Growing up in Greece in the 1980s, I witnessed the organization 17 November in its apogee of violence. A terrorist organization that killed 23 politicians, foreign officials, businessmen, and members of the security services, it spurred fear and intricate conspiracy theories by evading justice until 2002. Whereas those with a European vision for Greece vehemently despised 17 November, some revolutionary leftists romanticized it as a bastion of resistance to capitalism and imperialism. The Historical Roots of Political Violence by Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca is a lucidly written book that sets out to explain such incidents of revolutionary terrorism. Using a comparative lens and historically informed data analysis, the author argues that cross-national variation in levels of lethal revolutionary terrorism in affluent countries in the last three decades of the twentieth century replicates variation in development paths in the interwar years.
I consider this the authoritative political science book on revolutionary terrorism, because it tries to tackle this phenomenon holistically, going beyond individual or comparative case studies. As such, it allows the reader to understand why revolutionary terrorism took off in the Mediterranean countries, Germany, and Japan and not in other affluent western countries such as France and the United Kingdom.
Revolutionary terrorists engaged in selective violence intended to mobilize support rather than maximize the number of dead. They avoided civilian casualties, targeting instead 424 individuals from the worlds of politics, security, or business between 1970 and 2003. Although the level of violence was low compared to that committed by nationalist terrorist groups of the same era, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), it left an indelible mark on the psyche of the countries experiencing it and proved treacherously difficult to uproot.
Cognizant of the limitations of the data given the small number of observations and overall limited degrees of freedom, Sánchez-Cuenca engages in very careful analysis using historically and theoretically informed measurement strategies and well-thought-through mechanisms associated with each variable. It is this deep historical knowledge that helps the reader contextualize and fully appreciate the quantitative findings. The book complements cross-national analysis with some excellently curated case studies: it covers the four main cases of revolutionary terrorism: Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany; the two minor ones, Greece and Portugal; and two deviant cases, those of France and the United States. All the case material is well written, with the Italy case being quite exceptional.
Although Sánchez-Cuenca examines the role of political activism, labor conflict, and strike volume in the 1960s and 1970s in setting revolutionary terrorism alight, these events do not explain why violence erupted in some cases and not others. He argues instead that the explanation lies in the interwar years, where differences in developmental paths were most pronounced. In the highly volatile political and economic situation that followed the end of World War I and the disintegration of old empires, two broad clusters of countries emerged: liberal and nonliberal. Even though these countries converged politically and economically after World War II, they followed diverging paths in the interwar period.
A crucial point in the argument is that state legitimacy was lower in the circles of the Radical Left when the country had a nonliberal past, because the Left was severely repressed. Specifically, societies that did not respect an individual’s autonomy as it related to his or her family and social group went through a nonliberal trajectory during the interwar years and experienced lethal revolutionary terrorism starting in the 1970s. Endogeneity is undoubtedly always a problem in the analysis of the interplay between culture and institutions, so the author is careful to correlate individualism with exogenous variables using family and grammar rules that were fixed in medieval times.
Even though the book is very much centered on the role of history, it is not about historic determinism. Rather, it discusses the historic conditions in the interwar period that mattered in turning late 1960s Radical Left movements violent, rather than using the role of history as a treatment in the causal sense. Although my work focuses on the endogenous dynamics of violence (see Fotini Christia, “Following the Money: Muslim versus Muslim in Bosnia's Civil War,” Comparative Politics, 40 [4], 2008; and Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, 2012) and opts for a more constructivist take on the way violence erupts and escalates, I really appreciate the degree of historical grounding in Sánchez-Cuenca’s discussion of the role of exogenous factors. The book is at its best when highlighting that revolutionary terrorism is a result of short-term events, as well as long-term macrolevel processes of political and economic development associated with the interwar years.
Concurring with a quote from a leading member of the Red Brigades that the people who joined terrorist groups in the 1970s were “the last revolutionaries of the affluent world and the least likely to succeed” (p. 12), the author at the end of the book suggests that we have seen the end of the cycle of revolutionary terrorism of the Left in affluent countries. That got me wondering about radical leftist and anarchist groups that have been active during the recent years of austerity in Europe. Such groups as Rouvikonas or the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire in Greece, among other violent activities, have sent bomb packages through the mail to organizations across the EU. Would their activity suggest that revolutionary terrorism of the sort depicted in the book is actually still alive in Europe? What is it about austerity that may have worked as a fuse much like the protests and labor strikes of 1968 did? Is the variation in such revolutionary terrorism across Europe during the austerity years still explained by the experience in the interwar years, or is this a distinct phenomenon that should be conceptualized differently? Is the book’s argument purely retrospective?
When I was reading this book in mid-January 2020, the news cycle in Greece was dominated by reports of the near-deaths of security forces trying to evacuate buildings occupied by radical leftists and anarchists. In their resistance they were catapulting police officers with slabs of concrete and bags of human excrement. Revolutionary terrorism is dead. Long live revolutionary terrorism?
