the conference, the newly elected Brazilian president Collor was impeached for corruption, and he resigned at the end of December. In contrast, Peruvian president Fujimoro had suspended the constitution in April, but his agents' success in capturing Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path rebels, won him back some support.82 61
     The progress of a variety of different processes gradually broke the links among the social movements. The exercise of military force in Iraq by the U.S. and its allies punished a renegade state, but it also made clear that governments retained great coercive power. The political counteroffensive of governments and military forces, as in francophone Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, limited the power of movements for national reform. Processes of national dissolution ø in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ø focused all concerned on local issues. Even the process of national construction in Germany caused a local focus to displace cosmopolitan concerns. The desire for "democracy" may have remained as strong in 1992 as in 1989, but the hope of finding allies in achieving democratic reform had declined significantly. 62
    The transformation of South Africa – in some ways the most remarkable of all the political and social changes -- alternated between confrontation and conciliation. White voters in March approved a referendum supporting de Klerk's negotiations for a transition in power, but Inkatha killings of ANC supporters began in June. By the end of 1992, the ANC had admitted instances of torture by its forces and had agreed to share power with the Nationalists, and de Klerk had removed known assassins from the military. In the years thereafter South Africa was able to contain its tensions to make a largely successful transition to a broadly-based, constitutional government.83 To the north, in the highlands of Central Africa, similar tensions went uncontained, and from 1994 the most extreme cases of genocide of the decade brought years of death in the region and avoidance from the rest of the world.84 63
    With the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1992, global polarization changed its shape. From a contest of two great camps, with much of the world looking both ways along borders between them, global relations became reoriented around a single great power: regions and social groups outside the United States distinguished themselves no longer into sharp camps and the "non-aligned," but in gradations of distance and alienation from the hegemonic power. In this substantially different shape of the world, the various social movements that had arisen and connected with each other now turned primarily to local issues, and allowed their communications to diminish. In the U.S. and the other wealthy, capitalist countries, social movements did not develop during the years 1989-1992 to the degree that they had flourished from 1968 to 1970. Elements of the general public in wealthy countries did express wide sympathy for social movements based in other parts of the world from 1989 to 1992, though without deep involvement. The main target for mobilization in the wealthy countries was opposition to the Gulf War of 1991, but this movement rapidly subsided with the success of the American war effort. It was unclear how long this unipolar world would persist: in the era after 1792, Napoleon Bonaparte held the greatest political power in Europe and the Atlantic; in the era after 1992, American presidents held the greatest power in the world. The parallel, though by no means exact, may be instructive. 64
Interpreting Processes in Social Movements  
     We turn now to comments on the processes linking the events described above. For students to get a fuller sense of the linkages among events and processes, it may be most helpful to read the narratives of the events, then read this discussion of the processes, then read the narratives again. The analytical concern here is with the weekly, seasonal, and annual interactions of social movements — how they reinforce each other either positively or negatively in the short term. What follows is a set of considerations that fall far short of a theory, but provide an exploratory list of relevant factors and patterns. 65
    To begin with, social movements draw on pre-existing conflicts and debates that can flare up with any new irritation or shift in the balance of influences. In 1789 these included debates on levels of taxation, monarchical powers, aristocratic privileges, an emerging vision of national identity and destiny, the line between freedom and slavery, and the rights of individuals. In 1989 the equivalent debates included rights to self-expression, freedom from government restraint, recognition of individual rights, renunciation of racial and ethnic discrimination, and recognition of communities. 66
     Second, some major change or conflict brought by human agency, most often in a distant region, helps to launch social groups into activity. Such mobilizations in identification and solidarity with new-found brothers and sisters are in contrast to movements of sympathy for people in other regions who have suffered such acts of God as floods, famines, and earthquakes. While the latter typically brings outpourings of humanitarian support intended for the victims, the former tends to bring the articulation of parallel demands presented to local authorities. 67
Third, a language of identification and common cause serves to link social movements to each other. The metaphors and slogans work better if they are not too specific, so that the participants in each social situation can fill in their own details yet retain identification with those far away who must fill in quite different details. In 1789 "the rights of man" and "abolition of feudal privilege" worked well; in 1989 "democracy" and "multiparty elections" worked equally well. 68
