[Reader-list] Eric Hobsbawm interview

[Harsh Kapoor]

[See towards the end, Eric Hobsbawm comments on the BJP destroying 
democracy and secularism in India
xxx Harsh]

o o o

Guardian Unlimited Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,796531,00.html


The Observer
Sunday September 22, 2002

Interview

Man of the extreme century

	 			 		 Eric Hobsbawm is one 
of Britain's greatest historians. His long, eventful life has 
mirrored the great events of the twentieth century. The rises of 
imperialism, fascism and communism are as much components of his life 
as subjects of his books, and have turned Hobsbawm into a 'lifelong 
communist'. Now, he has published his autobiography. In this 
wide-ranging conversation with Tristram Hunt, one of Britain 's new 
generation of historians, he reveals how he continues to believe in a 
spirit of progress as the surest route for happiness


	 	 	 Tristram Hunt: Much of your work as a 
historian has consciously appealed to a broader audience beyond the 
academic establishment. There is a dramatic resurgence in the 
popularity of history: more people are reading history, visiting 
monuments, watching TV programmes than ever before. But you have 
recently warned of a 'permanent present' - the creation of a new 
generation who might know a great deal about the past but have little 
sense of continuity or identity with it. Has history become simply a 
consumable product in a deeply transient age?

Eric Hobsbawm: Well, choosing to write for a broad public isn't only 
my personal choice. I regard it as part of a long English tradition. 
After all, this is a country in which even the most important 
thinkers have expressed their views for the broad public, going back 
to Adam Smith via Charles Darwin to name but two. For me, the sort of 
ideal reader may be a construct of the educated but non-specialist 
reader who wants to find out about the past - is curious about the 
past and wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be 
what it is today. And where it's going. This is also part of the 
Marxist Historian Movement. We reacted against a tradition of 
historians between the wars who were suspicious of talking to the 
public for fear of talking down. And there were only very few people, 
G.M. Trevelyan or A.J.P. Taylor, who were courageous enough to do 
this, even at the risk of people saying well, of course, he's talking 
down, you know.

There is also today a huge upsurge of do-it-yourself history. It's 
mostly about the past of people's own families. Family history and 
the study of genealogy has become democra tised. This may or may not 
help to explain the enormous passion for biographies and 
autobiographies which is very marked here. What it shows to me is 
that history is an essential part of human life.

It's a critique of the two basic principles on which the modern 
society appears to be run. First, the problem-solving approach of 
technology which means the past is absolutely irrelevant to it. 
Second, the buy-it-now approach of the consumer society. For 
practical purposes, history doesn't come into this except as a sort 
of decoration. Well, people know that this isn't the case. They're 
stuck in the past, they grow out of the past. And I think this - 
without their knowing it - is a protest against the kind of society 
which wishes to cut them off from the past and cut them off from each 
other.

TH: So much of the current surge in history has to do with English 
and British identity. What came out from your autobiography was a 
strong affection for England and your own sense of Englishness. Do 
you think the public obsession with British roots and identity 
illustrates a fallow intellectual retreat? We seem to be returning to 
nation-state history and an insecurity about our identity.

EH: Nation-state history is probably the most damaging part of 
history today since the world cannot be understood in terms of nation 
states. On the other hand, it's very difficult to know how to break 
away from it since schools are essentially geared to states.

This business about English history ... I can understand it, but I'm 
a bit worried about it as I'm worried about all kinds of identity 
history. Identity isn't a good basis for history. It's a new problem 
for the English, partly because of globalisation but chiefly because 
of devolution and the end of empire. Both of these have left the 
English with a need to define themselves as such.

Part of the British tradition was that unlike so many others, we were 
actually proud of being a mongrel race. Everybody said, oh well you 
see my grandmother was Irish and my auntie is Welsh and all the rest 
of it. There was no sense you had to pick and choose - you could do 
both. But I think this is a similar problem to the one which in the 
past faced Spaniards and Russians. It's a pre-nationalist political 
consciousness.

TH: One of your most important academic contributions was your work 
on the invention of national traditions. In an age of resurgent 
nationalism and new concern with identity there seems to be a whole 
wave of traditions being invented for naked political, sectarian and 
ethnic reasons. Does that make the role of historian more crucial as 
an exposer of myth?

