The age of Eric Hobsbawm

With the recent death of Eric Hobsbawm passed away the last great intellectual marked by the rise of Nazism and the II World War. To be honest his disappearance left me with no feeling of emptiness. I was never too fond of him, as I was of Isaiah Berlin or Ernst Junger. Without understanding exactly why, his two best known works, The Invention of Tradition and the Era of Extremes, didn’t convince me. Despite finding them well written and intelligent, I seemed to detect a very subtle hypocrisy that I couldn’t quite explain then. So, I received his death with a certain relief. Was as if with his disappearance the last phantom of the Cold War had gone and was finally possible to bury the Twentieth Century.

In Reappraisals Tony Judt creates a fair portrait of Hobsbawm. Judt develops an idea that I saw touched upon in a column from The Guardian, after his death, saying that the author of the Era of Extremes was a better historian than thinker. Hobsbawm lacked empathy, says Judt, after praising his memory, erudition and prose. Taking into account that history demands that you put yourself into the skin of other people from other ages, the remark is a slap in the face, even though it is made with delicacy. I think that Judt was right. Despite having specialized in rebels and social revolutionary movements, Hobsbawm consistently avoided asking himself complicated questions. He wrote from the armchair, contradictions of common life didn’t interest him. He had the typical totalitarian tics of the abstemious intellectual that trades sex for books. In the end, as many thinkers of his age, he never understood the relationship between tradition and modernity, nor between localism and cosmopolitism. He defended his subjectivity but he had too many fears and immediate interests to take distance from his own time. Maybe that’s why in my home I have books by Berlin and Junger, but not one by him.

Sometimes it has been remembered that Hobsbawm foresaw the crisis of capitalism after the sinking of the Berlin wall, but no one remarks that he didn’t foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union nor the failure of euro-communism. It’s worth mentioning, that he also never revised his teenage opinions as did other communists who have enriched the European culture. Orphaned, from a Jewish family, he was born in Alexandria, he lived in Vienna and Berlin and he was exiled to Great Britain after Hitler’s rise to power. The portrait that he made of the 20 century was conditioned by his harsh personal biography and has become a standard view of this age. But it’s a shallow portrait that uses the demon of Nazism to romantize the Soviet Union and to avoid autocriticism. Hobsbawm lived like a communist mandarin enjoying all the advantages of belonging to the official establishment in a country as liberal as is Great Britain. Despite having initially hindered his career, in the end his ideology favored him and even folklorized him. It could also be said that his figure represents, to the European intellectual panorama, what the anti-franquist intellectuals meant to Barcelona.

In the Era of Extremes he wrote: “The possibility of dictatorship is implicit in any regime based in a single, irremovable, party.” Judt, in the portrait of Reappraisals, asks, discarding any irony in the sentence: “Possibility?”Hobsbawm’s obituary, in The Times, includes some lines from his memories, published in 2002, where he wrote referring to the Stalin regime: “Those sacrifices were excessive...They shouldn’t have happened. Looking back the project was damned to fail, although some time was still needed in order to see it.” Time? Why didn’t Hobsbawm put distance between himself and communism when the Soviet tanks invaded Hungary in 1956? Or in 1968, when they invaded Prague? When journalists asked him these questions he hid behind generational reasonings and, entered into 21st century, he insisted upon saying that inside he still carried the dreams of the Revolution of October. In the end I think he must have believed that the sacrifices were worth it. Despite sweetening his militancy with sentimentalism, sometimes his writings have these disturbing moments, when he seems to suggest that the suffering of so many people would have been justified if Stalin and his men had obtained better results. Sometimes the Spanish democrats have similar short circuits.

Hollande plays the Grande Armée

On the very same day that the International Commission of European Citizens opened its campaign to collect one million signatures in favor of self-determination, the major newspapers were full of images of the famous French Mirage aircraft flying towards Mali. The war driven by Paris hasn't received harsh criticism, but it hasn't been difficult to detect some suspect enthusiasm and suspicious silence. Last week The Economist published an article titled more or less: Dictionary to understand the new French double speak. The text didn’t mention the war, but it wasn’t necessary. The intervention immediately found an unusual unanimity amongst the members of the UN Security Council, where Russia and China have a strong voice. Thus, it was easy to see that France was again going its own way, now that the democratic countries have more reasons than ever to band together in military matters.

So far, the Tuareg have said they are against the French intervention and that they hope to resolve the conflict through political negotiation with the United States, as Kosovo did.  While France pursues its "grandeur" in Africa, Japan and China threaten to go to war over a couple of tiny islands and Israel is considering a preemptive strike against Iran. The militarization of the international agenda endangers the goals of globalization, even hindering a peaceful solution to the crisis, highly intensified by the entry of former European colonies into the world economy. In Europe the increase of military parades has always ended up stopping the democratizing movements and  the process of political integration, that is so necessary to maintain world peace. The continent will be a reference for democratic values or will not be a reference at all. History, demography and culture don't  allow Europeans to play any other role, but it turns out that Zapatero-Hollande needs to hide his broken promises playing Napoleon.