     For social movements to gain an interactive momentum, several of them must achieve mobilization of large numbers of people outside the established institutions and modes of behavior. The demonstrations and barricades of Paris, the petitions of the anti-slave-trade campaign, the uprising of Haitian slaves, and the many public demonstrations of 1989 and thereafter provided signals of the strength of feeling behind them. As an additional factor, migrations and visits of people among the various places involved in social conflicts served to heighten a sense of mutual identification as well as to exchange information. More broadly, each social movement became more effective to the degree that it was able to enunciate its goals as serving the needs of broad communities and of humanity itself. In addition to words, the movements needed to enunciate their goals through visual symbols: still images in 1789 and videotapes in 1989. 69
    Finally, the communication among social movements involved the development and exchange of models for policy and behavior. The convening of assemblies, the taking of oaths, the very institutions of government and warfare — these were passed among each of the great parties on all sides of these transregional social struggles. New institutions arising in the wake of 1789 were the citizen army and national identity. Meanwhile, two new types of institutions arose in the time after 1989 to address the aftermath of the conficts of the era: international tribunals created under the aegis of the World Court to prosecute war crimes on three continents, and commissions of truth and reconciliation set up by national governments in Latin America and South Africa. These institutions could not have functioned in the 1790s because the ideologies of nationhood and citizenship were not then sufficiently developed. In the 1990s the national commissions of truth and reconciliation seem to have functioned more effectively than the international tribunals: in South Africa especially, but in Latin American nations as well, these commissions appear to have made progress toward social reconciliation that, previously, could only be achieved with the passage of time. 70
     In some cases, interactions among social movements could take place through direct and organizational contact. The movement of Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette from the U.S. to France are the most obvious examples of such links; the travels of Nelson Mandela and young Chinese protestors after 1989 had a parallel impact. But in addition, movements could become linked in popular imagination. The activists in one movement needed no more than the knowledge that another and apparently similar movement was in progress in order to gain courage, audacity, and imagination. In this knowledge, the sense of immediacy seems to have been important. One could take inspiration from past movements, as many millenarian and religious movements have done, but it seems that there was an extra benefit from responding to a parallel movement taking place in the same real time. 71
     The story of linkages among social movements is not limited, however, to the accelerating connections of the early stage. One must also analyze the eventual subsiding of individual social movements and the process of delinking that succeeded their earlier combination. The decline of coordinated and mutually reinforcing movements can be explained in part by their various defeats and divisions at the hand of their opposition forces. It could also be that participants in the various movements found that their earlier alliances were based on illusory commonalities, and that there was no common substance beneath the rhetoric of commonality. 72
    But in addition to these arguments that the constituent social movements were defeated and that they were misdirected, one may also argue that they evolved, and as they evolved their alliances shifted and often were suspended. To put it within the perspective of activists in a given social movement, there were patterns and factors that made them focus on their distinctiveness and their locality, as well as patterns emphasizing their universality. For instance, while Germans of 1989 focused on the universal message of liberation – conveyed by the opening of the Berlin Wall, the achievement of freedom of movement, and the dismantling of the secret police – Germans of 1991 had become focused on the intensely national project of unifying two states and determining the degree of equality among the expanded body of citizens in the unified state. After the high points of 1791, the Poles lost the inevitable war with Russia and with it their independence; the Americans concentrated on consolidation of their new republic. 73
    It is not necessarily the case, therefore, that once people learn to adopt a broad, international perspective they will maintain it. Rwanda and Burundi gave every appearance of participating in the African continental expansion of the rights of citizens until 1993 and especially 1994, when factions defined by ethnicity suddenly became the dominant frame of reference. 74
Conclusion  
    The periodic coalescence of social movements creates moments of great symbolism and perhaps institutional change in world history. These linkages of social movements look very different when explored in global rather than national context, and when compared to the rather different character of the long times separating such occasional linkage of social outbursts. 75
     The comparison of narratives of 1789 and 1989 shows remarkable parallels. It suggests that the worldwide interactions of 1989-1992 emerged not only from the specifics of the Cold War and decolonization, but included patterns far more general. In 1789, while communications were far slower and technology far more elementary than in 1989, patterns of inspiration, imitation, and mobilization were remarkable in the degree to which they anticipated the struggles that broke out two centuries later. But one could just as well address the periods 1968-1971, 1848-1851, 1917-1920, or even 1905-1909 or 1829-1832, each of which brought analogous confluences of localized social movements into global clamors for social change. The alternation between local concerns and broad human identity appears, in this perspective, as a recurring pattern in human affairs. 76

