The Calm Before the Storm? Revolutionary Pressures and Global Governance

Abstract

Has the era of revolution passed? Many scholars think globalization and democratization make a recurrence of the great social revolutions unlikely, now that global webs of economic interest bind states together and democratization absorbs popular discontent. I argue against these views here. The present climate is the calm before the storm. Precisely those factors that make national revolutions unlikely (economic, political, and cultural globalization) may lead to a global revolutionary crisis in coming decades. Despite the lack of a global state to capture, transnational political institutions are creating a global political arena for future upsurges of revolt. They lock in policies favorable to global capital, while remaining unresponsive and hence brittle. The loss of democratic legitimacy within nation-states, combined with rising inequality, make the world system quite vulnerable to crisis in the long run. A future profound economic crisis, if it overlaps with the cultural fault lines of our time, may recreate globally many of the dynamics that led to earlier revolutionary ruptures within nation-states.