Commenting on the commotion, Neil Smelser, the American social psychologist in 1968’s Essays in Social Explanation writes that youthful rebellion against an institution takes the place of rebellion against the father. He added that it was a “biological urge” of the adolescent to assert him or herself.
The turmoil of the late 1960s in this context contributed to the strengthening of various social and civil rights movements and concepts. But it was really about a robust political-economic system correcting itself after failing to accommodate the influx and aspirations of a whole new generation.
That’s why, by the mid-1970s, ‘the revolution’ was over. The system had successfully appropriated and accommodated the new generation by building more educational institutions and then, from the late 1970s onwards, offering more lucrative economic opportunities to young graduates.
In 1990, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, these were revolutionary events, almost at par with actual revolutions such as the 1917, 1949 and 1958 communist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba, and the 1979 revolution in Iran. Yet, there are those who claim that the events that led to the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe were, again, more about a system correcting itself.
In a May 25, 1987 article for the New York Times, the Czech journalist Jiri Pehe predicted a “major realignment of class power” in the Soviet Union and its satellite communist states in East Europe. Two years before the Berlin Wall came down, Pehe wrote that more and more members at the top of the region’s ruling communist parties were assuming “middle-class values.”
Many latter-day analysts have even gone to the extent of suggesting that, till the early 1970s, communism actually raised the living standards of thousands of people in communist countries. These lifestyle improvements led to the desire among people to espouse middle-class ideals. So even when communist economics began to crumble, middle-class aspirations and ideals brewing within these societies continued to grow. Thus, as Pehe put it, communist parties too began to embrace middle-class values, as a survival tactic.
So one can suggest, here too it was the system readjusting or re-setting itself. Of course, Western media never stopped calling these as the “democratic revolutions” of the century. They really weren’t, as the rise of illiberal and authoritarian regimes in many former communist regions should suggest.
But the tradition of excitedly describing such readjustments as revolutions (sometimes amping them up by giving them a colour) continues in the Western media.
Starting with the so-called Velvet Revolution (1989) in the erstwhile Czechoslovakia, there was the Rose Revolution (Georgia, 2003), Tulip Revolution (Kyrgyzstan, 2005), the Orange Revolution (Ukraine, 2005), etc. Each one of these was course-correction, not revolution. The 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ in various Middle-Eastern countries too was exactly that — course-correction.
And what is happening today in, say, Hong Kong or Lebanon, may be exciting Western media again, but these are course-corrections as well.
Revolutions are rare. Course-corrections are not, even though many are mistaken and sometimes peddled as revolutions.
The 1960s’ Pakistani activist Lal Khan in The Other Story describes the movement against the Ayub Khan regime as a revolution. It wasn’t for the reasons already discussed. It was course-correction by the system, as was the movement against Z.A. Bhutto in 1977 and the Lawyers’ Movement against Gen Musharraf. And if there is to be a movement against the current regime, that too would be the system correcting itself to adjust to newer realities.
Published in Dawn, EOS, October 27th, 2019