History does not proceed in an orderly fashion, but in fits and starts, with long quiet periods followed by a telescoping of spectacular upheavals in a matter of weeks and months.
The title of this piece refers to this pattern of historical change - like buses, none come for ages and then several turn up. Historians draw on past events to give a deeper perspective on current events. In the age of social media, stepping back from the daily tweet storm to assess underlying forces and processes is a useful exercise.
Today we are confronted with profound issues of global economic imbalances, vast movements of people, populism and nationalism. Through the modern era there have been a few historical moments where events can be seen as causing a radical discontinuity, a fundamental changing of the framework of what is possible in human political affairs.
The modern era, demarcated by the discovery of the Americas and the end of Muslim Spain in 1492, has seen one such "crack in history" every 125-130 years, after which nothing is quite the same and no return to the status quo ante is possible.
The first of these was the Protestant reformation, declared by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521, followed three years later by the German peasant revolution, in which ordinary peasants across the Holy Roman Empire took up arms, inspired by more radical Protestant leaders. The popular uprising was brutally crushed by the aristocratic ruling elites, supported by Martin Luther, who urged on their slaughter.
Possibly of even greater consequence, 1521 marked the downfall of the Aztec empire at the hands of Hernan Cortez, 400 conquistadores and local allies, sparking a devastating period of conquest and genocide. European conquest of the Americas, and the creation of a global capitalist economy, began here.
Thereafter the Protestant revolution became a clash between the new urban classes and the ruling elites of Europe, rather than an open class war. The ripples of revolution and attempts to cast off the feudal-clerical order continued for decades, sparking the Jesuit counter-reformation. The new creed was adopted opportunistically by Henry VIII in England for his own personal reasons.
The revolution put the word of God into the hands of ordinary people, thanks to radical publishers deploying the social media of the age, the printing press. No more listening to Latin liturgies that few understood from a class of elite clergy. God spoke directly to believers and the interpretation of his works fell to members of the congregation and radical preachers. It was this new form of religious consciousness that eventually led to the next historical break: the English revolution.
In 1649 - 130 years after Luther - a successor to Henry VIII, Charles I, was the first king in the western world to be executed judicially, marking the beginning of the era of republican government. The Cromwellian revolution did not fare well after the death of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, in 1658. Charles's son was restored to the throne in 1660. However the tumult of the revolution created a new kind of constitutional principle that brought the king down from the realm of divine rule into the earthly reach of popular sovereignty. Eventually in 1688, the last absolute ruler of England was dethroned and a Bill of Rights set the limits to kingly power, which has never been rescinded.
A third revolutionary break in western European history was in a sense a radical continuity with England's revolution 130 years earlier. 1789 gave birth to a kind of radical democracy, which, like its English predecessor, could not sustain itself and collapsed in bloodshed and terror, giving rise to the rule of Napoleon and a European war. Despite the Bourbon restoration of 1815, things could not be put back to where they were before the storming of the Bastille. A new wave of revolutions spread to Latin America and the age of democracy in Europe was more or less born in 1848.
The embedding of the bourgeois order in mid 19th century Europe also sewed the seeds of the next revolutionary break, which arrived in 1917 - the import of this event is not yet settled, since it is so close to us it is not merely dead history but still echoing in the present. For a period it seemed as if socialism was the future, until the harsh model created by Stalin gradually unravelled and collapsed in 1989. The significance of the second, Bolshevik, revolution of October is still hugely contested. It is hard though to claim that it did not mark a seismic upheaval in the world system the ripple effects of which have even yet not fully played out. The Trump-Kim Yong-un showdown is perhaps the last, senile iteration of the 1917 cleavage between east and west. As in previous such cleavages, it is only in the death throes of the previous historical earthquake, when the dust finally settles from the first eruption, that the outlines of a new upheaval will unfold.
The North Korean regime was effectively installed by Stalin in 1948, he being the Napoleon figure of the Russian revolution, who, like his Corsican predecessor, created an empire out of a revolution. Like Napoleon, Stalin remained on the lips of many revolutionaries long after his departure from the stage. Stalin was Napoleon to Lenin's Robespierre.
Rather than socialism, the more lasting legacy of 1917 is the western welfare state - rolled back strongly since 1989 - and even more so, a model of non-colonial development and the delegitimation of empire. China is the leading inheritor of this national revolutionary path, today a powerhouse of Leninist state capitalism that could yet eclipse the United States.
If the next definitive upheaval arrives at the same interval as the previous three, it should occur at the beginning of the fifth decade of this century. That's 25 years from now. For an oldie such as myself, that's a long wait.
Between these breaks it is possible to delineate, in each case, an initial period of revolution, followed by counter-revolution, followed by a period of consolidation of the social-cultural changes that emerge from the dialectic of the previous two processes - the second (counter-revolution) in effect a direct reaction to the first (revolution).
I have deliberately not connected this to the economic processes that interact with the politico-social dynamic under scrutiny - although they are clearly intimately linked.
What is certain, apart from the obvious fact that such a projection is a kind of numerology that can only be confirmed if and when it happens, is we can't know what, where or how the break will come, but that come it must.
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