hobsbawm
about a surprisingly new subject.* We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson, who was concerned chiefly with such things as the so-called ‘identity crisis’ of adolescents who are trying to discover what they are, and a general piece on voters’ identification. And as for ethnicity, in the Oxford English Dictionary of the early 1970s it still occurs only as a rare word indicating ‘heathendom and heathen superstition’ and documented by quotations from the eighteenth century.
In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which really come into use only in the 1960s. Their emergence is most easily followed in the usa, partly because it has always been a society unusually interested in monitoring its social and psychological temperature, blood-pressure and other symptoms, and mainly because the most obvious form of identity politics—but not the only one—namely ethnicity, has always been central to American politics since it became a country of mass immigration from all parts of Europe. Roughly, the new ethnicity makes its first public appearance with Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and becomes a militant programme with Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972. The first, I don’t have to tell you, was the work of a Jewish professor and an Irishman, now the senior Democratic senator for New York; the second came from a Catholic of Slovak origin. For the moment we need not bother too much about why all this happened in the 1960s, but let me remind you that—in the style-setting usa at least—this decade also saw the emergence of two other variants of identity politics: the modern (that is, post suffragist) women’s movement and the gay movement.
I am not saying that before the 1960s nobody asked themselves questions about their public identity. In situations of uncertainty they sometimes did; for instance in the industrial belt of Lorraine in France, whose official language and nationality changed five times in a century, and whose rural life changed to an industrial, semi-urban one, while their frontiers were redrawn seven times in the past century and a half. No wonder people said: ‘Berliners know they’re Berliners, Parisians know they are Parisians, but who are we?’ Or, to quote another interview, ‘I come from Lorraine, my culture is German, my nationality is French, and I think in our provincial dialect’.1 Actually, these things only led to genuine identity problems when people were prevented from having the multiple, combined, identities which are natural to most of us. Or, even more so, when they are detached ‘from the past and all common cultural practices’.2 However, until the 1960s these problems of uncertain identity were confined to special border zones of politics. They were not yet central.
They appear to have become much more central since the 1960s. Why? There are no doubt particular reasons in the politics and institutions of this or that country—for instance, in the peculiar procedures imposed on the usa by its Constitution—for example, the civil rights judgments of the 1950s, which were first applied to blacks and then extended to women, providing a model for other identity groups. It may follow, especially in countries where parties compete for votes, that constituting oneself into such an identity group may provide concrete political advantages: for instance, positive discrimination in favour of the members of such groups, quotas in jobs and so forth. This is also the case in the usa, but not only there. For instance, in India, where the government is committed to creating social equality, it may actually pay to classify yourself as low caste or belonging to an aboriginal tribal group, in order to enjoy the extra access to jobs guaranteed to such groups.
The Denial of Multiple Identity
But in my view the emergence of identity politics is a consequence of the extraordinarily rapid and profound upheavals and transformations of human society in the third quarter of this century, which I have tried to describe and to understand in the second part of my history of the ‘Short Twentieth Century’, The Age of Extremes. This is not my view alone. The American sociologist Daniel Bell, for instance, argued in 1975 that ‘The breakup of the traditional authority structures and the previous affective social units—historically nation and class...make the ethnic attachment more salient’.3
In fact, we know that both the nation-state and the old class-based political parties and movements have been weakened as a result of these transformations. More than this, we have been living—we are living—through a gigantic ‘cultural revolution’, an ‘extraordinary dissolution of traditional social norms, textures and values, which left so many inhabitants of the developed world orphaned and bereft.’ If I may go on quoting myself, ‘Never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense become hard to find in real life’.4 Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain. And they find it in an identity group. Hence the strange paradox, which the brilliant, and incidentally, Caribbean Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has identified: people choose to belong to an identity group, but ‘it is a choice predicated on the strongly held, intensely conceived belief that the individual has absolutely no choice but to belong to that specific group.’5 That it is a choice can sometimes be demonstrated. The number of Americans reporting themselves as ‘American Indian’ or ‘Native American’ almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1990, from about half a million to about two millions, which is far more than could be explained by normal demography; and incidentally, since 70 per cent of ‘Native Americans’ marry outside their race, exactly who is a ‘Native American’ ethnically, is far from clear.6
So what do we understand by this collective ‘identity’, this sentiment of belonging to a primary group, which is its basis? I draw your attention to four points.
First, collective identities are defined negatively; that is to say against others. ‘We’ recognize ourselves as ‘us’ because we are different from ‘Them’. If there were no ‘They’ from whom we are different, we wouldn’t have to ask ourselves who ‘We’ were. Without Outsiders there are no Insiders. In other words, collective identities are based not on what their members have in common—they may have very little in common except not being the ‘Others’. Unionists and Nationalists in Belfast, or Serb, Croat and Muslim Bosnians, who would otherwise be indistinguishable—they speak the same language, have the same life styles, look and behave the same—insist on the one thing that divides them, which happens to be religion. Conversely, what gives unity as Palestinians to a mixed population of Muslims of various kinds, Roman and Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and others who might well—like their neighbours in Lebanon—fight each other under different circumstances? Simply that they are not the Israelis, as Israeli policy continually reminds them.
Of course, there are collectivities which are based on objective characteristics which their members have in common, including biological gender or such politically sensitive physical characteristics as skin-colour and so forth. However most collective identities are like shirts rather than skin, namely they are, in theory at least, optional, not inescapable. In spite of the current fashion for manipulating our bodies, it is still easier to put on another shirt than another arm. Most identity groups are not based on objective physical similarities or differences, although all of them would like to claim that they are ‘natural’ rather than socially constructed. Certainly all ethnic groups do.
Second, it follows that in real life identities, like garments, are interchangeable or wearable in combination rather than unique and, as it were, stuck to the body. For, of course, as every opinion pollster knows, no one has one and only one identity. Human beings cannot be described, even for bureaucratic purposes, except by a combination of many characteristics. But identity politics assumes that one among the many identities we all have is the one that determines, or at least dominates our politics: being a woman, if you are a feminist, being a Protestant if you are an Antrim Unionist, being a Catalan, if you are a Catalan nationalist, being homosexual if you are in the gay movement. And, of course, that you have to get rid of the others, because they are incompatible with the ‘real’ you. So David Selbourne, an all-purpose ideologue and general denouncer, firmly calls on ‘The Jew in England’ to ‘cease to pretend to be English’ and to recognize that his ‘real’ identity is as a Jew. This is both dangerous and absurd. There is no practical incompatibility unless an outside authority tells you that you cannot be both, or unless it is physically impossible to be both. If I wanted to be simultaneously and ecumenically a devout Catholic, a devout Jew, and a devout Buddhist why shouldn’t I? The only reason which stops me physically is that the respective religious authorities might tell me I cannot combine them, or that it might be impossible to carry out all their rituals because some got in the way of others.
Usually people have no problem about combining identities, and this, of course, is the basis of general politics as distinct from sectional identity politics. Often people don’t even bother to make the choice between identities, either because nobody asks them, or because it’s too complicated. When inhabitants of the usa are asked to declare their ethnic origins, 54 per cent refuse or are unable to give an answer. In short, exclusive identity politics do not come naturally to people. It is more likely to be forced upon them from outside—in the way in which Serb, Croat and Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia who lived together, socialized and intermarried, have been forced to separate, or in less brutal ways.
The third thing to say is that identities, or their expression, are not fixed, even supposing you have opted for one of your many potential selves, the way Michael Portillo has opted for being British instead of Spanish. They shift around and can change, if need be more than once. For instance non-ethnic groups, all or most of whose members happen to be black or Jewish, may turn into consciously ethnic groups. This happened to the Southern Christian Baptist Church under Martin Luther King. The opposite is also possible, as when the Official ira turned itself from a Fenian nationalist into a class organization, which is now the Workers’ Party and part of the Irish Republic’s government coalition.
The fourth and last thing to say about identity is that it depends on the context, which may change. We can all think of paid-up, card-carrying members of the gay community in the Oxbridge of the 1920s who, after the slump of 1929 and the rise of Hitler, shifted, as they liked to say, from Homintern to Comintern. Burgess and Blunt, as it were, transferred their gayness from the public to the private sphere. Or, consider the case of the Protestant German classical scholar, Pater, a professor of Classics in London, who suddenly discovered, after Hitler, that he had to emigrate, because, by Nazi standards, he was actually Jewish—a fact of which until that moment, he was unaware. However he had defined himself previously, he now had to find a different identity.
The Universalism of the Left
What has all this to do with the Left? Identity groups were certainly not central to the Left. Basically, the mass social and political movements of the Left, that is, those inspired by the American and French revolutions and socialism, were indeed coalitions or group alliances, but held together not by aims that were specific to the group, but by great, universal causes through which each group believed its particular aims could be realized: democracy, the Republic, socialism, communism or whatever. Our own Labour Party in its great days was both the party of a class and, among other things, of the minority nations and immigrant communities of mainland Britainians. It was all this, because it was a party of equality and social justice.
Let us not misunderstand its claim to be essentially class-based. The political labour and socialist movements were not, ever, anywhere, movements essentially confined to the proletariat in the strict Marxist sense. Except perhaps in Britain, they could not have become such vast movements as they did, because in the 1880s and 1890s, when mass labour and socialist parties suddenly appeared on the scene, like fields of bluebells in spring, the industrial working class in most countries was a fairly small minority, and in any case a lot of it remained outside socialist labour organization. Remember that by the time of World War i the social-democrats polled between 30 and 47 per cent of the electorate in countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland, which were hardly industrialized, as well as in Germany. (The highest percentage of votes ever achieved by the Labour Party in this country, in 1951, was 48 per cent.) Furthermore, the socialist case for the centrality of the workers in their movement was not a sectional case. Trade unions pursued the sectional interests of wage-earners, but one of the reasons why the relations between labour and socialist parties and the unions associated with them, were never without problems, was precisely that the aims of the movement were wider than those of the unions. The socialist argument was not just that most people were ‘workers by hand or brain’ but that the workers were the necessary historic agency for changing society. So, whoever you were, if you wanted the future, you would have to go with the workers’ movement.