France pretends to be the queen of the Continent on behalf of an old Europe that doesn't exist and no longer makes sense, as the basis of the social contract that created her has become extinct and the coming world will only be favorable to democracy if it’s based on culture and talent. Military borders have changed. Now, some of the best European countries to live in share defense with the United States and OTAN, and enjoy a modest military budget.  While Ireland collects the fruits of austerity, and Britain is reducing military spending and prepares a referendum to allow the Scottish people to decide their future, Hollande plays the Grande Armée. With his Second Empire shopkeeper’s style, the socialist president reminds us which country introduced the political culture of the Ottomans into Europe while Turks stood at the gates of Vienna. Paris seeks a national solution to the crisis that will not work, not even at the price of breaking political unity. In recent years, some countries have claimed that the boundaries were not important and that nationalism was evil. The crisis is putting them in evidence.

The Last Decolonization

The Economist has released an almost providential study, now that we are so much in crisis and, therefore, so deeply depressed. This study is based on the opportunities that the main countries of the world offer to their citizens in order to enjoy a full and happy life. Twenty years ago the United States and France headed the ranking, and countries such as Italy, Spain, Germany and Britain where classified within the first 15 positions. The league of 1988 was dominated by big democratic countries with an epic military curriculum and a powerful mass of population. After a quarter of a century, Europe is still the best continent to be born in. There is no place in the world where governments offers better aces to the people. However, the nine European countries that are currently among the best 15 places to live are demographically small and have modest armies and modest official languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Irish or even Rhaeto-Romance (Switzerland).

Five of the top ten countries in this ranking of wellbeing are European, but only one –Holland- belongs to the euro zone–Austria is in the 12th place, while Belgium and Ireland are, respectively, in the 13th and the 15th position. In respect to Asian representation, Japan and South Korea have lost their positions in favor of two smaller countries also modest in military capabilities: Singapore and Taiwan. It’s interesting to see that all the countries that have the atomic bomb have sunk in ranking this last quarter century: Westerners are now between number 17 (U.S.) and 27 (UK), and Easterners are between number 49 (China) and 70 (Russia). Australia, with its kangaroos and their extreme insularity, is the best country to be born now after Switzerland, according to The Economist, while New Zealand is seventh, ahead of Holland. The classification of 1988 makes clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall has benefited societies not particularly militarized and very attached to their soil.

This study, and the growing contradictions faced by certain nation-state, shows that the happiness of countries will be increasingly less associated with military power and colonialism, and more related with the capacity of each society to take advantage of its own culture and territory. The decision of Gerard Depardieu to become Russian citizen in order to avoid Hollande's taxes shows that the more the decolonization goes forward the more the welfare state becomes unsustainable without a national compromise stronger than universalist clichés. National identities are gaining importance because the military borders are changing. Giants such as the United States or China can not be considered nationals powers, but rather the spine of great civilizations. To maintain their Status Quo, and to be able to pay their armies, those giants will increasingly need to be surrounded by countries smaller and richer that help them to spread their reputations and their model of happiness without questioning their military leadership.

The crisis in Spain and in the European Union has a lot to do with the changes of paradigm that globalization is driving. The ranking proposed by The Economist suggests that it's not true that the future is fleeing towards Asia, and that could rather be fleeing from certain European countries anchored in the old schemes of the past. Today, having a mass language or a big army doesn't assure as many privileges as in the old times, but we have to recognize that the world is going forward, despite the crisis of the euro. Former colonies are competing with the old metropolis and the countries that during centuries had been living as if they where the centre of the universe are noticing. However, life expectancy and civil freedoms are thriving everywhere, and such things have always been good news in the Western countries.

I feel that to compete in the coming world, the EU will have to face the last phase of decolonization, that is, interior decolonization. Spain and France are the European countries that will suffer most because they have an imperial culture designed to succeed in a geopolitical order made of strong borders and heavy burocracies bankrolled by speculative economies, such as that impulsed by Aznar before the financial bubble burst. In France, during 2012, almost 400 people committed suicide due to laboral reasons throwing themselves in front of the underground. I want to know what the newspapers would say if, in Madrid, the underground stations had to be protected from suicidal people by a wall of glass. In Spain, the ghost of Catalan secession has begun to produce more anguish than the crisis itself, after decades of political denial and failed reforms to eliminate it.

Some moderate columnist will say that is more probable that Britain leave the EU than Catalonia attain its independence from Spain. This would be France’s dream scenario: that Paris substitute London as the financial capital of Europe. This would allow her to maintain the Mediterranean territories in the situation of neocolonization of the last centuries and avoid, for few more years, burying the shadow of old grandeur. I don't know if that scenario is favorable to the United States or Germany. The high speed train Barcelona-Perpignan just arrived to Figueres last month and since 1988 has been considered prioritary. Naturally, in the decolonized European countries these delays related to imperialistic manners don't happen. That's why I feel that a possible way to save Spain and even the Europe Union would be, precisely, to give Catalonia its independence.