00:03Erich Hobsbawm spent his early years in Vienna and then Berlin. Born in 1917 to an English father and an
00:10Austrian mother, it was in this crucible of pre-war Middle Europe that his lifelong communist views were formed.
00:18He moved to England in the 1930s and in time became one of the country's most eminent historians, writing such
00:25seminal works as his account of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes.
00:30There are few enough people left with his breadth of experience of the 20th century. So when we met at
00:36the British Academy in London, I asked him, as a historian of imperialism, what he thought of a world in
00:42which there was now only one real empire.
00:46I've seen them come and I've seen them go. Err, in the course of my lifetime, all the old colonial
00:54empires went. Err, the one empire which offered to last a thousand years, last is a good deal shorter.
01:06Another great project, my own, which hoped to last forever, didn't last forever.
01:12You're talking about the Soviet Union?
01:14I'm sort of talking about the Soviet Union or world communism.
01:19So, err, I don't give too much for the long life of anybody declaring themselves a world empire. Err, it'll
01:32last my time, but probably err, it won't last as long as some of the people that are going to
01:39read my books.
01:41Err, you talk about your own particular project. I bet you're fed up with talking about this, but it is,
01:47I think, a legitimate area of questioning.
01:49You are, famously, a very long-standing member of work, a very long-standing member of the Communist Party, and
01:55yet, everywhere one looks, during the course of the 20th century, where communism was applied, it failed.
02:04Do you think your commitment was a mistake, then?
02:09My commitment to the cause of the poor, the oppressed, wasn't.
02:18I think the solution that we thought, er, we had, was a much more dodgy business.
02:30I thought, at one time, it was simply the historic fact that it won first in some rather marginal and
02:38barbarous countries.
02:40There's no question that made it much, much worse.
02:43Err, if it hadn't been Russia, it would certainly not have been anything near as barbarous as it was.
02:50On the other hand, looking back, I must now say, er, I can't call myself a communist anymore,
02:59because the kind of party which I believed, er, was necessary, which Lenin pioneered, and which was, for a period
03:10in the 20th century, an incredibly formidable device for changing states and societies, has run out.
03:19This is, the historic period for that is gone.
03:24Nevertheless, the belief that this is not basically a just society.
03:29It may be a tolerable society, and it may be a rich society, and we live in lucky, lucky times,
03:36and in the lucky part of the world.
03:39I think one shouldn't forget the others.
03:42The problem is the methodology, isn't it?
03:46I mean, no one disputes the ideals.
03:49Of course we would all seek a fairer world.
03:52But can you think of anywhere where those principles were applied in practice, which created a society you admired?
03:59In some instances, it created better societies.
04:04Where?
04:08I remember my friends from India going to Soviet Central Asia and saying,
04:20at least they've taught them all to read and write.
04:24It may not seem much for us, particularly now as we can see that there was a hell of a
04:30lot wrong, and they were poor, and all the rest of it.
04:32They taught them all to read and write, but they didn't let them vote.
04:39They didn't let them vote, but then neither did, well, the Americans didn't like to let the other people vote
04:48the wrong way.
04:49It's a pity, actually.
04:52I think the voting is worried me less, worries me less than the absence of freedom of opinion, particularly free
05:02press.
05:03What was it that made you decide to become a communist?
05:13Being in Germany between 1931 and 1933, living at a time when it was clear that there was no solution,
05:26or it seemed clear that there was no solution for the problems of the world, at least as I could
05:31see it as a teenager, which was not revolutionary.
05:38Living at a time when not only did you know you were on the Titanic, but you know it was
05:43going to hit the iceberg.
05:46The only question is what was going to happen when it hit the iceberg.
05:51And it was almost impossible. Obviously, if you had been, if I had been a German, I might have decided
05:59to say, oh, well, I'm only interested in the Germans, a solution only for the Germans.
06:05And I might have become a Nazi. I could understand why people in my school and so on sympathised with
06:11this. It didn't apply to me. I was English, treated as English, I was Jewish on top of it, so
06:18it didn't apply.
06:21Liberals, Social Democrats were not on. Liberals was exactly what was failing.
06:27I can understand that in the context of Germany with Nazism emerging, that bipolar intellectual or political world, but that
06:35wasn't the world in which you found yourself in this country.
06:38And while membership of the party must have been a warm embrace, by God, it demanded a degree of fealty
06:45from you, didn't it?
06:50You wanted to change the world. You thought, you see, we were the first globalisers. We believed, as indeed Marx
06:58believed from the word going, that this is the way history was going.
07:02Therefore, there must be global solutions. Even though, of course, we were concerned about our own place, our own countries
07:10and so on.
07:12And nobody else produced global solutions. And above all, when I came to England, there was the crucial question, the
07:21absolutely fundamental question of the fight against fascism.
07:26That's to say, the fight against the Nazis.
07:29Do you think it was a mistake to adhere to those beliefs for as long as you did?
07:40It didn't make much difference, as far as I'm concerned. Whether I kept a party card, if you like, you
07:48know. I'm not a quitter by nature.
07:54That's one thing, if you want an answer. I wanted to stay, if you like, to pay tribute to a
08:03cause which was a good cause, a great cause, a global cause, never mind Stalin, never mind the Soviet Union,
08:11never mind anything.
08:13But it didn't really make any difference to what I did afterwards. I went on doing what I'd done before,
08:20namely teaching people, writing books.
08:25And actually, I took very little part in politics. I'm not a political figure. I don't have the talent.
08:33To the extent that you did, though, through your work, proselytise for that cause, do you now regret it, given
08:41that everywhere we've seen it attempted, it's failed?
08:44I'm not proselytised for the Communist Party. I proselytised against capitalism and for the liberation of colonial peoples, for the
08:56poor, against the rich.
08:58And I don't regret that. Why should I?
09:02When you look at the world as we find it now, with all of the edifices that owed some sort
09:10of political antecedents to that belief,
09:16and you see this single great capitalist power, what do you feel?
09:27I like America. I've worked in America. So, in a sense, it's a nice country. It has drawbacks.
09:36I'm sufficient of an old anti-imperialist to be suspicious of any world empires, particularly world empires that don't have
09:50anybody to keep them in check.
09:53For the last 50 years, and it's lucky for you and for me and for all of us that this
09:58was so, there were two world empires that kept them in check.
10:02One of them was a more agreeable one that one would prefer to live under. The other was less agreeable.
10:08But nevertheless, both had the function of keeping each other in check. One of them disappeared. And the net effect
10:16of this is, I think, a certain degree the occupational disease of, you might say, world conquerors,
10:26particularly people that feel that their military power is unlimited, namely megalomania.
10:33I think there needs to be a learning curve because there are, even in the United States, a lot of
10:40people, even among the officials in the United States,
10:43who believe that world empires live in the real world and the real world is a bit too big and
10:50a bit too complicated to be run single-handed from Washington.
10:58I hope that that learning curve can start or at least progress rapidly.
11:06Harry Cobswell, thank you.
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