Conversely, when the labour movement became narrowed down to nothing but a pressure-group or a sectional movement of industrial workers, as in 1970s Britain, it lost both the capacity to be the potential centre of a general people’s mobilization and the general hope of the future. Militant ‘economist’ trade unionism antagonized the people not directly involved in it to such an extent that it gave Thatcherite Toryism its most convincing argument—and the justification for turning the traditional ‘one-nation’ Tory Party into a force for waging militant class-war. What is more, this proletarian identity politics not only isolated the working class, but also split it by setting groups of workers against each other.
So what does identity politics have to do with the Left? Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings. However we interpret the words, it isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody. It isn’t equality for all members of the Garrick Club or the handicapped, but for everybody. It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for the members of a specific group only. This is perfectly evident in the case of ethnic or nationalist movements. Zionist Jewish nationalism, whether we sympathize with it or not, is exclusively about Jews, and hang—or rather bomb—the rest. All nationalisms are. The nationalist claim that they are for everyone’s right to self-determination is bogus.
That is why the Left cannot base itself on identity politics. It has a wider agenda. For the Left, Ireland was, historically, one, but only one, out of the many exploited, oppressed and victimized sets of human beings for which it fought. For the ira kind of nationalism, the Left was, and is, only one possible ally in the fight for its objectives in certain situations. In others it was ready to bid for the support of Hitler as some of its leaders did during World War ii. And this applies to every group which makes identity politics its foundation, ethnic or otherwise.
Now the wider agenda of the Left does, of course, mean it supports many identity groups, at least some of the time, and they, in turn look to the Left. Indeed, some of these alliances are so old and so close that the Left is surprised when they come to an end, as people are surprised when marriages break up after a lifetime. In the usa it almost seems against nature that the ‘ethnics’—that is, the groups of poor mass immigrants and their descendants—no longer vote almost automatically for the Democratic Party. It seems almost incredible that a black American could even consider standing for the Presidency of the usa as a Republican (I am thinking of Colin Powell). And yet, the common interest of Irish, Italian, Jewish and black Americans in the Democratic Party did not derive from their particular ethnicities, even though realistic politicians paid their respects to these. What united them was the hunger for equality and social justice, and a programme believed capable of advancing both.
The Common Interest
But this is just what so many on the Left have forgotten, as they dive head first into the deep waters of identity politics. Since the 1970s there has been a tendency—an increasing tendency’ to see the Left essentially as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race, gender, sexual or other cultural preferences and lifestyles, even of economic minorities such as the old getting-your-hands-dirty, industrial working class have now become. This is understandable enough, but it is dangerous, not least because winning majorities is not the same as adding up minorities.
First, let me repeat: identity groups are about themselves, for themselves, and nobody else. A coalition of such groups that is not held together by a single common set of aims or values, has only an ad hoc unity, rather like states temporarily allied in war against a common enemy. They break up when they are no longer so held together. In any case, as identity groups, they are not committed to the Left as such, but only to get support for their aims wherever they can. We think of women’s emancipation as a cause closely associated with the Left, as it has certainly been since the beginnings of socialism, even before Marx and Engels. And yet, historically, the British suffragist movement before 1914 was a movement of all three parties, and the first woman mp, as we know, was actually a Tory.7
Secondly, whatever their rhetoric, the actual movements and organizations of identity politics mobilize only minorities, at any rate before they acquire the power of coercion and law. National feeling may be universal, but, to the best of my knowledge, no secessionist nationalist party in democratic states has so far ever got the votes of the majority of its constituency (though the Québecois last autumn came close—but then their nationalists were careful not actually to demand complete secession in so many words). I do not say it cannot or will not happen—only that the safest way to get national independence by secession so far has been not to ask populations to vote for it until you already have it first by other means.
That, by the way, makes two pragmatic reasons to be against identity politics. Without such outside compulsion or pressure, under normal circumstances it hardly ever mobilizes more than a minority—even of the target group. Hence, attempts to form separate political women’s parties have not been very effective ways of mobilizing the women’s vote. The other reason is that forcing people to take on one, and only one, identity divides them from each other. It therefore isolates these minorities.
Consequently to commit a general movement to the specific demands of minority pressure groups, which are not necessarily even those of their constituencies, is to ask for trouble. This is much more obvious in the usa, where the backlash against positive discrimination in favour of particular minorities, and the excesses of multiculturalism, is now very powerful; but the problem exists here also.
Today both the Right and to the Left are saddled with identity politics. Unfortunately, the danger of disintegrating into a pure alliance of minorities is unusually great on the Left because the decline of the great universalist slogans of the Enlightenment, which were essentially slogans of the Left, leaves it without any obvious way of formulating a common interest across sectional boundaries. The only one of the so-called ‘new social movements’ which crosses all such boundaries is that of the ecologists. But, alas, its political appeal is limited and likely to remain so.
However, there is one form of identity politics which is actually comprehensive, inasmuch as it is based on a common appeal, at least within the confines of a single state: citizen nationalism. Seen in the global perspective this may be the opposite of a universal appeal, but seen in the perspective of the national state, which is where most of us still live, and are likely to go on living, it provides a common identity, or in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, ‘an imagined community’ not the less real for being imagined. The Right, especially the Right in government, has always claimed to monopolize this and can usually still manipulate it. Even Thatcherism, the grave-digger of ‘one-nation Toryism’, did it. Even its ghostly and dying successor, Major’s government, hopes to avoid electoral defeat by damning its opponents as unpatriotic.
Why then has it been so difficult for the Left, certainly for the Left in English-speaking countries, to see itself as the representative of the entire nation? (I am, of course, speaking of the nation as the community of all people in a country, not as an ethnic entity.) Why have they found it so difficult even to try? After all, the European Left began when a class, or a class alliance, the Third Estate in the French Estates General of 1789, decided to declare itself ‘the nation’ as against the minority of the ruling class, thus creating the very concept of the political ‘nation’. After all, even Marx envisaged such a transformation in The Communist Manifesto. 8 Indeed, one might go further. Todd Gitlin, one of the best observers of the American Left, has put it dramatically in his new book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: ‘What is a Left if it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of the whole people?...If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left.’9
The Muffled Voice of New Labour
And there have been times when the Left has not only wanted to be the nation, but has been accepted as representing the national interest, even by those who had no special sympathy for its aspirations: in the usa, when the Rooseveltian Democratic Party was politically hegemonic, in Scandinavia since the early 1930s. More generally, at the end of World War ii the Left, almost everywhere in Europe, represented the nation in the most literal sense, because it represented resistance to, and victory over, Hitler and his allies. Hence the remarkable marriage of patriotism and social transformation, which dominated European politics immediately after 1945. Not least in Britain, where 1945 was a plebiscite in favour of the Labour Party as the party best representing the nation against one-nation Toryism led by the most charismatic and victorious war-leader on the scene. This set the course for the next thirty-five years of the country’s history. Much more recently, François Mitterrand, a politician without a natural commitment to the Left, chose leadership of the Socialist Party as the best platform for exercising the leadership of all French people.
One would have thought that today was another moment when the British Left could claim to speak for Britain—that is to say all the people—against a discredited, decrepit and demoralized regime. And yet, how rarely are the words ‘the country’, ‘Great Britain’, ‘the nation’, ‘patriotism’, even ‘the people’ heard in the pre-election rhetoric of those who hope to become the next government of the United Kingdom!
It has been suggested that this is because, unlike 1945 and 1964, ‘neither the politician nor his public has anything but a modest belief in the capacity of government to do very much’. 10 If that is why Labour speaks to and about the nation in so muffled a voice, it is trebly absurd. First, because if citizens really think that government can’t do very much, why should they bother to vote for one lot rather than the other, or for that matter for any lot? Second, because government, that is to say the management of the state in the public interest, is indispensable and will remain so. Even the ideologues of the mad Right, who dream of replacing it by the universal sovereign market, need it to establish their utopia, or rather dystopia. And insofar as they succeed, as in much of the ex-socialist world, the backlash against the market brings back into politics those who want the state to return to social responsibility. In 1995, five years after abandoning their old state with joy and enthusiasm, two thirds of East Germans think that life and conditions in the old gdr were better than the ‘negative descriptions and reports’ in today’s German media, and 70 per cent think ‘the idea of socialism was good, but we had incompetent politicians’. And, most unanswerably, because in the past seventeen years we have lived under governments which believed that government has enormous power, which have used that power actually to change our country decisively for the worse, and which, in their dying days are still trying to do so, and to con us into the belief that what one government has done is irreversible by another. The state will not go away. It is the business of government to use it.
Government is not just about getting elected and then re-elected. This is a process which, in democratic politics, implies enormous quantities of lying in all its forms. Elections become contests in fiscal perjury. Unfortunately, politicians, who have as short a time-horizon as journalists, find it hard to see politics as other than a permanent campaigning season. Yet there is something beyond. There lies what government does and must do.There is the future of the country. There are the hopes and fears of the people as a whole—not just ‘the community’, which is an ideological cop-out, or the sum-total of earners and spenders (the ‘taxpayers’ of political jargon), but the British people, the sort of collective which would be ready to cheer the victory of any British team in the World Cup, if it hadn’t lost the hope that there might still be such a thing. For not the least symptom of the decline of Britain, with the decline of science, is the decline of British team sports.
