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Structural Reform As a Destabilizing Force Writ

Writing in the 19th century about the causes of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville proposed a generalization that can apply equally well to today's repressive regimes. Tocqueville's central concern was to explain how and why revolutions occur:

Revolution does not always come when things are going from bad to worse. It occurs most often when a nation that has accepted, and indeed, has given no sigh of even noticed the most crushing laws, rejects them at the very moment when their weight is being lightened. The regime that is destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than the one preceding it, and experience teaches us that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it attempts to reform itself.

The proposition of this paper, which is derived from Tocqueville's theory of revolution, holds that political instability is likely to rise when an illegitimate regime initiates reform. The greater the illegitimacy and the more radical the reforms, the higher the level of instability. Illegitimacy and reform are the independent variables in this proposition. Political instability is the dependent variable. Reform provides the immediate occasion for the rise in unrest, while illegitimacy provides the underlying reason. In other words, illegitimacy is the precondition and reform is the accelerator of instability. Since a whole series of antecedent and intervening variables can exert a significant influence on this relationship, this proposition is not a causal one. It is directional.

This paper, then, is an analysis written for the purpose of devising an explanatory scheme which can account for the rise in political instability that follows an illegitimate regime's attempts to reform itself. This paper will ground its generalization in the illustrative case of the Soviet Union, attempting to show that, given the illegimacy of that regime, instability has increased as a result of Gorbachev's re...

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Structural Reform As a Destabilizing Force Writ. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:45, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704678.html