 

Biographical Note: Patrick Manning is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Notes

1 This essay was presented in an earlier version at the American Historical Association conference on "Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-oceanic Exchanges," Washington, DC, February 15, 2003. The author expresses thanks for comments from Adam McKeown, Heather Streets, and two reviewers for this journal.

2 Major works on the era of 1789 include Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, trans. Alan Forrest and Colin Jones (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Major works on the era of 1989 are more difficult to identify so soon after the events, but among those that have gained wide attention are Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Viking, 1993).

3 François Furet refers to the French Revolution as "an event," and builds on that logic in his chapter, "The French Revolution is Over." Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ix, 1.

4 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). Charles Tilly distinguishes two categories of explanations of collective action: "tension-release" explanations and social-movement explanations. Louise A. Tilly and Charles Tilly, eds., Class Conflict and Collective Action (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981).

5 The most distinguished journal in which this literature appears is Le Mouvement Social.

6 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Skocpol has been most explicit in her focus on "macroscopic comparisons" of revolutions as an appropriate way to investigate social movements at the global level. An early work, much discussed over the years, is Eric Williams Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

7 Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). For a more informal but still thought-provoking study of a later time period, see Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).

8 Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra.

9 Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Rebellions in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1979).

10 Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

11 I argue that analysis of social movements at this global and interactive level qualifies, in addition to other frameworks, as a legitimate and fruitful frame of analysis in social history. Other approaches: local studies, national studies, comparative studies of national experiences. What is important to me is to make the case that each of these enormous episodes took the form of an interaction and coalescence of separate social movements, and that each of the movements as well as their overall combination underwent transformation as a result of their connections.

12 For a good analysis of interaction among social movements at a more localized level, see Michael Biggs, "Strikes as Sequences of Interaction: The American Strike Wave of 1886," Social Science History 26 (2002), 583-617. Anthony Oberschall, in an attempt to locate short-term interactions among the social movements of 1968, concluded negatively that the events of 1968 in China, Czechoslovakia, France, and the U.S. were linked to each other only in that all had inherited the consequences of World War II. Oberschall, Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests, and Identities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 320-323.

13 Student narratives at global levels may trace large-scale patterns, specific turning points, cases where symbols and slogans travel widely, and cases where social movements lose external connections and become isolated in their locale.

14 In the terms I have used elsewhere, this is an "exploratory comparison," an exercise in academic brainstorming to seek out, for both of the two great movements considered, interactions within them and comparisons between them. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 315-316.

15 An alternative approach to teaching the social movements of 1789-92 and 1989-92 would be for the teacher to rely mainly on such primary documents rather than on the narrative.

16 The Estates General had last met in 1614. For a venerable but effective collection of documents on revolutionary France, see Paul Beik, ed., The French Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). A more detailed collection, with documents in French, is J. M. Roberts and R. C. Cobb, eds., French Revolution Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966).

17 For an emphasis on economic conditions, see Soboul, French Revolution; for an emphasis on elite frustrations, see Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); for an emphasis on political culture, see Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class.

18 Alexander Pushkin's nineteenth-century History of the Pugachev Rebellion is now available in English, translated by Paul Debreczeny (Downham Market, UK: Norfolk, 2000); for a recent study in English on Tupac Amaru, see Ward Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); on Shays's Rebellion, see Leonard L. Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

19 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: Norton, 1972); David P. Thelen, ed., The Constitution and American Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

20 The conspiracy was betrayed, and the leaders arrested and tried, with the unfolding events of the French Revolution and Haitian uprising as backdrop. Maxwell, Kenneth R., "The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of Luso-Brazilian Empire," in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 107-117.

21 On the role of Hugo Kollataj, a leading noble reformer in the period 1787-1792, see Joan S. Skurnowicz, "Polish Szlachta Democracy at the Crossroads, 1795-1831," in M. B Biskupski, and James S. Pula, Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays and Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 75-81.

22 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 67-78.

23 Svend E. Green-Pederson, "The Economic Considerations Behind the Danish Abolition of the Negro Slave Trade," in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 399-418; Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

24 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Olaudah Equiano, The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Robert Allison (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995 [first published 1789]).

25 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 106-107, 150-176; Maxwell, "Generation of the 1790s," 119-121.

26 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le tiers état? (Paris, 1789), reprinted in Beik, French Revolution, 16-37.

27 Soboul, French Revolution, 132-133, 137-140. Schama, Citizens, 356-357, 359, 399-404.

28 On the Great Fear, Soboul, French Revolution, 144-147; Schama, Citizens, 429-436. On the August 4, 1789, session of the National Assembly, Beik, French Revolution, 86-94. On the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, ibid., 94-97.