It was Mrs Thatcher’s strength, that she recognized this dimension of politics. She saw herself leading a people ‘who thought we could no longer do the great things we once did’—I quote her words—‘those who believed our decline was irreversible, that we could never again be what we were’. 11 She was not like other politicians, inasmuch as she recognized the need to offer hope and action to a puzzled and demoralized people. A false hope, perhaps, and certainly the wrong kind of action, but enough to let her sweep aside opposition within her party as well as outside, and change the country and destroy so much of it. The failure of her project is now manifest. Our decline as a nation has not been halted. As a people we are more troubled, more demoralized than in 1979, and we know it. Only those who alone can form the post-Tory government are themselves too demoralized and frightened by failure and defeat, to offer anything except the promise not to raise taxes. We may win the next general election that way and I hope we will, though the Tories will not fight the election campaign primarily on taxes, but on British Unionism, English nationalism, xenophobia and the Union Jack, and in doing so will catch us off balance. Will those who have elected us really believe we shall make much difference? And what will we do if they merely elect us, shrugging their shoulders as they do so? We will have created the New Labour Party. Will we make the same effort to restore and transform Britain? There is still time to answer these questions.
I see five main changes. First, the shift of the economic centre of the world from the North Atlantic to South and East Asia. This was beginning in Japan in the seventies and eighties, but the rise of China from the nineties has made a real difference. Secondly, of course, the worldwide crisis of capitalism, which we had been predicting, but which nevertheless took a long time to occur. Third, the clamorous failure of the us attempt at a solo world hegemony after 2001—and it has very visibly failed. Fourth, the emergence of the new bloc of developing countries as a political entity—the brics—had not taken place when I wrote Age of Extremes. And fifth, the erosion and systematic weakening of the authority of states: of national states within their territories, and in large parts of the world, of any kind of effective state authority. It might have been predictable, but it has accelerated to an extent that I would not have expected.
What else has surprised you since then?
I never cease to be surprised at the sheer lunacy of the neocon project, which not merely pretended that America was the future, but even thought it had formulated a strategy and tactics for achieving this end. As far as I can see, in rational terms, they didn’t have a coherent strategy. Second—much smaller, but significant—the revival of piracy, which we had largely forgotten about; that is new. And the third, which is even more local: the collapse of the cp1(m) in West Bengal, which I really wouldn’t have expected. Prakash Karat, the cpi(m) general secretary, recently told me that in West Bengal, they felt themselves beleaguered and besieged. They look forward to doing very badly against this new Congress in the local elections. This after governing as a national party, as it were, for thirty years. The industrialization policy, taking land away from the peasants, had a very bad effect, and was clearly a mistake. I can see that, like all such surviving left-wing governments, they had to accommodate economic development, including private development, and so it seemed natural for them to develop a strong industrial base. But it does seem slightly surprising that it should have led to such a dramatic turn-around.
Can you envisage any political recomposition of what was once the working class?
Not in traditional form. Marx was undoubtedly right in predicting the formation of major class parties at a certain stage of industrialization. But these parties, if they were successful, were operating not purely as working-class parties: if they wanted to extend beyond a narrow class, they did so as people’s parties, structured around an organization invented by and for the purposes of the working class. Even so, there were limits to class consciousness. In Britain, the Labour Party never got beyond 50 per cent of the vote. The same is true in Italy, where the pci was much more of a people’s party. In France, the left was based on a relatively weak working class, but one which happened to be politically reinforced by the great revolutionary tradition, of which it managed to make itself the essential successor—and that gave it and the left far more leverage.
The decline of the manual working class in industry does seem terminal. There are, or will be, plenty of people left doing manual work, and defence of their conditions remains a major task for all left governments. But it can no longer be the principal foundation of their hopes: they no longer have, even in theory, political potential, because they lack the potential for organization of the old working class. There have been three other major negative developments. One is, of course, xenophobia—which, for most of the working class is, as Bebel once put it, ‘the socialism of fools’: safeguard my job against people who are competing with me. The weaker the labour movement is, the more xenophobia appeals. Second, a lot of manual labour and work in what the British Civil Service used to call ‘minor and manipulative grades’ is not permanent, it’s temporary: students or migrants, working in catering, for instance. And therefore it’s not easy to see it as potentially organizable. The only readily organizable form of that kind of labour is that employed by public authorities, and this is because those authorities are politically vulnerable.
The third and most important development, in my view, is the growing divide produced by a new class criterion—namely, passing examinations in schools and universities as an entry ticket into jobs. This is, if you like, meritocracy; but it is measured, institutionalized and mediated by educational systems. What this has done is to divert class consciousness from opposition to employers to opposition to toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us. America is a standard example of this, but it’s not absent in the uk, if you look at the British press. The fact that, increasingly, getting a PhD or at least being a postgraduate also gives you a better chance of getting millions complicates the situation a bit.
Can there be new agencies? It can no longer be in terms of a single class, but then in my view it never could be. There is a progressive politics of coalitions, even such relatively permanent coalitions as that between, say, the educated, Guardian-reading middle class and the intellectuals—the highly educated, who on the whole tend to be more on the left than the others—and the mass of the poor and the ignorant. Both groups are essential to such a movement, but they are perhaps harder to unify than before. In a sense, it is possible for the poor to identify with multi-millionaires, as in the United States, saying, ‘If only I was lucky, I could become a pop star’. But you can’t say, ‘If only I was lucky, I’d become a Nobel Prize winner’. This is a real problem in coordinating the politics of people who objectively might be on the same side.
How would you compare the contemporary crisis to the Great Depression?
Nineteen twenty-nine didn’t start with the banks—they didn’t collapse until two years later. Rather, the stock exchange set off a production slump, with far higher unemployment and a greater actual decline in production than there have ever been since. The current depression had more preparation than that of 1929, which came almost out of the blue. It should have been apparent from quite early on that neoliberal fundamentalism produced an enormous instability in the operations of capitalism. Until 2008 it seemed to affect only the marginal areas—Latin America in the nineties and earlier 2000s; Southeast Asia; Russia. In the major countries, all it meant was occasional stock-exchange collapses, which were then recuperated quite quickly. It seemed to me that the real sign of something bad happening should have been the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, which proved how wrong the whole growth model was; but it wasn’t seen as such. Paradoxically, it did get a number of businessmen and journalists to rediscover Karl Marx, as somebody who wrote something of interest about a modern, globalized economy; it had absolutely nothing to do with the former left.
The world economy in 1929 was less global than at present. This, of course, had some effect—for instance, it would have been a great deal easier for people who lost their jobs to go back to their villages than it is today. In 1929, in much of the world outside Europe and North America, the global parts of the economy were really patches that left what surrounded them largely unchanged. The existence of the ussr had no practical effect on the Depression, but it had an enormous ideological effect—there was an alternative. Since the 1990s, we have seen the rise of China and the emerging economies, which actually has had a practical effect in the current depression, because they have helped to keep the world economy on a far more even keel that it would have been otherwise. In fact, even in the days when neoliberalism claimed that it was flourishing, the actual growth was very largely occurring in these newly developing economies—particularly in China. I’m sure that if China had not been there, the 2008 slump would have been much more serious. So, for those reasons, I think we are likely to emerge from it more quickly; though certain countries—notably Britain—will continue to be fairly depressed for quite some time.
What about the political consequences?
The 1929 Depression led overwhelmingly to a shift to the right, with the major exception of North America, including Mexico, and Scandinavia. In France, the Popular Front in 1936 had only 0.5 per cent more votes than they had had in 1932, so their victory marked a shift in the composition of political alliances rather than anything more profound. In Spain, despite the quasi- or potentially revolutionary situation, the immediate effect was also a move to the right, and indeed also the long-term effect. In most of the other states, particularly in central and eastern Europe, politics moved very sharply to the right. The effect of the current crisis is not so clear-cut. One would suspect that the major political changes or shifts in policy would come not in the United States or in the West, but almost certainly in China. But one can only speculate about what they’re likely to be.
Do you see China continuing to resist the downturn?
There’s no particular reason to think that it will suddenly stop growing. The Chinese government has had a bad shock with the depression, because it brought an awful lot of industries to a stop, temporarily. But the country is still in the early stages of economic development, and there is enormous room for expansion. I don’t want to speculate about the future, but one would imagine China in twenty or thirty years’ time to be relatively more important than it is today, on the world scale—at least economically and politically; not necessarily in military terms. Of course, it has enormous problems—there are always people who ask if the country can hold together. But I think both the real and the ideological reasons for people wishing for China to be united continue to be very strong.
How would you assess the Obama administration, one year on?
People were so pleased at a man like that being elected, and in a situation of crisis, that they thought he was bound to be a great reformer, to do what Roosevelt did. But he didn’t. He started badly. If you compare the first hundred days of Roosevelt with the first hundred days of Obama, what leaps out is Roosevelt’s readiness to take on unofficial advisers, to try something new, compared to Obama’s insistence on staying right in the centre. I think he’s blown his chance. His real opportunity was in the first three months, when the other side was totally demoralized, and before it was able to remobilize in Congress—and he didn’t do it. One might wish him well, but I think the prospects don’t look terribly encouraging.
Looking at the hottest theatre of international conflict in the world at present, do you think a two-state solution, as currently envisaged, is a credible prospect in Palestine?