EH: The worrying thing at the moment is that history - including 
tradition - is being invented in vast quantities. In the past 30 
years there's been an explosion of heritage sites and historical 
museums. On top of this, particularly since the end of communism, 
there's been the foundation of new states which need to invent 
histories to show how important they are. And the way you do this is 
that you invent or collect yourself a past. The extreme example of 
this is in Croatia where the man who actually created the new state, 
Franjo Tudjman, was a professional historian who invented a phoney 
tradition. So, the world is today full of people inventing histories 
and lying about history and that's largely because the people who do 
this are not actually interested in the past. What they are 
interested in is something which will make the punters feel good. At 
present it's more important to have historians, especially sceptical 
historians, than ever before.

TH: Martin Amis's new book, Koba The Dread, has impugned the British 
Left - and you personally - for not condemning Stalin's atrocities. 
In your autobiography you vividly bring out the mindset of a 
believing Communist in the 1940s and 1950s: the party discipline and 
a reluctance 'to believe the few who told us what they knew' of 
Soviet Russia. Yet you also bring out the historical context for 
joining the Communist Party - the battle against fascism on the 
streets of 1930s Berlin and a strong sense of the idealism of the 
October Revolution. There also remains the broader historical context 
that the Soviet Union remained a viable economic and political model 
to many in the West right up to the 1970s. Do you think this 
historical context seems absent in the current debate about 
'Communist guilt'?

EH: I must leave the discussion of Amis's views on Stalin to others. 
I wasn't a Stalinist. I criticised Stalin and I cannot conceive how 
what I've written can be regarded as a defence of Stalin. But as 
someone who was a loyal Party member for two decades before 1956 and 
therefore silent about a number of things about which it's reasonable 
not to be silent - things I knew or suspected in the USSR - I don't 
want to be critical of a book which brings out some of the horrors of 
Stalin. It isn't an original or important book. It brings nothing 
that we haven't known except perhaps about his personal relations 
with his father. But I don't want to say anything that might suggest 
to people that I'm in some ways trying to defend the record of 
something which is indefensible.

TH: Amis has criticised those on the Left who deny any moral 
equivalence between Nazism and Communism because the latter committed 
atrocities in the cause of a higher social ideal as opposed to racial 
genocide. The majority of deaths in the Soviet Union came not from 
political or racial persecution but famine caused by economic 
policies. As you have written of Stalin: 'His terrifying career makes 
no sense except as a stubborn, unbroken pursuit of that utopian aim 
of a communist society.' I want to tease out this issue of idealism. 
You stayed in the party after 1956 partly because of solidarity to 
the fallen and partly because of a belief in a societal ideal. Are 
you still drawn to an Enlightenment ideal of societal perfectibility 
or have you come to accept the limits of the human condition - what 
your friend Isaiah Berlin called, 'the crooked timber of humanity'?

EH: Why I stayed [in the Communist Party] is not a political question 
about communism, it's a one-off biographical question. It wasn't out 
of idealisation of the October Revolution. I'm not an idealiser. One 
should not delude oneself about the people or things one cares most 
about in one's life. Communism is one of these things and I've done 
my best not to delude myself about it even though I was loyal to it 
and to its memory. The phenomenon of communism and the passion it 
aroused is specific to the twentieth century. It was a combination of 
the great hopes which were brought with progress and the belief in 
human improvement during the nineteenth century along with the 
discovery that the bourgeois society in which we live (however great 
and successful) did not work and at certain stages looked as though 
it was on the verge of collapse. And it did collapse and generated 
awful nightmares.

I don't think that this particular movement is likely to revive, 
certainly not as a global movement of its kind because its particular 
historical moment has passed.

TH: Did you ever discuss these ideas with Isaiah Berlin?

EH: I liked Isaiah Berlin - we used to lunch together. We got on very 
well. He was a marvellous fellow and he had enormous charm and warmth 
but, it's a funny thing, we didn't actually discuss controversial 
matters much.

I think the main difference is that I don't actually believe he was 
an Enlightenment liberal. On the contrary, he could see the world as 
individuals and as groups. He couldn't see the world. I believe that 
whatever the limitations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment it 
was the only principle on which it is possible to demand improvements 
or rights for every human being. And I think this is what he couldn't 
believe. He believed that this would lead to very bad results. Well, 
he was right, of course. It can, among other things, lead to very bad 
results. And it did, for instance in the case of Soviet Union.