29 John P. Kaminski and Richard B. Bernstein, "The Bill of Rights, 1791," in Stephen L. Schechter, ed., Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 423-440.

30 On the Polish Sejm, Skurnowicz, "Polish Szlachta Democracy," 75-78. On church property in France, Schama, Citizens, 483-491. On the civil constitution of the clergy, Beik, French Revolution, 136-142.

31 Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 90; Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat, trans. Ann Major (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 178.

32 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 2001); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2002).

33 For the text of the constitution, Biskupski and Pula, Polish Democratic Thought, 168-177.

34 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 81-92.

35 João José Reis, personal communication.

36 Humphrey John Fisher, "A Muslim William Wilberforce? The Sokoto jihad as anti-slavery crusade: an enquiry into historical causes," in Serge Daget, ed., De la Traite à l'esclavage (Paris: Société française d'histoire d'Outre-Mer, 1988), II:537-555.

37 Green-Pederson, "Danish Abolition"; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 79-87. In addition, Drescher notes that boom and bust in trade affected British parliamentary votes on slave trade. Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 114-119.

38 For the Declaration of Pillnitz, Roberts and Cobb, French Revolution, I:439.

39 Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 79; Soboul, French Revolution, 240-241. The Legislative Assembly had taken office in October 1791.

40 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark. D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 247-251.

41 Soboul, French Revolution, 248-251, 272-273, 282-285, 290-292; Schama, Citizens, 611-618, 641, 646-647, 649-671. The August 1792 insurrection came in reaction to weak prosecution of the war against Austria and Prussia; in this era the hymn "The Marseillaise" gained popularity.

42 Soboul, French Revolution, 304; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 46-48; Schama, Citizens, 755-756, 762-764; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 125-126, 175-176; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 147-149.

43 For instance, on Pennsylvania, Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); on Louisiana, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century ((Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992), 343-374; on Ireland, Cathal Poirteir, ed., The Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1998); on England, Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 248-287.

44 Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 91-94.

45 Most references below are to the New York Times, for which the convenient index is widely available. The index will enable students exploring these events to find additional articles for surrounding dates.

46 New York Times (hereafter NYT) 15 April 1989,1-10; 18 April 1989, A-3; NYT 19 April 1989, A-1; NYT 20 April 1989, A-8.

47 Manning, Patrick, "Songs of Democracy: The World, 1989-1992" manuscript in preparation.

48 On Afghanistan, NYT 4 January 1989, A-1; 16 February 1989, A-1. On Namibia, NYT 14 December 1988, A-1; 2 April 1989, 1-1. On Poland, NYT 6 April 1989, A-1.

49 On martial law and the response, NYT 20 May 1989, A-1; 21 May 1989, 1-1; 30 May 1989, A-1. On the "Goddess of Democracy," NYT 30 May 1989, A-1. On repression of the demonstration, NYT 4 June 1989, 1-1.

50 NYT 14 June 1989, A-1; 17 June 1989, A-1; 23 June 1989, A-1.

51 NYT 6 June 1989, A-6.

52 NYT 6 August 1989, 1-3; 25 August 1989, A-30; 2 September 1989, A-5; 11 September 1989, A-1.

53 On East Germany, NYT 10 October 1989, A-1; 24 October 1989, A-14; 31 October 1989, A-17. On Czechoslovakia, NYT 23 May 1989, A-8; NYT 30 August 1989, A-3.

54 NYT 15 September 1989, A-3; 25 September 1989, A-3.

55 NYT 15 August 1989, A-1; 13 August 1989, 1-1; 11 October 1989, A-1; 16 October 1989, A-8. Sisulu had been imprisoned 26 years before his release on October 15. The African National Congress, founded in 1913, was the principal opposition group but had been banned by the governing National Party since the 1950s.

56 NYT 7 October 1989, 1-5; NYT 19 October 1989, A-1.

57 NYT 10 November 1989, A-1. On Czechoslovakia, see NYT 18 November 1989, A-7; 25 November 1989, A-1.

58 On Brazil, NYT 20 November 1989, A-3; 18 December 1989, A-3. On Chile, NYT 15 December 1989, A-1; 3 June 1990, 1-6. On Argentina, NYT 15 May 1989, A-1; on Uruguay, NYT 27 November 1989, A-6.

