Globalisation, democracy and terrorism By Eric Hobsbawm, Little, Brown, Rs 695

In 1994, Robert Conquest had accused Eric Hobsbawm of justifying 20 million deaths if they helped the creation of the communist utopia, a justification denied by Hobsbawm in his own book, The Age of Extremes (1994). Hobsbawm, often the subject of such controversies during and after the Cold War, has nevertheless been described as “arguably our greatest living historian” by The Spectator, a publication not exactly known for left-wing sympathies. Characteristically, Hobsbawm warns that “there are very few shortcuts in history.”

Whether his own treatises are immune to such shortcuts has always been open to debate (his recent writings on the Spanish Civil War show that he has not altogether shed his Stalinist credentials), but the student of history cannot deny the attraction of Hobsbawm’s polemics, coupled with the lucidity of his argument on the printed page. Thus he warns us of the need to be sceptical of all definitions and purposes of history, given the times we live in.

In Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, Hobsbawm transfers this scepticism from the purely academic argument about definition to the practical question of the direction contemporary global politics and economics are taking and to the rhetoric associated with them. While globalisation, democracy and terrorism are the reigning trinity over everyday reality, the three stumble on the assumption that politics and values, or violence, have a uniform impact on nation-states. This book ties the three together to show not only their hold on our lives but also the atrophy within these significant determinants of individual and national existence today.

The 20th century was unique in its combination of human disasters, material improvement and the hitherto unprecedented technological threat to the planet. To identify the road the nascent 21st century has taken, an objective analysis of the last century — the “age of extremes” — is necessary. To that effect, Hobsbawm says nothing fundamentally new about his subject. But the clarity of thought and expression makes the book useful for analysing contemporary global problems.

Hobsbawm focuses on five areas he identifies as essential to understand the 20th century’s legacy to the next. Apart from the question of war and peace, we have to study the past and future of global empire-building, the continuous morphing of nationalism, the scope for democracy and, finally, the problem of political violence and terror. All of these issues belong to a global context conditioned heavily by the impact of technology and economics and by globalisation.

Globalisation has drastically increased economic and social inequalities within and among states. Hobsbawm builds on this standard leftist critique of globalisation to show how the disparity lies at the root of all major social and political tensions today. Thus, the developing countries may need to deal with mass discontent soon again, and the developed world is likely to see a return to the politics of fragmentation and hate as immigrants keep moving in and jobs keep moving out. Arguably, while globalisation is still confined to a modest scale, its political and cultural impact is “disproportionately large”. Yet, for all its economic, technological and even cultural advancement, globalisation has failed to dislodge the political and military might of nation-states. If states alone wield real (political) power, international institutions such as the UN or the WTO will remain ineffective.

On the other hand, the territorial state has lost its monopoly of armed force over the last few decades, as proved by insurgencies perpetrated by small groups. World War II onwards, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants has been steadily erased, and the 21st century is likely to witness a further shift from war between sovereign states. There is today a thin line between inter- and intra-state conflicts even as the demarcation between war and peace becomes more and more obscure. Just as the Cold War could be defined as neither peace nor war, it is equally difficult to describe the period of the war on terror. Hobsbawm’s forecast is that wars in the 21st century will kill less but armed violence will produce disproportionate suffering, as in Iraq, and remain endemic in large parts of the globe.

As for democracy, it is closely linked to the “imperialism of human rights” where professed champions of freedom support a state machinery’s intervention in the affairs of another state, almost always on the assumption that tyrannical regimes are immune to internal change. But Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that democracy and Western values, unlike technological imports, do not have benefits immediately identifiable and welcome.

Hobsbawm is baffled, and not merely appalled, by the irrationality of the American desire for hegemony. Before the Bush regime took over, American policy-makers had always been careful to mask the reality of US supremacy with tact and ‘soft power’. But the megalomania of the Bush administration has not only destroyed that supremacy but also left the US with only its frightening military power. Which brings one to Hobsbawm’s repeated lament for the end of the Cold War — the last great global balancing system that threatened war but guaranteed life.

Perhaps contemporary global problems have taken on their current proportions because, while the Cold War has ended, “Cold War institutions, assumptions and rhetoric” have stayed on. These assumptions must be abandoned if armed conflict is to be controlled in the future. The US, for all its attempts, has failed to impose on the globe a world order of its choice. But it carries on with the pursuit without knowing which way it is headed. In Chapter 2, delivered as a lecture in Delhi in 2004, Hobsbawm says that the best hope for peace is to point out to the US its own isolation and give the country a chance to learn from its mistakes and return from megalomania to reason.

Since this book is a collection of essays and lectures, it tends to be repetitive. Hobsbawm reiterates the same points over various chapters. Although his overall perspective and general argument lend unity to the chapters, there also exist variations, differences in detail and seeming contradictions. He cannot, for instance, make up his mind as to where the fault for America’s transformation under Bush lay — in the collaboration between the coastal regions and the heartland or in the paranoid American psyche itself or in the complacency of Cold War victory.