TH: What struck me in your autobiography was that despite your 
lifelong Communist Party membership, you were deeply hostile to 
Militant Tendency attempts to take over the Labour Party during the 
1980s. Indeed, to the fury of your comrades you became a committed 
supporter of Neil Kinnock's modernisation of the party - describing 
the 1992 general election night as the 'saddest and most desperate in 
my political experience'. Yet you have spoken out against Tony Blair, 
branding him 'Thatcher in trousers'. Surely New Labour was the 
inevitable conclusion of Kinnock's modernisation process?

EH: Most communists and indeed most socialists disagreed at the time 
[1980s] with the few of us who said it's absolutely no use, the 
Labour Party has got to go in a different direction. On the other 
hand, what we thought of was a reformed Labour Party not a simple 
rejection of everything that Labour had stood for. Obviously, any 
Labour Government, however watered down, is better than the 
right-wing alternative as the USA demonstrates. But I'm not 
absolutely certain that Labour Prime Ministers who glory in trying to 
be warlords - subordinate warlords particularly - are a thing that I 
can stick and it certainly sticks in my gullet.

TH: Yet in the wake of Lionel Jospin's defeat in France is there any 
other progressive way for centre-Left administrations than the Third 
Way? Do you think the concept of the Third Way has any intellectual 
validity?

EH: The Third Way is a topographical and not a political term. It 
means between two arbitrary points. Ideally, there's the totally 
centralised command economy and the complete anarchism of a non-state 
free market. Now, we know everybody's against the first and it 
doesn't exist and when they tried to introduce it, it didn't work, so 
that's no longer around. Now, instead of being halfway between these 
two, the so-called Third Way is considerably skewed towards the 
free-market segment. I think perhaps they can now revise things a 
bit. But they haven't done enough in the past.

TH: In that context, given his radical socialist heritage and his 
academic work on Jimmy Maxton [Independent Labour Party MP for 
Glasgow during the Red Clydeside era], have you been at all 
disappointed by Gordon Brown's chancellorship?

EH: I recognise where Gordon Brown comes from. I recognise where he 
wants to go to and for that I give him confidence. I don't recognise 
either of those things in some other people in the Government - 
including some that were much further to the left than I was.

TH: This is an interesting point. The way you characterise Communist 
Party behaviour - the need for party discipline, the importance of 
the 'line to take' and the hostility to criticism - some people will 
find an echo of in New Labour's control-freakery. Do you find ironic 
those aspects of Communist Party behaviour in New Labour?

EH: CP people have never been able to get anything done in politics. 
The only field where they got anything done and which fitted in very 
much with the CP is the unions. The unions also believe in 
discipline: unions believe that even if you don't like it, if the 
decision's taken, you don't cross a picket line. Which is where you 
still find the ultra-left today, which has no political presence at 
all now. It still has a presence in unions.

As for all the people who once were Trotskyists of varying 
descriptions or CP people, they were all able people who found 
themselves in movements which didn't provide enough scope for able 
people and I don't blame them for looking after their political 
interests - for going where the action is.

TH: The 11 September attacks and the crusade of al-Qaeda against 
America marks a break from the certainties of the twentieth-century 
military and diplomatic world. We are seeing a return to pre-nation 
state fundamentalism where religious and cultural orthodoxy overrides 
'national' interests. In your autobiography, you hint that the growth 
of groups like al-Qaeda is partly the result of a weakening of social 
democracy and the collapse of communism. Do you believe like Terry 
Eagleton that the threat from such religious fundamentalists is far 
greater than socialism ever was to the capitalist world? The West 
seems to have chosen barbarism above socialism?

EH: Well, they obviously chose barbarism above socialism in 
Afghanistan. They financed the al-Qaeda guys [the Taliban], 
specifically, because they thought communism was worse than that. I 
don't believe communism was worse than that.

