Eric Hobsbawm has a long and impressive track record as a historian-thinker, but is probably best known for his phrase "the short century" - meaning in effect the world which began with the Great War in 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, in his view, we have been living in a new epoch of history which only now is beginning to take shape or show its hand a little.
Hobsbawm is a cosmopolitan intellectual and academic of a special inter-war vintage, born in Alexandria in 1917 and by education partly Austro-German, partly English. He is, or at least was, a Marxist, but in recent decades this has softened into what might almost be termed a liberal-Leftist stance. The book - a relatively short one, but highly condensed, ideas-charged and thought-provoking - is in question-and-answer form, the questions being presumably chosen so that Hobsbawm can state his politico-historical philosophy in a general yet concrete way. In his view, "a Marxist interpretation suggests that, in having understood that a particular historical stage is not permanent, human society is a successful structure because it is capable of change, and thus the present is not its point of arrival". This seems as much historicist as Marxist, but it does set the tone for much of what follows.
Questioned about the Balkan War, he sees it as "the final consequence, the last byproduct of the Great War", a definition which includes not only the collapse of the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and the Czars, but also of the Czars' Soviet successors in Russia. He also believes that "the line which distinguishes internal conflicts from international conflicts has disappeared or is tending to disappear," and points out rather bleakly that this means that the difference between war and peace has diminished. And at a time when American foreign policy has been defined by those hostile to it as economic imperialism impure and simple, he reminds us that the US is "to some extent an ideological power which originated, just like the Soviet Union, from a revolution, and therefore feels the need to guide the world in accordance with its principles".
Hobsbawm is noticeably hard-headed about the facile talk of nation-states vanishing away and "international" institutions taking their place. This belief - probably in itself a legacy from the more woolly-minded aspects of the Enlightenment - is very much canvassed at present. Yet he points out that while it is possible to have a globalized economy (towards which we seem to be moving at present) globalization is a process that cannot easily be applied to politics. He goes even further in this direction by remarking brusquely that there are in fact no global political institutions, as the United Nations derives its power from existing states.
The collapse of Russia he sees as a catastrophe which has been greatly underestimated, since it has left not only a huge power and ideological vacuum, but a continuous state of socio-political disintegration on a large part of the world's surface. On the other hand, he is sceptical about predictions that the US is heading almost unstoppably for complete global hegemony. American dominance, in his view, is due largely to its powerful economy, and "with the generalized industrialization of vast areas of the world, the relative force of America as a productive system will decline". (Its cultural hegemony, of course, is quite a different matter.)
Meanwhile, he thinks there is a genuine risk in America's aspiration to become the global policeman and to establish a new world order. China, he predicts, will be a formidable superpower in the new century, militarily as well as economically. On the bad record of human rights under Communist regimes, he says little and indeed seems complacent and almost self-congratulatory about the doctrinaire Marxism of himself and his friends in their earlier days.
Hobsbawm maintains - and not, it seems, in any conventional neo-Marxist spirit - that the present neo-laissez-faire or free-market economy should be subject to some international checks and controls. He shows little patience with those who feel that world markets are a kind of untameable, organic power in themselves: "the idea that globalization is uncontrollable is mistaken. We know it could be controlled."
Paradoxically enough for an international Leftist, he also believes that the much-abused nation-states have an essential role in the distribution of wealth, at a time when wealth is tending once again to be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. And he hands out an unexpected tribute when he praises the present Pope's rejection of capitalism - "a very interesting phenomenon".
On European unity, he upsets many people's applecart by expressing strong doubts as to whether it can be accelerated by strengthening the powers of the Strasbourg parliament. Bluntly and perhaps controversially, Hobsbawm says in this connection: "The European Union was not founded as a democratic organisation. I cannot even see the point of talking of its democratic deficit, because it wasn't supposed to be a democracy. Besides, if it had really been a democracy, it would never have reached its current degree of integration." Politicians of all parties, student debaters, letters-to-the-editor writers - kindly take note!
His final words are not comforting; the "extraordinary dynamism" of our modern economy is forcing more and more people into a situation "in which they cannot appeal to clear norms, perspectives, and common values, in which they do not know what to do with their own individual and collective existences". This is true, he believes, not only of institutions such as the family, but also of politics, parties, newspapers, organisations, representative assemblies, and states. "None of these operates in the way they used to and in which we supposed they would go on operating for a long time to come. Their future is obscure. That is why . . . I cannot look to the future with great optimism." We have, it seems, been warned.
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic