The historian Eric Hobsbawm is widely feted: he has been showered by the academic establishment with honorary doctorates (20 and rising) and big cash prizes. His famous quartet of historical surveys and his studies of 19th-century bandits as proto-revolutionaries have all been highly praised. New Labour made him a Companion of Honour in 1998, citing his “committed” scholarship. Perhaps new Labour also appreciated his Stalinist detestation of Trotskyites, which dovetailed neatly with its own crusade against Militant. For, early on, Hobsbawm threw in his lot with Stalin’s communists, a cause for which he is still nostalgic, on the grounds that the USSR provided “order”. (A thought that brings to mind the orderly silence of mass graves.)

Despite hardly ever visiting the USSR, and not liking it much when he did, Hobsbawm claimed in his autobiography a youthful readiness to spy for the Soviets, while in 1994, on television, he aired the thought that the 20m dead racked up by the Leninist-Stalinist experiment would have been worthwhile had it worked out in the end.

Such candid admissions are concealed within a personal story that warms the hearts of his many admirers. He speaks several languages and once interpreted for Che Guevara, who “had nothing interesting to say”. In his writing he somehow contrives to conjure up the heat of jungle guerrilla encampments, rather than the cool international conference centres he still haunts in his ninth decade.

This appetite for intellectual conjury is amply demonstrated in Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, a collection of his offcuts, essays and lectures from the past two decades. Hobsbawm argues here that free-market globalisation is rapidly turning citizens of democracies into apolitical consumers. Globalisation also “incubates” inequalities that in turn generate terrorism. But terrorism itself is merely a minor nuisance, a pretext for unbounded US aggression.

Take an essay called Terror, which started as seminar notes from Columbia University in the 1990s. Readers with more provincial horizons may be impressed as the sage darts from Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, via ETA and the Provos, to Peru’s Sendero Luminoso. The effect is like spinning a postcard carousel in a souvenir shop. Having rendered the reader dizzy, Hobsbawm slips in what he really wants to say: “Horrifying though the carnage of 9/11 was in New York, it left the international power of the US and its internal structures completely unaffected. If things have changed for the worse, it is not by the actions of the terrorists but by those of the US government.” How does that explain bombs that in 1998 killed 200 Africans, or 7/7, 21/7 and recent plots to blow up “slags” in a London nightclub?

In several of these essays, Hobsbawm vents his contempt for the “crazies”, “mad men”, “cowboys” and messianic megalomaniacs who he believes drive George W Bush’s foreign policy, though he speaks in similarly insulting tones of the very different “realist” Reagan administration, too. Freed from the fear emanating from the Soviets, the cowboys are alternately accused of trying to establish a world empire, and of inventing new fears of terrorism in the service of some dark domestic agenda that Hobsbawm intimates rather than specifies.

Elsewhere, he sneers at “democracy” as “one of the most sacred cows of vulgar western political discourse [which] yields less milk than is usually supposed”. Electorates are dismissed as “stupid”, and he has a new villain: the “imperialism of human rights”. Advocates of progressive interventionism, be they Michael Ignatieff or Tony Blair (but not Bill Clinton who goes unmentioned), are the most deluded of all. It is inconceivable, in Hobsbawm’s world view, that the neocon “crazies” could be exercised by the gassing of Kurdish villagers or the Taliban’s propensity to shoot women school teachers.

Hobsbawm’s “indestructible” political faith presumably drives his Stakhanovite output. Hence one grimly anticipates further collections like this by a historian who has been so wrong about the past that he has little credible entitlement on our future.

GLOBALISATION, DEMOCRACY AND TERRORISM by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown £17.99 pp192
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (inc p&p)

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