Personally, I doubt whether it’s on at the moment. Whatever the solution is, nothing is going to happen until the Americans decide to change their mind totally, and put pressure on the Israelis. And it doesn’t look as though this is happening.
Are there any parts of the world in which you think positive, progressive projects are still alive, or likely to revive?
Certainly in Latin America, politics and general public discourse are still conducted in the old Enlightenment—liberal, socialist, communist—terms. Those are the places where you find militarists who talk like socialists—who are socialists. You find a phenomenon like Lula, based on a working-class movement, and Morales. Where it’s going to lead is another matter, but the old language can still be spoken, and the old modes of politics are still available. I’m not absolutely sure about Central America, although there are indications of a slight revival of the tradition of the Revolution in Mexico itself; not that this will go very far, since Mexico has been virtually integrated into the American economy. I think Latin America benefited from the absence of ethnic-linguistic nationalism, and of religious divisions; that made it a lot easier to maintain the old discourse. It always struck me that, until quite recently, there were no signs of ethnic politics. It has appeared among indigenous movements in Mexico and Peru, but not on the scale of anything that there was in Europe, Asia or Africa.
It’s possible that in India, because of the institutional strength of the Nehru secular tradition, progressive projects could revive. But this doesn’t seem to reach very far into the masses, except for some areas where the Communists have, or had, mass support, such as Bengal and Kerala, and possibly some groups like the Naxalites or the Maoists in Nepal. Beyond that, the heritage of the old labour, socialist and communist movements in Europe remains quite strong. The parties founded under Engels are still, almost everywhere in Europe, potential parties of government or the chief parties of opposition. I suspect that at some stage the heritage of communism, for example in the Balkans and even in parts of Russia, may come out in ways we can’t predict. What will happen in China, I don’t know. But there can be no question that they are thinking in different terms, and not in modified Maoist or Marxist terms.
You’ve always been critical of nationalism as a political force, warning the left against painting it red. But you’ve also come out strongly against violations of national sovereignty in the name of humanitarian interventions. What kinds of internationalism, after the demise of those born of the labour movement, are desirable and feasible today?
First of all, humanitarianism, the imperialism of human rights, doesn’t have anything much to do with internationalism. It’s an indication either of a revived imperialism, which finds a suitable excuse for violations of state sovereignty—they may be perfectly sincere excuses—or else it is, more dangerously, a reassertion of belief in the permanent superiority of the area which dominated the globe from the sixteenth until the late twentieth century. After all, the values which the West seeks to impose are specifically regional values, not necessarily universal ones. If they were universal values they would have to be reformulated in different terms. I don’t think we’re dealing here with something that is in itself national or international. Nationalism does enter into it, however, because the international order based on nation-states—the Westphalian system—has in the past been, for good or ill, one of the best safeguards against outsiders coming into countries. There’s no question that once that is abolished, the road is open for aggressive and expansionist warfare—indeed, that’s why the United States has denounced the Westphalian order.
Internationalism, which is the alternative to nationalism, is a tricky business. It’s either a politically empty slogan, as it was, for practical purposes, in the international labour movement—it didn’t mean anything specific—or it’s a way of ensuring uniformity for powerful, centralized organizations like the Roman Catholic Church, or the Comintern. Internationalism meant that, as a Catholic, you believed in the same dogmas and took part in the same practices, no matter who you were and where you were; the same thing was theoretically the case with Communist parties. To what extent this really happened, and at what stage it ceased to happen—even in the Catholic Church—is another matter. This is not really what we meant by ‘internationalism’.
The nation-state was and remains the framework for all political decisions, domestic or foreign. Until quite recently, the activities of labour movements—in fact, all political activities—were almost entirely conducted within the framework of a state. Even within the eu, politics is still framed in national terms. In other words, there is no super-national power to act—only separate states in coalition. It is possible that missionary fundamentalist Islam is an exception here, which spreads across states, but this hasn’t actually yet been demonstrated. Earlier attempts at pan-Arab super-states, as between Egypt and Syria, broke down precisely due to the persistence of the existing state—formerly colonial—frontiers.
Do you therefore see inherent obstacles to any attempts to exceed the boundaries of the nation-state?
Economically and in most other respects—even to some extent culturally—the revolution of communications has created a genuinely international world, in which there are powers of decision that go transnational, activities that are transnational, and of course movements of ideas, communications and people that are far more easily transnational than they ever were before. Even linguistic cultures are supplemented now by international communications idioms. But in politics there has been no sign of this happening at all; and that’s the basic contradiction at the moment. One of the reasons why it hasn’t occurred is that, in the twentieth century, politics was democratized to a very great extent—the mass of the ordinary people were involved in it. For them, the state is essential to normal daily operations and to their life possibilities. Attempts to break up the state internally, by decentralization, have been undertaken, mostly in the past thirty or forty years, and some of them not unsuccessfully—certainly in Germany decentralization has been successful in some respects, and in Italy, regionalization has actually been beneficial. But the attempt to set up supra-national states hasn’t worked. The eu is the obvious example. It was to some extent handicapped by its founders thinking precisely in terms of a super-state analogous to a national state, only bigger—whereas that wasn’t, I think, a possibility, and certainly isn’t now. The eu is a specific reaction within Europe. There were signs, at one time or another, of a super-national state in the Middle East and elsewhere, but the eu is the only one that seems to have got anywhere. I don’t believe, for instance, that there’s much chance of a greater federation arising in South America. I would bet against it, myself.
The unsolved problem, then, remains this contradiction: on the one hand, there are transnational entities and practices, which are in the process of hollowing out the state, perhaps to the point at which it collapses. But if this happens—which isn’t an immediate prospect, not in developed states—who, then, will undertake the redistributive and other functions, which so far only the state has undertaken? At the moment, you have a sort of symbiosis and conflict. This is one of the basic problems of any kind of popular politics today.
Nationalism was clearly one of the great driving political forces in the nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century. What’s your reading of the situation today?
There’s no question that historically, nationalism was, to a great extent, part of the process of the formation of modern states, which required a different form of legitimation from the traditional theocratic or dynastic state. The original idea of nationalism was the creation of larger states, and it seems to me that this unifying and expanding function was very important. Typical was the French Revolution, where in 1790 people appeared saying, ‘We’re no longer Dauphinois, or Southerners, we are all Frenchmen’. At a later stage, from the 1870s on, you get movements of groups within these states pushing for their own independent states. This, of course, produced the Wilsonian moment of self-determination—although fortunately, in 1918–19, it was still corrected to a certain extent by something which has since completely disappeared, namely, the protection of minorities. It was recognized, if not by the nationalists themselves, that none of these new nation-states were in fact ethnically or linguistically homogeneous. But after the Second World War, the weaknesses of the existing arrangements were addressed, not just by the Reds but by everybody, with the deliberate, forcible creation of ethnic homogeneity. This brought an enormous amount of suffering and cruelty, and in the long run, it didn’t work either. Nevertheless, up to that period the separatist type of nationalism operated reasonably well. It was reinforced after the Second World War by decolonization, which by its nature created more states; and it was bolstered still further at the end of the century by the collapse of the Soviet empire, which also created new mini-separate states, including many, as in the colonies, which actually hadn’t wanted to secede, and which had independence imposed on them by the force of history.
I can’t help feeling that the function of small, separatist states, which have multiplied tremendously since 1945, has changed. For one thing, they are recognized as existing. Before the Second World War, the mini-states, like Andorra and Luxembourg and all the rest, weren’t even reckoned as part of the international system, except by stamp collectors. The idea that everything down to the Vatican City is now a state, and potentially a member of the United Nations, is new. It’s also quite clear that, in terms of power, these states are not capable of playing the part of traditional states—they do not possess the capacity to make war against other states. They’ve become at best fiscal paradises, or useful sub-bases for transnational deciders. Iceland is a good example; Scotland is not far behind.
The historic function of creating a nation as a nation-state is no longer the basis of nationalism. It’s no longer, as it were, a very convincing slogan. It may once have been effective as a means of creating communities and organizing them against other political or economic units. But today, the xenophobic element in nationalism is increasingly important. The more politics was democratized, the more potential there was for it. The causes of xenophobia are now much greater than they were before. This is cultural rather than political—look at the rise of English or Scottish nationalism in recent years—but not the less dangerous for that.
Did fascism not include such forms of xenophobia?
Fascism was still, to some extent, part of the drive to create large nations. There’s no question that Italian fascism was a great step forward in turning Calabrians and Umbrians into Italians; and even in Germany it wasn’t until 1934 that Germans could be defined as Germans, and not German because they were Swabian, or Frank, or Saxon. Certainly, German and central and east European fascisms were passionately against outsiders—largely, but not only, Jews. And of course, fascism provided less of a guarantee against xenophobic instincts. One of the enormous advantages of the old labour movements used to be that they did provide such a guarantee. This was very clear in South Africa: but for the commitment of traditional left-wing organizations to equality and non-discrimination, the temptation to exact revenge on the Afrikaners would have been much harder to resist.
You’ve emphasized the separatist and xenophobic dynamics of nationalism. Would you see this as something that now operates at the margins of world politics, rather than in the main theatre of events?
Yes, I think this is probably true—although there are areas in which it has done an enormous amount of harm, such as south-east Europe. Of course, it is still the case that nationalism—or patriotism, or identification with a specified people, not necessarily ethnically defined—is an enormous asset for giving legitimacy to governments. It is clearly the case in China. One of the problems in India is that they don’t have anything quite like that. The United States obviously can’t be based on ethnic unity, but it certainly has strong nationalist sentiments. In quite a lot of the well-functioning states, those sentiments remain. This is why mass immigration creates more problems today than it did in the past.
