Eric
Hobsbawm on 2011: ‘It reminds me of 1848...’
The renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm has
watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement - and notes that it's now the
middle class, not the working class, that is making waves.
"It was an enormous joy to discover once again
that it's possible for people to get down in the streets, to demonstrate, to
overthrow governments," says EJ Hobsbawm at the close of a year of
revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world.
He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of
revolutions.
Born just months before the Russian revolution of
1917, he was a Communist for most of his adult life - as well as an innovative
and influential writer and thinker.
He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an
advocate of revolutionary change.
Now in his
mid-nineties, his continuing passion for politics is reflected in the title of
his most recent book How to Change the World - and in his keen interest in the
Arab Spring.
"I certainly felt a sense of excitement and
relief," he says, talking to me in his north London home, which is strolling
distance from Hampstead Heath.
Books about jazz - he was once a jazz critic - jostle
for space on the shelves with works of history in several languages.
"If there is to be a revolution, it should be a
bit like this. At least in the first few days. People turning up in the
streets, demonstrating for the right things."
But, he adds: "We know it won't last."
The historian in him draws a parallel between the Arab
Spring of 2011 and Europe's "year of revolutions" almost two
centuries earlier, when an uprising in France was followed by others in the
Italian and German states, in the Hapsburg Empire, and beyond.
Arab democracies?
"It reminds me of 1848 - another self-propelled
revolution which started in one country then spread all over the continent in a
short time."
For those who once
crowded Tahrir Square and are now worried about the fate of their revolution,
he has a word of comfort.
"Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all
failed. In the long run, it hadn't failed. A good deal of liberal advances had
been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success -
though no longer in the form of a revolution."
However, with the possible exception of Tunisia, he
sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative
government in the Arab world.
Not enough notice has been taken, he says, of the
differences between Arab countries in the throes of mass protests.
"We are in the middle of a revolution - but it
isn't the same revolution."
"What unites them is a common discontent and
common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young,
student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much
easier to mobilise protests."
The importance of social media extends to the other
global movement of the past year, the Occupy protests North America and Europe.
That too has caught Eric Hobsbawm's attention, and to a large extent his
admiration.
The movement dates
back, he argues, to Barack Obama's election campaign, which successfully
mobilised otherwise politically inactive young people, largely through the
internet.
"The actual occupations in most cases have not
been mass protests, not the 99%, but the famous 'stage army' of students and
counter culture. Sometimes that has found an echo in public opinion - and in
the anti-Wall Street, anti-capitalist occupations, that is clearly the
case."
Yet across the world, the old left of which Hobsbawm
was a part - as participant, chronicler and would-be moderniser - has been on
the margins of the mass protests and occupations.
"The traditional left was geared to a kind of
society that is no longer in existence or is going out of business. It believed
very largely in the mass labour movement as the carrier of the future. Well,
we've been de-industrialised, so that's no longer possible.
"The most effective mass mobilisations today are
those which start from a new modernised middle class, and particularly the
enormously swollen body of students.
"They are more effective in countries in which,
demographically, young men and women are a far greater part of the population
than they are in Europe."
Wider push
Eric Hobsbawm doesn't expect the Arab revolutions to
ricochet still further round the world, at least not as the harbinger of wider
revolution.
More likely, he believes, is a wider push for gradual
reform of the sort which, in the 1980s, saw a movement of the young and middle
class in South Korea wrest power from the military.
Of the political dramas still playing out in Arabic
speaking nations, he makes a point of harking back to Iran in 1979, the first
revolution to be couched in the political language of Islam.
One aspect of that revolution has found an echo in the
Arab world in recent months.
"The people who had made concessions to Islam,
but were not Islamists themselves, were marginalised. And that included
reformers, liberals, communists.
"What emerges as the mass ideology is not the
ideology of those that started off the demonstrations."
While the Arab Spring has brought him joy, this aspect
of it he regards as an "unexpected and not necessarily welcome"
development.
Andrew Whitehead's interview with Eric Hobsbawm will
be broadcast on the BBC World Service's World Today
Programme.
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