States and urban revolutions

The structural perspective applied here highlights the features that led to the successful, anti-modern, and backward-looking religious revolution in Iran and the failure of a democratic socialist, worker-oriented movement in Poland. I argue that one can best understand the outcome of modern revolutions by focusing on the state and its relations to the society. By contrasting two countries and two revolutions, I have tried to show that variables such as the structure of the state, the patterns of state-church conflicts, the shifting church-class alliances, and the impact of geopolitics on these domestic factors are essential in explaining why one revolution succeeded while the other failed. The comparative argument can be summarized in the following way. In terms of state structure, the one-man rule in Iran strengthened the absolutist power of the Shah, but weakened the organizational capacity of the various state agencies to deal with political crises. The state bureaucracy and military disintegrated when the leadership lost its authority. In Poland, the existence of powerful and potentially autonomous organizations within the state apparatus made the counterrevolution possible. The party bureaucracy functioned despite chaos at the top and bottom of the hierarchy; and the Polish generals used the united military to seize power by declaring martial laws. The dialectical relation between state and society is equally important to understanding the different revolutionary outcomes. The Iranian state intensified its attacks on the Shiite clergy in the 1970s, emasculating the power of this non-state elite. When popular discontent broke out, the Shiite clerics became the revolutionary vanguard, mobilizing the support of all urban classes and leading the final assault on the monarchy. On the other hand, after a period of repression, the Polish regime made peace with the Roman Catholic church in order to appease the overwhelming Catholic population and to gain legitimacy. Because of the moderation of the state's religious policy, the church played a mediating rather than revolutionary role in the state-class conflict of 1980–81. While the clergy in Iran allied with the urban classes, the Polish church first supported the creation of Solidarity and then broke this alliance; the neutrality of the church thus reduced drastically the capacity of Solidarity to negotiate with the party-state. In these two cases, the participation of the clergy or the withdrawal of its support to urban classes means class capacity or incapacity to fight the regime. In addition, the international contexts had a great impact on the Iranian and Polish conflicts. The Polish state was constrained by its satellite position within the Soviet military empire, and the Polish Catholic church by the Vatican bureaucracy. The Soviet threat of invasion forced the party to choose military repression and convinced the religious elite to adopt a cautious attitude. In contrast, the Iranian state was relatively independent from the United States. The U.S. administration had no policy of military intervention in the Gulf region, and because it was devoid of any constraint, Iran's clergy followed the revolutionary call by a charismatic leader.