How do you foresee the social dynamics of contemporary immigration working out, now that as many newcomers arrive every year in the eu as in the us? Would you foresee the gradual emergence of another melting pot, not dissimilar to the American, in Europe?
But in the us, the melting pot stopped melting as of the 1960s. Moreover, at the end of the twentieth century, migration had become really quite different from that in earlier periods, largely because, by emigrating, one no longer breaks links with the past to the same extent as before. You can continue living in two, possibly even three, worlds at the same time, and identify with two or three different places. You can go on being a Guatemalan while you’re in the United States. There are also situations as in the eu where, de facto, immigration does not create the possibility of assimilation. A Pole who comes to the uk isn’t supposed to be anything except a Pole who comes to work.
This is clearly new, and quite different from the experience of, say, people of my generation—that of political émigrés, not that I was one of them—in which one’s family was British, but culturally one never stopped being Austrian or German; yet nevertheless, one really believed that one ought to be English. Even when they went back afterwards to their own countries, it wasn’t quite the same—the centre of gravity had shifted. There are always exceptions: the poet Erich Fried, who lived in Willesden for fifty years, in fact went on living in Germany. I do believe it is essential to maintain the basic rules of assimilation—that citizens of a particular country should behave in a certain way and have certain rights, and that these should define them, and that this should not be weakened by multicultural arguments. France had, in spite of everything, integrated about as many of its foreign immigrants as America, relatively speaking, and still the relationship between locals and former immigrants is almost certainly better there. This is because the values of the French Republic remain essentially egalitarian, and make no real concession in public. Whatever you do privately—it was also the case in America in the nineteenth century—publicly this is a country that speaks French. The real difficulty is going to be not so much with the immigrants as with locals. It’s in places like Italy and Scandinavia, which previously had no xenophobic traditions, where this new immigration has created serious problems.
Today, the view is widespread that religion—whether in evangelical, Catholic, Sunni, Shia, neo-Hindu, Buddhist, or other forms—has returned as an immensely powerful force in one continent after another. Do you regard this as a fundamental phenomenon, or a more passing one, of surfaces rather than depths?
It’s clear that religion—as the ritualization of life, the belief in spirits or non-material entities influencing life, and not least, as a common bond of communities—is so widespread throughout history that it would be a mistake to regard it as a superficial phenomenon, or one destined to disappear, at least among the poor and the weak, who probably have more need of its consolations, as well as of its potential explanations of why things are the way they are. There are systems of rule, such as the Chinese, which for practical purposes lack anything corresponding to what we would regard as religion. They demonstrate that it is possible, but I think one of the errors of the traditional socialist and communist movement was to go for violent extirpation of religion at times when it might well have been better not to do so. One of the major interesting changes after Mussolini fell in Italy came when Togliatti no longer discriminated against practising Catholics—and quite rightly. He wouldn’t otherwise have had 14 per cent of housewives voting Communist in the 1940s. This changed the character of the Italian Communist Party from being a Leninist vanguard party to a mass class party or people’s party.
On the other hand, it’s true that religion has ceased to be the universal language of public discourse; and to this extent, secularization has been a global phenomenon, even though it has only undercut organized religion severely in some parts of the world. In Europe, it’s still doing so; why this hasn’t occurred in the United States isn’t so clear, but there’s no question that secularization has taken hold to a large degree among intellectuals and others who don’t need religion. For people who continue to be religious, the fact that there are now two languages of discourse produces a sort of schizophrenia, which you can see quite often, say, in fundamentalist Jews in the West Bank—they believe in what is patently baloney, but work as experts in it. The present Islamist movement is largely composed of young technologists and technicians of this kind. Religious practices no doubt will change very substantially. Whether that actually produces a further secularization isn’t clear. For instance, I don’t know how far the major change in the Catholic religion in the West—namely, the refusal of women to abide by the sexual rules—has actually made Catholic women believers to a lesser extent.
The decline of the Enlightenment ideologies, of course, has left far more political scope for religious politics and religious versions of nationalism. But I don’t think there has been a major rise in all religions. Many are clearly on the way down. Roman Catholicism is fighting very hard, even in Latin America, against the rise of evangelical Protestant sects, and I’m sure it’s only maintaining itself in Africa by concessions to local habits and customs which I doubt would have been made in the nineteenth century. Evangelical Protestant sects are rising, but to what extent they are more than a small minority of the upwardly mobile—as nonconformists used to be in England—is not clear. It’s also not apparent that Jewish fundamentalism, which does such harm in Israel, is a mass phenomenon. The one exception to this trend is Islam, which has continued to expand without any effective missionary activity over the past few centuries. Within Islam, it’s unclear whether tendencies such as the present militant movement for restoring the caliphate represent more than an activist minority. Islam, however, does seem to me to have great assets for continuing to expand—largely because it gives poor people the sense that they’re as good as anybody else and that all Muslims are equal.
Couldn’t the same be said of Christianity?
But a Christian doesn’t believe that he’s as good as any other Christian. I doubt whether Christian blacks believe that they’re as good as Christian colonizers, whereas Muslim blacks do. The structure of Islam is more egalitarian and the militant element is rather stronger there. I remember reading that slave-traders in Brazil stopped importing Muslim slaves because they kept rebelling. From where we stand, there are considerable dangers in this appeal—to some extent Islam makes the poor less receptive to other appeals for equality. Progressives in the Muslim world knew from the start that there was no way of shifting the masses away from Islam; even in Turkey they had to come to some kind of modus vivendi—probably the only place where this was successfully done. Elsewhere the rise of religion as an element in politics, in nationalist politics, has been extremely dangerous. In places like India, it has been a very strong middle-class phenomenon, and all the more alarming because linked with militant and quasi-fascist elites and organizations such as the rss, and therefore more easily mobilized as an anti-Muslim movement. Fortunately, the upper-class secularization of Indian politics has so far blocked its advance. Not that India’s elite is anti-religious; but the basic idea of Nehru was a secular state in which religion is obviously omnipresent—nobody in India could suppose otherwise, or would necessarily want it to be otherwise—but it is limited by the supremacy of the values of the secular civil society.
Science formed a central part of the culture of the left before the Second World War, but over the next two generations it virtually disappeared as a leading element in Marxist or socialist thinking. Do you think that the growing salience of environmental issues is likely to rejoin science and radical politics?
I’m sure radical movements will be interested in science. The environment and other concerns produce sound reasons for countering the flight from science, and from the rational approach to problems, which became fairly widespread from the 70s and 80s. But with regard to the scientists themselves, I don’t believe it will happen. Unlike social scientists, there is nothing which edges natural scientists towards politics. Historically speaking, they have in most cases either been non-political or had the standard politics of their class. There are exceptions—say, among the young in early nineteenth-century France, and very notably in the 1930s and 1940s. But these are special cases, due to the recognition by scientists themselves that their work was becoming increasingly essential to society, but that society didn’t realize it. The crucial work on this is Bernal’s The Social Function of Science, which had an enormous effect on other scientists. Of course, Hitler’s deliberate attack on everything that science stood for helped.
In the twentieth century, the physical sciences were the centre of development, whereas in the twenty-first century it’s clearly the biological sciences which are. Because these are closer to human life, there may be a greater element of politicization. But there is certainly one counter-factor: increasingly, scientists have been integrated into the system of capitalism, both as individuals and within scientific organizations. Forty years ago it would have been unthinkable for somebody to speak of patenting a gene. Today one patents a gene in hopes of becoming a millionaire, and that has removed quite a large body of scientists from left politics. The one thing which may still politicize them is the struggle against dictatorial or authoritarian governments which interfere with their work. One of the most interesting phenomena in the Soviet Union was that Soviet scientists were forced to become politicized, because they were given the privilege of a certain degree of citizen rights and freedoms—so that people who otherwise had been nothing except loyal manufacturers of H-bombs became dissident leaders. It is not impossible for this to occur in other countries, though there aren’t very many at the moment. Of course, the environment is an issue which may keep a number of scientists mobilized. If there is a massive development of campaigns around climate change, then clearly the experts will find themselves engaged, largely against know-nothings and reactionaries. So all is not lost.
Turning to historiographical questions: what originally drew you to the subject-matter of archaic forms of social movement in Primitive Rebels, and how far did you plan for it in advance?
It developed out of two things. Travelling around Italy in the 1950s, I kept discovering these aberrant phenomena—Party branches in the South electing Jehovah’s Witnesses as Party secretaries, and so on; people who were thinking about modern problems, but not in the terms that we were used to. Second, particularly after 1956, it expressed a general dissatisfaction with the simplified version we had of the development of working-class popular movements. In Primitive Rebels, I was very far from critical of the standard reading—on the contrary, I pointed out that these other movements would not get anywhere unless they sooner or later adopted the modern vocabulary and institutions. But, nonetheless, it became clear to me that it wasn’t enough simply to neglect these other phenomena, to say that we know how all these things operate. I produced a series of illustrations, case studies, of this kind, and said, ‘these don’t fit’. It led me to think that, even before the invention of modern political vocabulary, methods and institutions, there were ways in which people practised politics that encompassed basic ideas about social relations—not least between the powerful and the weak, rulers and ruled—which had a certain logic and fitted together. But I didn’t really have a chance to follow this up any further, although later, reading Barrington Moore’s Injustice, I found a clue as to how one might be able to get at it. It was the beginning of something that was never really carried on, and I rather regret it. I’m still hoping to try and do something about it.
In Interesting Times, you expressed considerable reservations about what were then recent historical fashions. Do you think the historiographic scene remains relatively unchanged?
