What is the point of revolution? Does it do any good? Does it better the lives of the people in a country? Throughout our history, people have been taking a look at their lives and realizing they want more and deserve more, from their government. Every major world power has had a revolution, civil war or change; the United States had the Civil War, there was the whole Cromwell episode in England, the French Revolution, the Russian’s had a civil war and WWII resulted in a change of government for many European governments. Western nations seem to have had fairly smooth transitions that may involve a quick burst of violence, but haven’t resulted in sustained violence. Why is it that it is so hard for non-western nations to have smooth and sustained transitions into peaceful, efficient and beneficial government systems?
Some may say that these nations are unsuccessful because they choose not to use democracy as their form of government. Some say the problems in Latin America are caused by the fact that every political idea that has ever existed has probably been tried somewhere in Latin America. Is it possible that there is some other form of government that has not yet been created would be the right fix for them?
Seriously, has humanity really figured out every formula for government? We are following formulas and theories that were created by people that share our history. Democracy is in our blood, but it might not be in non-western nations. The founding fathers based their form of democracy off of the teachings of writers from the Age of Enlightenment like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who were Westerners and based their writings off men like Plato and Thucydides. Carl Marx, the creator of communism, was reading the same things. We all know communism doesn’t work though. People like to say, “Oh communism is a great theory, but it can’t work because of human nature.” They’re wrong. If it was a good theory, it would be good in practice.
There is much research on how revolutions and governments can be successful. The biggest factor to a successful revolution is to be left alone: self-determination. Most of the major western revolutions had little to no involvement by other nations, (there was always a little because people can’t help themselves), but for the most part, every major world democracy has had the option for self-determination.
Most of the world’s powers are democracies, and research shows that this type of government works better with others like it. Therefore, there is vested interest among world democracies in creating more so, theoretically, there will be more peace. Unfortunately, democracy doesn’t work for every nation. That being said, communism doesn’t work for any nation; so what do we do?
This leads me to believe that there has to be some other form of peaceful government that works for the people it rules, but can also work with the world’s democracies. For this to happen, a group of unselfish individuals have to sit around and come up with something new that fits in with the values of the nation as well as the shared history. There might be some violence, and unfortunately there are few times in history when a change in regime/government has been peaceful.
These are the questions that real political scientists ask. This is among the things we study and the things we talk about. If this kind of thing interests you, please join us at Politics Club in Ruffner 256, Fridays at 4:00 p.m.
