Tax and Revolutions

In June 2021 Professor Chantal Stebbings delivered her thematic report on Tax and Revolutions to the European Association of Tax Law Professors Congress (Amsterdam/Online). The theme of the Congress was ‘History and Taxation: the Relationship between Taxation and the Political Balance of Power’. Some 30 national reports had been submitted exploring the theme in jurisdictions across Europe, and in the United States. The thematic report drew on the wealth of evidence these national studies provided to assess the role played by tax in political revolution and to identify common themes. The universality of tax, its substance, processes and justification, was evident. Tax had an obvious and inevitable potential to ignite or foment tensions between the state and the taxpayers, but it was clear that it was convenient to ascribe a tax provenance to many political revolutions, and that tax often obscured the reason behind an insurrection. It emerged that the role of tax varied enormously in rebellions, from the incidental to the motive force, to the convenient adoption of an obvious ideological tool to agitate the public and promote other political agendas. Rebellions against specific oppressive taxes were common, but revolutions were of a different order being events of fundamental reconstruction in relation to the balance of power, and were endemic in European history. Tax is seen rarely to be the sole cause of, but was almost without exception an element in, such revolutions. The national and thematic reports will be published in book form in due course.