I’m increasingly impressed by the scale of the intellectual shift in history and the social sciences from the 70s on. My generation of historians, who on the whole transformed the teaching of history as well as a good deal else, were essentially trying to establish a permanent liaison, a mutual fertilization, between history and the social sciences; an effort that dated back to the 1890s. Economics went down a different road. We took it for granted that we were talking about something real: objective realities; even though, ever since Marx and the sociology of knowledge, we knew that one didn’t simply record the truth as it was. But what was really interesting were social transformations. The Depression was instrumental in this, because it reintroduced the part played by great crises in historical transformations—the fourteenth-century crisis, the transition to capitalism. It wasn’t actually Marxists who introduced this—it was Wilhelm Abel, in Germany, who first reread the developments of the Middle Ages in light of the Great Depression of the 1930s. We were a problem-solving lot, concerned with the big questions. There were other things we downgraded: we were so against traditionalist, top people’s history, or for that matter history of ideas, that we rejected all that. It was not a particularly Marxist position—this was a general approach adopted by Weberians in Germany; by people in France who had no Marxist background, who came from the Annales school; and, in their own way, by American social scientists.
At some stage in the 70s, there was a sharp change. Past & Present published an exchange between myself and Lawrence Stone in 1979–80 on the ‘revival of narrative’—‘what’s happening to the great why questions?’ Since then, the big, transformative questions have generally been forgotten by historians. At the same time, there was a huge expansion of the range of history—you could now write on anything you wanted: objects, sentiments, practices. Some of this was interesting, but there was also an enormous increase in what you might call fanzine history, which groups write in order to feel better about themselves. The intention was trivial; the results were not always trivial. Just the other day I noticed a new labour history journal which has an article on blacks in Wales in the eighteenth century. Whatever the importance of this to blacks in Wales, it is not in itself a particularly central subject. The most dangerous instance of this, of course, is the rise of national mythology, a by-product of the multiplication of new states, which had to create their own national histories. A large element in all this is people saying, we’re not interested in what happened, but in what makes us feel good. The classical example is that of the Native Americans who refused to believe that their ancestors had migrated from Asia, and said, ‘We’ve always been here’.
A good deal of this shift was in some sense political. The historians who came out of 68 were no longer interested in the big questions—they thought they’d all been answered. They were much more interested in the voluntary or personal aspects. History Workshop was a late development of this kind. I don’t think the new types of history have produced any dramatic changes. In France, for instance, history post-Braudel is not a patch on the generation of the 1950s and 1960s. There may be the occasional very good work, but it’s not the same. And I’m inclined to think the same is true of Britain. There was an element of anti-rationalism and relativism in this reaction of the 1970s, which on the whole I found was hostile to history.
On the other hand, there have been some positive developments. The most positive one was cultural history, which unquestionably we had all neglected. We didn’t pay enough attention to history as it actually presents itself to the actors. We had assumed that you could generalize about actors; but if you go back to saying that men make their history, how do they make it, in their practices, in their lives? Eric Wolf’s book, Europe and the People without History, is an example of a good change in this regard. There has also been an enormous rise in global history. Among non-historians, there has been a great deal of interest in general history—namely, how the human race started. Thanks to dna research, we now know a good deal about the settlement of humans across the globe. In other words, we have a genuine basis for a world history. Among historians, there has been a break with the Eurocentric or Occidentalocentric tradition. Another positive development, largely from the Americans and partly also the postcolonial historians, has been the reopening of the question of the specificity of European or Atlantic civilization, and of the rise of capitalism—Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence and so on. That seems to me very positive, even though there is no denying that modern capitalism arose in parts of Europe, and not in India or China.
If you were to pick still unexplored topics or fields presenting major challenges for future historians, what would they be?
The big problem is a very general one. By palaeontological standards the human species has transformed its existence at astonishing speed, but the rate of change has varied enormously. Sometimes it has moved very slowly, sometimes very fast, sometimes controlled, sometimes not. Clearly this implies a growing control over nature, but we should not claim to know whither this is leading us. Marxists have rightly focused on changes in the mode of production and their social relations as the generators of historical change. However, if we think in terms of how ‘men make their own history’, the great question is this: historically, communities and social systems have aimed at stabilization and reproduction, creating mechanisms to keep at bay disturbing leaps into the unknown. Resistance to the imposition of change from outside is still a major factor in world politics today. How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development come to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development? Marxist historians might profitably investigate the operations of this basic contradiction between the mechanisms bringing about change and those geared to resist it.
Barbarism, A User’s Guide’, not because I wish to give you instructions in how to be barbarians.1 None of us, unfortunately, need it. Barbarism is not something like ice-dancing, a technique that has to be learned—at least not unless you wish to become a torturer or some other specialist in inhuman activities. It is rather a by-product of life in a particular social and historical context, something that comes with the territory, as Arthur Miller says in Death of a Salesman. The term ‘street-wise’ expresses what I want to say all the better for indicating the actual adaptation of people to living in a society without the rules of civilization. By understanding this word we have all adapted to living in a society that is, by the standards of our grandparents or parents, even—if we are as old as I am—of our youth, uncivilized. We have got used to it. I don’t mean we can’t still be shocked by this or that example of it. On the contrary, being periodically shocked by something unusually awful is part of the experience. It helps to conceal how used we have become to the normality of what our—certainly my—parents would have considered life under inhuman conditions. My user’s guide is, I hope, a guide to understanding how this has come about.
The argument of this lecture is that, after about a hundred and fifty years of secular decline, barbarism has been on the increase for most of the twentieth century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end. In this context I understand ‘barbarism’ to mean two things. First, the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies regulate the relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies. Second, I mean, more specifically, the reversal of what we may call the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity: to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, to Equality, Liberty and Fraternity or whatever. Both are now taking place and reinforce each other’s negative effects on our lives. The relation of my subject to the question of human rights should therefore be obvious.
Let me clarify the first form of barbarization, i.e. what happens when traditional controls disappear. Michael Ignatieff, in his recent Blood and Belonging, notes the difference between the gunmen of the Kurdish guerrillas in 1993 and those of the Bosnian checkpoints. With great perception he sees that in the stateless society of Kurdistan, every male child reaching adolescence gets a gun. Carrying a weapon simply means that a boy has ceased to be a child and must behave like a man. ‘The accent of meaning in the culture of the gun thus stresses responsibility, sobriety, tragic duty.’ Guns are fired when they need to be. On the contrary, most Europeans since 1945, including in the Balkans, have lived in societies where the state enjoyed a monopoly of legitimate violence. As the states broke down, so did that monopoly. ‘For some young European males, the chaos that resulted from [this collapse]. . .offered the chance of entering an erotic paradise of the all-is-permitted. Hence the semi-sexual, semi-pornographic gun culture of the checkpoints. For young men there was an irresistible erotic charge in holding lethal power in your hands’ and using it to terrorize the helpless.2
I suspect that a good many of the atrocities now committed in the civil wars of three continents reflect this type of disruption, which is characteristic of the late twentieth-century world. But I hope to say a word or two about this later.
The Defence of Enlightenment
As to the second form of barbarization, I wish to declare an interest. I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. It may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this Earth, and for the assertion and defence of their human rights as persons. In any case, the progress of civility which took place from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth was achieved overwhelmingly or entirely under the influence of the Enlightenment, by governments of what are still called, for the benefit of history students, ‘enlightened absolutists’, by revolutionaries and reformers, Liberals, Socialists, and Communists, all of whom belonged to the same intellectual family. It was not achieved by its critics. This era when progress was not merely supposed to be both material and moral but actually was, has come to an end. But the only criterion which allows us to judge rather than merely to record the consequent descent into barbarism, is the old rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Let me illustrate the width of the gap between the period before 1914 and ours. I will not dwell on the fact that we, who have lived through greater inhumanity, are today likely to be less shocked by the modest injustices that outraged the nineteenth century. For instance, a single miscarriage of justice in France (the Dreyfus case) or twenty demonstrators locked up for one night by the German army in an Alsatian town (the Zabern incident of 1913). What I want to remind you of is standards of conduct. Clausewitz, writing after the Napoleonic wars, took it for granted that the armed forces of civilized states did not put their prisoners of war to death or devastate countries. The most recent wars in which Britain was involved, that is to say the Falklands war and the Gulf war, suggest that this is no longer taken for granted. Again, to quote the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘civilized warfare, the textbooks tell us, is confined, as far as possible, to the disablement of the armed forces of the enemy; otherwise war would continue till one of the parties was exterminated. “It is with good reason”’—and here the Encyclopedia quotes Vattel, an international lawyer of the noble eighteenth-century Enlightenment—‘“that this practice has grown in a custom within the nations of Europe”.’ It is no longer a custom of the nations of Europe or anywhere else. Before 1914 the view that war was against combatants and not non-combatants was shared by rebels and revolutionaries. The programme of the Russian Narodnaya Volya, the group which killed Tsar Alexander II, stated ‘explicitly that individuals and groups standing outside its fight against the government would be treated as neutrals, their person and property were to be inviolate.’3 At about the same time Frederick Engels condemned the Irish Fenians (with whom all his sympathies lay) for placing a bomb in Westminster Hall, thus risking the lives of innocent bystanders. War, he felt as an old revolutionary with experience of armed conflict, should be waged against combatants and not against civilians. Today this limitation is no more recognized by revolutionaries and terrorists than by governments waging war.