I don't believe that al-Qaeda or fundamentalism is the main danger to 
capitalism. Capitalism will live with it; will make money out of it. 
Fundamentalist Islam isn't a danger, if only because it can't win any 
wars. The basic element to understanding the present situation is 
that 9/11 did not threaten the US. It was a terrible human tragedy 
which humiliated the US, but in no sense was it any weaker after 
those attacks. Three, four or five of those attacks will not change 
the position of the US or its relative power in the world. An example 
of collapsing social democracy and growing fundamentalism is in India 
where there is a government breaking with a westernising, secular, 
tolerant democratic society, a socialist society, in order to create 
a kind of exclusive Hinduist society.

TH: Much of it built on spurious historical foundations.

EH: Oh, completely spurious. They are re-jigging the entire textbooks 
of India in order to make a more saffron past. What more saffron 
means is pogroms against Christians and Muslims and no further belief 
in democracy and truth and a secular society.

TH: You characterised the short twentieth century as a period of 
unprecedented brutality. As the twenty-first century gets under way, 
America bestrides the world like few other hegemonies in history. You 
have spoken before of how the US revolutionary heritage gives it a 
certain domineering impulse. In the hands of President Bush is this 
now the most pressing danger to world stability?

EH: Any great power with the capacity to conquer the world is a 
danger to those other than itself. The US was such a power but for 50 
years it was kept in check to some extent. But it was kept in check 
by a power [USSR] which most people in the Western world didn't like 
on good grounds. The only people who maintained the view that almost 
any great power not kept in check is a danger were the French. The 
French are now too weak to do much about it, but they have maintained 
their rational traditions.

America is a world propagandist power. That's what happened to the 
French in 1789, it happened to communist powers and now to the US, 
which is a revolutionary regime. When you get the chance to spread 
your influence, you end up becoming an empire. That is what happened 
to the French under Napoleon. They said they were doing a lot of good 
to the countries they conquered, but they were regarded by the rest 
of the world as a conquering empire. The difference was that unlike 
the German Empire, which didn't aim to do good to anybody, the 
French, like the Russians and now the Americans aim to do good to the 
world by introducing their own ideas. The Americans are in a position 
to do what the French did after the Napoleonic period, and the 
arguments for and against are similar to those. But they are not 
arguments about spreading the [ideals of the] French Revolution any 
more.

The Americans have used 9/11 as an occasion to assert that they are 
the only power in the world which can dominate. What they want to 
achieve other than establish this assertion is by no means clear. The 
Iraq war has no rational justification at all. The United States 
would have to learn that there are limits even to its own power and I 
think with some luck this may happen, but right now the learning 
process has only just begun.

TH: One of the leading causes of diplomatic instability is the 
actions of Israel under Sharon. You have always identified yourself 
as a pre-Second World War cosmopolitan Jew - in contrast to the 
Zionists of the later 1940s. Despite the strong ties between the Left 
and early Zionism, you never seem to have felt a great loyalty to 
Israel. Did you differ on this point with Isaiah Berlin?

EH: I was never a Zionist. Once Israel was in existence or Jews were 
settled there then the idea they should disappear was not on. I have 
never been in favour of destroying or humiliating Israel. I am a Jew, 
but being a Jew does not imply being a supporter either of Zionism 
and even less of the particular policies now being pursued by the 
government of Israel, which are disastrous and evil. They are 
policies logically leading to the ethnic cleansing of the occupied 
territories - the official policy of those Jewish parties now 
governing says that Judaea and Samaria are part of what God gave the 
Israelis. I am very strongly of the opinion that Jews must say it is 
possible to be a Jew and not to support Israel.

I know that Isaiah was desperate about the direction that Israel was 
going under Likud. In some ways, it was to him what the discovery of 
the nature of what Stalinism was to me. I told him, now you probably 
understand how I feel. Because it was a terrible thing for a man who 
believed in humanity and the humanist idea of Judaism to see [the 
direction Israel was taking], but he believed he could not tear 
himself away from that identification [with Israel]. His Jewish 
identity implied identity with Israel because he believed that the 
Jews should be a nation.

TH: Finally, would an Eric Hobsbawm of the future born in 2017 see 
the same degree of 'interesting times' that you witnessed in the 
twentieth century?

EH: I hope not. I don't look forward to the next 30 to 40 years with 
any kind of pleasure (although I won't see very much of them), but 
then I think most people today share my pessimism about the immediate 
future.


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