59 On Panama, NYT 4 October 1989, A-1; 21 December 1989, A-25; 4 January 1990, A-1. On Romania, 18 December 1989, A-14; 23 December 1989, A-1; 26 December 1989, A-1.

60 NYT 3 February 1990, A-1; 12 February 1990, A-16. In recalling this event, some have chosen to give emphasis to De Klerk's February 2 speech, while others have chosen to emphasize Mandela's actual release on February 11.

61 On Mandela's travels, NYT 12 March 1990, A-6; 5 June 1990, A-6; 21 June 1990, A-1; 5 July 1990, A-3. On Nepal, NYT 18 February 1990, 1-23; 20 February 1990, A-3. No equivalent to Mandela's travel was possible in 1789, though Tom Paine traveled considerably.

62 Benin was one of several "Afro-Marxist" African nations, with formally Marxist governing parties, allied to the Soviet Union or China. NYT 12 December 1989, 1-9; Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1995, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 192-194.

63 Among the common characteristics of at least three national conferences were that Catholic bishops presided over them and that World Bank economists were selected as prime ministers. Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 194-200. The New York Times did not report on the national conference in Benin.

64 On Nepal, NYT 11 September 1990, A-12. On Yeltsin's election, NYT 30 May 1990, A-1. On German unification NYT 23 September 1990, 4-3;NYT 3 October 1990, A-17. On Jaruzelski's resignation, NYT 20 September 1990, A-5; on Walesa's election, NYT 10 December 1990, A-1.

65 On Burma, NYT 28 May 1990, A-3; 25 August 1990, A-3; 26 October 1990, A-5. On Algeria, NYT 18 June 1990, A-6. On Liberia, NYT 18 May 1990, A-3; 4 August 1990, A-9; 11 September 1990, A-1. On US–PLO talks, NYT 21 June 1990, A-1.

66 NYT 3 August 1990, A-1, A-9.

67 NYT 26 August 1990, 1-1; 9 November 1990, A-1; 30 November 1990, A-10.

68 NYT 5 November 1990, A-3; 18 December 1990, A-1.

69 On the opening of war, NYT 17 January 1991, A-1. On cease fire, NYT 4 March 1991, A-8.

70 NYT 7 March 1991, A-18; 20 March 1991, A-18.

71 NYT 23 March 1991, 1-3; 27 March 1991 A-3.

72 NYT 21 December 1990; 1 April 1991, A-9; 10 April 1991, A-1; 11 April 1991, A-1.

73 NYT 6 April 1991, 1-1; 25 April 1991, A-1; 28 April 1991, 4-1; 7 May 1991, A-1; 14 June 1991, A-1.

74 NYT 25 June 1991, A-8; 14 August 1991, A-5; 29 August 1991, A-13.

75 On Ethiopia, NYT 22 May 1991, A-1; 29 May 1991, A-6. On Angola, NYT 26 May 1991, 1-9.

76 NYT 19 August 1991, A-1.

77 NYT 22 August 1991, A-1; 25 August 1991, 1-1; 9 December 1991, A-1; 18 December 1991, A-1.

78 On Haiti, NYT 1 October 1991, A-1. On Togo, NYT 9 October 1991, A-6.

79 NYT 3 January 1992, A-6.

80 On declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatioa, NYT 27 June 1991, A-10. On Serbian-Croatian struggle, NYT 6 July 1991, 1-4. On EC recognition, NYT 16 January 1992, A-10. On siege of Sarajevo, NYT 30 May 1992, 1-1; 12 October 1992, A-7. On UN embargo, NYT 31 May 1992, 1-6.

81 On division of Czechoslovakia, NYT 1 January 1993, A-1. On Germany, NYT 29 November 1992, 4-2. On Somalia, NYT 4 December 1992, A-14; 5 December 1992, 1-5. On Ayodhya mosque, NYT 7 December 1992, A-1.

82 On Rio conference, NYT 2 June 1992, A-10; 14 June 1992, 1-1. On Collor, NYT 25 August 1992, A-1; 31 December 1992, A-10. On Peru, NYT 7 April 1992, A-1; 20 November, A-3.

83 NYT 19 March 1992, A-1; 19 June 1992, A-7; 20 October 1992, A-7; 20 December 1992, 1-1.

84 NYT 1 June 1992, A-11; 4 July 1992, 1-9; 11 July 1993, 1-14; 5 August 1992, A-12; 7 April 1994, A-1.

 

 

 

 
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