I will now suggest a brief chronology of this slide down the slope of barbarization. Its main stages are four: the First World War, the period of world crisis from the breakdown of 1917–20 to that of 1944–47; the four decades of the Cold War era, and lastly, the general breakdown of civilization as we know it over large parts of the world in and since the 1980s. There is an obvious continuity between the first three stages. In each the earlier lessons of man’s inhumanity to man were learned and became the basis of new advances in barbarism. There is no such linear connection between the third and the fourth stage. The breakdown of the 1980s and 1990s is not due to the actions of human decision-makers which could be recognized as being barbarous, like the projects of Hitler and the terror of Stalin, lunatic, like the arguments justifying the race to nuclear war, or both, like Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is due to the fact that the decision-makers no longer know what to do about a world that escapes from their, or our control, and that the explosive transformation of society and economy since 1950 produced an unprecedented breakdown and disruption of the rules governing behaviour in human societies. The third and fourth stages therefore overlap and interact. Today human societies are breaking down, but under conditions when the standards of public conduct remain at the level to which the earlier periods of barbarization have reduced them. They have not so far shown serious signs of rising again.
There are several reasons why the First World War began the descent into barbarism. First, it opened the must murderous era so far recorded in history. Zbigniew Brzezinski has recently estimated the ‘megadeaths’ between 1914 and 1990 at 187 million, which—however speculative—may serve as a reasonable order of magnitude. I calculate that this corresponds to something like 9 per cent of the world’s population in 1914. We have got used to killing. Second, the limitless sacrifices which governments imposed on their own men as they drove them into the holocaust of Verdun and Ypres set a sinister precedent, if only for imposing even more unlimited massacres on the enemy. Third, the very concept of a war of total national mobilization shattered the central pillar of civilized warfare, the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. World War I was the first war to be waged specifically against the enemy’s civilian populations, though civilians were not yet the primary target for guns and bombs. Once again, this was an ominous precedent. Fourth, World War I was the first major war, at all events in Europe, waged under conditions of democratic politics by, or with the active participation of, the entire population. Unfortunately democracies can rarely be mobilized by wars when these are seen merely as incidents in the international power-game, as old-fashioned foreign offices saw them to be. Nor do they fight them like bodies of professional soldiers or boxers, for whom war is an activity that does not require hating the enemy, so long as he fights by the professional rules. Democracies, as experience shows, require demonized enemies. This, as the Cold War was to demonstrate, facilitates barbarization. Finally, the Great War ended in social and political breakdown, social revolution and counter-revolution on an unprecedented scale.
This era of breakdown and revolution dominated the thirty years after 1917. The twentieth century became, among other things, an era of religious wars between a capitalist liberalism, on the defensive and in retreat until 1947, and both Soviet Communism and movements of the fascist type, which also wished to destroy each other. Actually the only real threat to liberal capitalism in its heartlands, apart from its own breakdown after 1914, came from the Right. Between 1920 and Hitler’s fall no regime anywhere was overthrown by communist or socialist revolution. But the communist threat, being to property and social privilege, was more frightening. This was not a situation conducive to the return of civilized values. All the more so, since the War had left behind a black deposit of ruthlessness and violence, and a substantial body of men experienced in both and attached to both. Many of them provided the manpower for an innovation, for which I can find no real precedent before 1914, namely quasi-official or tolerated strong-arm and killer squads which did the dirty work governments were not yet ready to do officially: Freikorps, Black-and-Tans, squadristi. In any case violence was on the rise. The enormous surge in political assassinations after the War has long been noticed, for instance by the Harvard historian Franklin Ford. Again, there is no precedent that I know before 1914 for the bloody street-fighting between organized political opponents which became so common in both Weimar Germany and Austria in the late 1920s. And where there had been a precedent, it was almost trivial. The Belfast riots and battles of 1921 killed more people than had been killed in the entire nineteenth century in that tumultuous city: 428 lives. And yet the street corner battlers were not necessarily old soldiers with a taste for war, though 57 per cent of the early membership of the Italian Fascist party were. Three-quarters of the Nazi storm-troopers of 1933 were too young to have been in the War. War, quasi-uniforms (the notorious coloured shirts) and gun-carrying now provided a model for the dispossessed young.
I have suggested that history after 1917 was to be that of wars of religion. ‘There is no true war but religious war’ wrote one of the French officers who pioneered the barbarism of French Algerian counter-insurgency policy in the 1950s.4 Yet what made the cruelty which is the natural result of religious wars more brutal and inhuman, was that the cause of Good (i.e. of Western great powers) was confronted with the cause of Evil represented, most commonly, by people whose very claim to full humanity was rejected. Social revolution, and especially colonial rebellion, challenged the sense of a natural, as it were a divine or cosmically sanctioned superiority of top people over bottom people in societies which were naturally unequal, whether by birth or by achievement. Class wars, as Mrs Thatcher reminded us, are usually conducted with more rancour from the top than from the bottom. The very idea that people whose perpetual inferiority is a datum of nature, especially when made manifest by skin colour, should claim equality with, let alone rebel against, their natural superiors, was an outrage in itself. If this was true of the relation between upper and lower classes, it was even more true of that between races. Would General Dyer in 1919 have ordered his men to fire into a crowd, killing 379 people, if the crowd had been English or even Irish and not Indian, or the place Glasgow and not Amritsar? Almost certainly not. The barbarism of Nazi Germany was far greater against Russians, Poles, Jews and other peoples considered subhuman than against West Europeans.
And yet, the ruthlessness implicit in relations between those who supposed themselves to be ‘naturally’ superior and their supposedly ‘natural’ inferiors, merely speeded up the barbarization latent in any confrontation between God and Devil. For in such apocalyptic face-offs there can be only one outcome: total victory or total defeat. Nothing could conceivably be worse than the Devil’s triumph. As the Cold War phrase went, ‘Better dead than red,’ which, in any literal sense, is an absurd statement. In such a struggle the end necessarily justified any means. If the only way to beat the Devil was by devilish means, that is what we had to do. Why, otherwise, would the mildest and most civilized of Western scientists have urged their governments to build the atom bomb? If the other side is devilish, then we must assume that they will use devilish means, even if they are not doing so now. I am not arguing that Einstein was wrong to regard a victory by Hitler as an ultimate evil, but merely trying to clarify the logic of such confrontations, which necessarily led to the mutual escalation of barbarism. That is rather clearer in the case of the Cold War. The argument of Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946 which provided the ideological justification of the Cold War, was no different from what British diplomats had constantly said about Russia throughout the nineteenth century: we must contain them, if need be by the threat of force, or they will advance on Constantinople and the Indian frontier. But during the nineteenth century the British government rarely lost its cool about this. Diplomacy, the ‘great game’ between secret agents, even the occasional war, were not confused with the apocalypse. After the October Revolution they were. Palmerston would have shaken his head; in the end, I think, Kennan himself did.
It is easy to see why civilization receded between the Treaty of Versailles and the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima. The fact that World War II, unlike World War I, was fought on one side by belligerents who specifically rejected the values of nineteenth-century civilization and the Enlightenment, speaks for itself. We may need to explain why nineteenth-century civilization did not recover from World War I, as many expected it to do. But we know it didn’t. It entered upon an age of catastrophe: of wars followed by social revolutions, of the end of empires, of the collapse of the liberal world economy, the steady retreat of constitutional and democratic governments, the rise of fascism and Nazism. That civilization receded is not very surprising, especially when we consider that the period ended in the greatest school of barbarism of all, the Second World War. So let me pass over the age of catastrophe and turn to what is both a depressing and a curious phenomenon, namely the advance of barbarism in the West after World War II. So far from an age of catastrophe, the third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of triumph for a reformed and restored liberal capitalism, at least in the core countries of the ‘developed market economies’. It produced both solid political stability and unparalleled economic prosperity. And yet, barbarization continued. Let me take, as a case in point, the distasteful subject of torture.
The Resurgence of Torture
As I need not tell you, at various times from 1782 on, torture was formally eliminated from judicial procedure in civilized countries. In theory it was no longer tolerated in the state’s coercive apparatus. The prejudice against it was so strong that torture did not return after the defeat of the French Revolution, which had, of course, abolished it. The famous or infamous Vidocq, the ex-convict turned police chief under the Restoration, and model for Balzac’s character Vautrin, was totally without scruples, but he did not torture. One may suspect that in the corners of traditional barbarism that resisted moral progress—for instance in military prisons or similar institutions—it did not quite die out, or at any rate its memory didn’t. I am struck by the fact that the basic form of torture applied by the Greek colonels in 1967–74 was, in effect, the old Turkish bastinado—variations on beating the soles of the feet—even though no part of Greece had been under Turkish administration for almost fifty years. We may also take it that civilized methods lagged where governments fought subversives, as in the tsarist Okhrana.
The major progress of torture between the wars was under Communist and fascist regimes. Fascism, uncommitted to the Enlightenment, practised it fully. The Bolsheviks like the Jacobins formally abolished the methods used by the Okhrana, but almost immediately founded the Cheka, which recognized no restraints in its fight to defend the revolution. However, a circular telegram by Stalin in 1939 suggests that after the Great War ‘application of methods of physical pressure in nkvd practice’ was not officially legitimized until 1937, that is to say it was legitimized as part of the Stalinist Great Terror. In fact it became compulsory in certain cases. These methods were to be exported to the European Soviet satellites after 1945, but we may take it that there were policemen in these new regimes who had experience of such activities in the regimes of Nazi occupation.
Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that Western torture did not learn much from, or imitate, Soviet torture, although techniques of mental manipulation may have owed more to the Chinese techniques of what journalists baptised ‘brainwashing’ when they came across it during the Korean War. Almost certainly the model was fascist torture, particularly as practised in the German repression of resistance movements during the War. However, we should not underestimate the readiness to learn even from the concentration camps. As we now know, thanks to the disclosures of President Clinton’s administration, the usa engaged, from shortly after the War until well into the 1970s, in systematic radiation experiments on human beings, chosen from among those felt to be of socially inferior value. These were, like the Nazi experiments, conducted or at least monitored by medical doctors, a profession whose members, I must say it with regret, too often allowed themselves to be involved in the practice of torture in all countries. At least one of the American medical men who found these experiments distasteful protested to his superiors that there seemed to be ‘a smell of Buchenwald’ to them. It is safe to assume that he was not the only one to be aware of the similarity.
Let me now bring in Amnesty, for whose benefit these lectures are held. This organization, as you know, was founded in 1961, mainly to protect political and other prisoners of conscience. To their surprise these excellent men and women discovered that they also had to deal with the systematic use of torture by governments—or barely disguised agencies of government—in countries in which they had not expected to find it. Perhaps only Anglo-Saxon provincialism accounts for their surprise. The use of torture by the French army during the Algerian war of independence, 1954–62, had long caused political uproar in France. So Amnesty had to concentrate much of its effort on torture and its 1975 Report on the subject remains fundamental.5 Two things about this phenomenon were striking. In the first place its systematic use in the democratic West was novel, even allowing for the odd precedent of electric cattle-prods in Argentinian jails after 1930. The second striking fact was that the phenomenon was now purely Western, at all events in Europe, as the Amnesty Report noted. ‘Torture as a government sanctioned Stalinist practice has ceased. With a few exceptions. . .no reports of torture in Eastern Europe have been reaching the outside world in the past decade.’ This is perhaps less surprising than it looks at first sight. Since the life-and-death struggle of the Russian Civil War, torture in the ussr—as distinct from the general brutality of Russian penal life—had not served to protect the security of the state. It served other purposes, such as the construction of show trials and similar forms of public theatre.
It declined and fell with Stalinism. Fragile as the Communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even a nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989. On the other hand it is more surprising that the period from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s should have been the classic era of Western torturing, reaching its peak in the first half of the seventies, when it flourished simultaneously in Mediterranean Europe, in several countries of Latin America with a hitherto unblemished record—Chile and Uruguay are cases in point—in South Africa and even, though without the application of electrodes to genitals, in Northern Ireland. I should add that the curve of Western official torturing has dipped substantially since then, partly, one hopes, because of the labours of Amnesty. Nevertheless, the 1992 edition of the admirable World Human Rights Guide records it in 62 out of the 104 countries it surveyed and gave only fifteen a completely clean bill of health.
How are we to explain this depressing phenomenon? Certainly not by the official rationalization of the practice, as stated in the British Compton Committee, which reported rather ambiguously on Northern Ireland in 1972. It talked about ‘information which it was operationally necessary to obtain as rapidly as possible.’6 But this was no explanation. It was merely another way of saying that governments had given way to barbarism, i.e. that they no longer accepted the convention that prisoners of war are not obliged to tell their captors more than name, rank and number, and that more information would not be tortured out of them, however urgent the operational necessity.
I suggest that three factors are involved. The post-1945 Western barbarization took place against the background of the lunacies of the Cold War, a period which will one day be as hard to understand for historians as the witch craze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I shall not say more about it here, except to note that the extraordinary assumption that only the readiness to launch the nuclear holocaust at a moment’s notice preserved the Western world from immediate overthrow by totalitarian tyranny, was enough in itself to undermine all accepted standards of civility. Again, Western torturing clearly developed first, on a significant scale, as part of the doomed attempt by a colonial power, or at all events the French armed forces, to preserve its empire in Indochina and North Africa. Nothing was more likely to barbarize than the suppression of inferior races by the forces of a state which had recently experienced suppression by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It is perhaps significant that, following the French example, systematic torture elsewhere seems later to have been primarily carried out by the military rather than the police.
In the 1960s, following the Cuban revolution and the student radicalization, a third element entered the situation. This was the rise of new insurrectionary and terrorist movements which were essentially attempts by volunteer minority groups to create revolutionary situations by acts of will. The essential strategy of such groups was polarization: either by demonstrating that the enemy regime was no longer in control, or—where the situation was less favourable—by provoking it into general repression, they hoped to drive the hitherto passive masses to support the rebels. Both variants were dangerous. The second was an open invitation for a sort of mutual escalation of terror and counter-terror. It took a very level-headed government to resist; even the British in Northern Ireland did not keep their cool in the early years. Several regimes, especially military ones, did not resist. I need hardly add that in a contest of comparative barbarism the forces of the state were likely to win—and they did.
But a sinister air of unreality surrounded these underground wars. Except in the remaining struggles for colonial liberation, and perhaps in Central America, the fights were for smaller stakes than either side pretended. The socialist revolution of the various left-wing terrorist brigades was not on the agenda. Their actual chances of defeating and overthrowing existing regimes by insurrection were insignificant, and known to be so. What reactionaries were really afraid of was not students with guns but mass movements which, like Allende in Chile and the Peronists in Argentina, could win elections, as the gunmen could not. The example of Italy demonstrates that routine politics could go on almost as before, even in the presence of the strongest force of such insurrectionaries in Europe, the Red Brigades. The main achievement of the neo-insurrectionaries was thus to allow the general level of force and violence to be ratcheted up by a few notches. The 1970s left behind torture, murder and terror in formerly democratic Chile, where its object was not to protect a military regime which ran no risk of overthrow, but to teach the poor humility and to instal a system of free-market economics safe from political opposition and trade unions. In relatively pacific Brazil, not a naturally bloodthirsty culture like Colombia or Mexico, it left a heritage of death squads of policemen, scouring the streets to liquidate ‘anti-socials’ and the lost children of the pavements. It left behind, almost everywhere in the West, doctrines of ‘counter-insurgency’ which I can sum up in the words of one of the authors who surveyed these writings: ‘Dissatisfaction there is always, but resistance only has a chance of success against a liberal democratic regime, or an old-fashioned, ineffectual authoritarian system.’7 In short, the moral of the 1970s was that barbarism is more effective than civilization. It has permanently weakened the constraints of civilization.
Let me finally turn to the current period. The wars of religion in their characteristic twentieth-century form are more or less over, even though they have left behind a sub-stratum of public barbarity. We may find ourselves returning towards wars of religion in the old sense, but let me leave aside this further illustration of the retreat of civilization. The current turmoil of nationalist conflicts and civil wars is not to be regarded as an ideological phenomenon at all, and still less as the re-emergence of primordial forces too long suppressed by Communism or Western universalism, or whatever else the current self-serving jargon of the militants of identity politics calls it. It is, in my view, a response to a double collapse: the collapse of political order as represented by functioning states—any effective state which stands watch against the descent into Hobbesian anarchy—and the crumbling of the old frameworks of social relations over a large part of the world—any framework which stands guard against Durkheimian anomie.
I believe the horrors of the current civil wars are a consequence of this double collapse. They are not a return to ancient savageries, however long ancestral memories may be in the mountains of Hercegovina and Krajina. The Bosnian communities were not prevented from cutting each others’ throats by the force majeure of a Communist dictatorship. They lived together peacefully and, at least among the 50 per cent or so of the urban Yugoslav population, intermarried to a degree inconceivable in really segregated societies like Ulster or the racial communities of the usa. If the British state had abdicated in Ulster as the Yugoslav state did, we would have had a lot more than some three thousand dead in a quarter of a century. Moreover, as Michael Ignatieff has brought out very well, the atrocities of this war are largely committed by a typically contemporary form of the ‘dangerous classes’, namely deracinated young males between the ages of puberty and marriage, for whom no accepted or effective rules and limits of behaviour exist any longer: not even the accepted rules of violence in a traditional society of macho fighters.
And this, of course, is what links the explosive collapse of political and social order on the periphery of our world system, with the slower subsidence in the heartlands of developed society. In both regions unspeakable things are done by people who no longer have social guides to action. The old traditional England which Mrs Thatcher did so much to bury relied on the enormous strength of custom and convention. One did, not what ‘ought to be’ done, but what was done: as the phrase went, ‘the done thing’. But we no longer know what ‘the done thing’ is, there is only ‘one’s own thing’.
Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism, and which I have tried to sketch in this lecture. For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable.
Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money. Let me conclude with the story of one of the last advances of nineteenth-century civilization, namely the banning of chemical and biological warfare—weapons essentially designed for terror, for their actual operational value is low. By virtually universal agreement they were banned after World War I under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, due to come into force in 1928. The ban held good through World War II, except, naturally, in Ethiopia. In 1987 it was contemptuously and provocatively torn up by Saddam Hussein, who killed several thousands of his citizens with poison-gas bombs. Who protested? Only the old ‘stage army of the good’, and not even all of these—as those of us who tried to collect signatures at the time know. Why so little outrage? In part, because the absolute rejection of such inhuman weapons had long been quietly abandoned. It had been softened down to a pledge not to be the first to use such weapons, but, of course, if the other side used them. . .Over forty states, headed by the usa, took this position on the 1969 un resolution against chemical warfare. Opposition to biological warfare remained stronger. Its means were to be totally destroyed under an agreement of 1972: but not chemical ones. We might say that poison gas had been quietly domesticated. Poor countries now saw it simply as a possible counter to nuclear arms. Still, it was terrible.And yet—need I remind you—the British and other governments of the democratic and liberal world, so far from protesting, kept quiet and did their best to keep their citizens in the dark, as they encouraged their businessmen to sell Saddam more arms including the equipment to gas more of his citizens. They were not outraged, until he did something genuinely insupportable. I don’t need to remind you what he did: he attacked the oil fields thought vital by the usa.
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