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Hobsbawm, E.
2000. The New Century. Abacus, (Little, Brown &
Co., London, UK) Rating: JJJJ About the Author: Eric Hobsbawm is one of the greatest historians of the 20th Century. He was born in Alexandria in 1917 and was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge. Since he retired from Birkbeck College, he has been teaching at the New York School for Social Research. Books by
the same author: The
Age of Revolution 1789-1848; The Age of Capital 1848-1875; The
Age of Empire 1875-1914; The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth
Century 1914-1991; Revolutionaries; On History; Bandits; Uncommon
People. |
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Review Hobsbawm has a ruthlessly logical
approach to history, and is not interested in preconceptions of
any kind. This book, in fact the transcript of a conversation
with Antonio Polito, is no exception. In The New Century, he
analyses the way in which our recent history will impact on the
events of the New Millenium, and in effect proves that nothing
will be really "new" about the 21st Century.
Like Chomsky, he challenges our most frequent misconceptions about
international relations, national unity and conflicts of all kinds.
Also like Chomsky, he destroys the myth of the "new military
humanism" and shows that governments hardly ever go to war
for any other reason than national interests. The intervention
in Kosovo, for example, was not "humanitarian" in any
way, since NATO knew beforehand that it would only aggravate the
refugee crisis. He also warns against "historical" justifications
for national land claims, such as Israel's reliance on events
2000 years old to justify the colonisation of Palestinian territory.
If each nation can pick and choose only those bits of history
which seem to justify their claims, further conflicts are inevitable.
In a less extreme way than Gore Vidal, he predicts that America
cannot maintain its global hegemony for much longer, because the
world as a whole is becoming more industrialised, and the USA
is at a demographic disadvantage when compared to its Asian competition.
as for the rest of the world, Hobsbawm is generally optimistic.
despite the ravages of excessively rapid liberalisation (e.g.
in Russia), the average living standards of the world population
at the end of the twentieth century are better than at any time
in the past. However, he cautions against euphoria by reminding
us that the inequality between rich and poor continues to grow.
Another concern of his is the depoliticisation of society, with
more and more people feeling less and less concerned with politics.
This is linked to the privatisation of society, whereby basic
human needs are being submitted to the undemocratic laws of the
market. He argues that certain activities just cannot function
properly in a neoliberal world. He cites science as a key example,
a sphere that has so far resisted the worse effects of liberalisation.
If science were to succumb to the temptation of profit, the results
would be disastrous, because it would spell the end of research
as a tool for the benefit of humanity. In many ways, Hobsbawm's
fears have already come true. For example, countless Africans
die each year of AIDS, because of the excessive market price of
the lifesaving drugs. Millions also suffer form malaria, because
the laboratories in the West see no financial incentive to conduct
research on a disease which only occurs in poor countries. However,
Hobsbawm ends a pessimistic note: based on the history of mankind,
it is impossible to hope for a vastly better world in the near
future. |
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