Guardian Review

It has been Eric Hobsbawm's fate to live to see the institutions whose rise he analysed as a historian of the modern world decline or disappear. Empires are gone, except for one, and that one is floundering. Nation states control less and less, while often pretending they control more and more. Democracy puffs itself up, but politicians wonder privately how long its eroded routines will continue to command allegiance. Mass parties and ideological movements survive largely as shells. Even the rebels who challenge established states are in confusion, pursuing unrealistic objectives while discarding rules that once limited political violence, an ominous combination. "We do not," Hobsbawm says in this collection of recent essays and lectures, "know where we are going." When a scholar as eminent as Hobsbawm professes perplexity as well as pessimism about the future the rest of us will be naturally inclined to share his anxieties. His worries are those of a man who, in spite of his reputation as a radical, has had a lifelong attachment to order. At different times he has had different views of what constitutes that order. But the essence, it may be ventured, is that order rests on understanding. Human beings need to comprehend change, to grasp the ways in which it can be managed, to cope with history rather than to be crushed by it. Our situation now, he argues, is that there is even less of such a rational understanding, particularly in Washington, than there was in the past. Since change is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, he says, that is truly dangerous. During the cold war era, for all its dismal aspects, there was more recognition of constraints and limits, and history, in any case, was going more slowly. People woke up each morning to a world in which certain things, both good and bad, were fixed. Not so now. The demise of the Soviet Union has, he suggests, set off a pathological political process in the United States. He confesses that he does not know why America has abandoned "a real hegemony" based on consent and soft power for the illusory pursuit of world domination. At one point he suggests that recent American foreign policy has been the result of a kind of mad negotiation between its relatively sophisticated coastal parts and a central region with no understanding of the world. At another he offers the rather standard thought that American over-reaction to the threat from terrorists amounts to "inventing enemies that legitimise the expansion and use of its global power". Events have moved us on since those words were written. It can be argued that there has been an over-reaction to America's over- reaction. One might say that the problem now is not that the United States is pursuing world domination but that it does not know what it is pursuing. Can America, in the wake of failure in the Middle East, revert to the softer hegemony of which Hobsbawm speaks, or has too much damage been done? Yet, in most of these essays Hobsbawm writes as if the change in the direction of US foreign policy under George W Bush was likely to be permanent, although certain to fail. He does not here consider the possibility that this was both a freakish and an unlucky moment in American history, and that we are on our way back to something that, for want of a better word, could be described as "normal". The process of "educating or re-educating the US" of which he speaks at the end of his concluding chapter has surely already begun. If much of what Hobsbawm has to say in these pieces is familiar, that is of course partly because he is one of the leading intellectual authors of the concepts and the language in which all of us now discuss our situation. He sketches here with great lucidity and his usual effortless compression the new landscape of the 21st century. Globalisation has brought societies together as never before, but politics is still confined to the nation state, which will continue to be the main frame work in which people live out their lives. But it will be weaker than before, contending both with less loyal citizens at home, and, abroad, with other actors in the global space who will often undercut and outflank it. That will make democracy less workable, and also less transferable. His thoughts on the difficulties of implanting democracy, with Iraq his obvious reference, are particularly gloomy. He does not examine the case that Iraq had a democratic tradition and a real national identity which, given a better-managed intervention, might have come to the fore. And, while warning against the dangers of intervention, he offers no answer to the question of what the stronger states should do about societies suffering under oppressive regimes or under regimes that have ceased to be able to govern. On terrorism, he is both dismissive and concerned. Dismissive of the idea that today's terrorism is an existential threat to established and powerful societies; concerned about the reaction of those societies. Terrorism has always been with us, he says, and today's groups are not so different from those of the past, except that some are more internationalised and readier than they used to be to kill innocents on a large scale. Unless and until terrorists acquire nuclear weapons, however, Hobsbawm repeatedly argues, it is nonsense to suggest that al-Qaida or similar movements present an existential danger. Rather, the use of an alleged existential danger to justify extreme policies is where the real threat to world stability lies. To order Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism for pounds 16.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-hobsbawm.1 It has been Eric Hobsbawm's fate to live to see the institutions whose rise he analysed as a historian of the modern world decline or disappear. Empires are gone, except for one, and that one is floundering. Nation states control less and less, while often pretending they control more and more. Democracy puffs itself up, but politicians wonder privately how long its eroded routines will continue to command allegiance. Mass parties and ideological movements survive largely as shells. Even the rebels who challenge established states are in confusion, pursuing unrealistic objectives while discarding rules that once limited political violence, an ominous combination. "We do not," Hobsbawm says in this collection of recent essays and lectures, "know where we are going." Events have moved us on since those words were written. It can be argued that there has been an over-reaction to America's over- reaction. One might say that the problem now is not that the United States is pursuing world domination but that it does not know what it is pursuing. Can America, in the wake of failure in the Middle East, revert to the softer hegemony of which Hobsbawm speaks, or has too much damage been done? Yet, in most of these essays Hobsbawm writes as if the change in the direction of US foreign policy under George W Bush was likely to be permanent, although certain to fail. He does not here consider the possibility that this was both a freakish and an unlucky moment in American history, and that we are on our way back to something that, for want of a better word, could be described as "normal". The process of "educating or re-educating the US" of which he speaks at the end of his concluding chapter has surely already begun. - Martin Woollacott.