Eric Hobsbawm

The twentieth century was, notoriously, the bloodiest that the world has known. The start of the twenty-first has been ominous indeed.

Turbulent times need clear thinkers to sort the wheat from the chaff, and so with this in mind Jeremy Paxman met one of the last century's greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, who this week produces his autobiography, called Interesting Times.

Jeremy started by asking him, as a historian of imperialism, what he thought of a world in which there was now only one real empire.

ERIC HOBSBAWM:
I've seen them come and I've seen them go. In the course of my lifetime, all the old colonial empires went. The one empire which offered to last 1,000 years lasted a good deal shorter. Another great project, my own, which hoped to last for ever, didn't last for ever.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
You're talking about the Soviet Union?

HOBSBAWM:
Yes, or world communism. So I don't give too much for the long life of anybody declaring themselves a world empire. It will last my time, but probably it won't last as long as some of the people that are going to read my books.

PAXMAN:
You talk about your own particular project. I bet you're fed up with talking about this, but it is a legitimate area of questioning. You were, famously, a very long-standing member of the Communist Party. Yet, everywhere one looks during the course of the 20th century, where communism was applied it failed. Do you think your commitment was a mistake?

HOBSBAWM:
My commitment to the cause of the poor, the oppressed, wasn't. I think the solution that we thought we had was a much more dodgy business. I thought at one time it was simply the historic fact that it won first in some rather marginal and barbarous countries. There's no question that made it much, much worse. If it hadn't been Russia, it would certainly not have been anything near as barbarous as it was. On the other hand, looking back, I must now say, I can't call myself a communist any more because the kind of party which I believed was necessary, which Lenin pioneered, and which was for a period in the 20th century an incredibly formidable device for changing states and societies, has run out. The historic period for that has gone. Nevertheless, the belief that this is not basically a just society, it may be a tolerable society and it may be a rich society and we live in lucky times and in a lucky part of the world one shouldn't forget the others.

PAXMAN:
The problem is the methodology, isn't it? No-one disputes the ideals. Of course we would all seek a fairer world. But can you think of anywhere where those principles were applied in practice which created a society you admired?

HOBSBAWM:
In some instances it created better societies.

PAXMAN:
Where?

HOBSBAWM:
I remember my friends from India going to Soviet Central Asia and saying, "At least they've taught them all to read and write." It may not seem much for us, particularly now, as we can see there was a hell of a lot wrong and they were poor.

PAXMAN:
They taught them to read and write but they didn't let them vote. They didn't let them vote.

HOBSBAWM:
But then the Americans didn't like to let the other people vote the wrong way. It is a pity. I think the voting worries me less than the absence of freedom of opinion, particularly a free press.

PAXMAN:
What was it that made you decide to become a communist?

HOBSBAWM:
Being in Germany between 1931 and 1933, living at a time when it seemed clear that there was no solution for the problems of the world, as I could see it as a teenager, which was not revolutionary. Living at a time when not only did you know you were on the Titanic but you knew it was going to hit the iceberg. The only question is what was going to happen when it hit the iceberg. And it was almost impossible. Obviously, if I had been a German, I might have decided to say, "Oh, well, I'm only interested in a solution only for the Germans," and I might have become a Nazi. I could understand why people in my school sympathised with this. I was English, and I was Jewish on top of it, so it didn't apply to me. Liberals, Social Democrats were not on. Liberals were exactly what was failing.

PAXMAN:
I can understand that in the context of Germany, with Nazism emerging, that bi-polar intellectual or political world. But that wasn't the world you found yourself in in this country. While membership of the party must have been a warm embrace, it demanded a degree of fealty from you, didn't it?

HOBSBAWM:
You wanted to change the world. You see, we were the first globalisers, we believed as, indeed Marx believed from the word go, that this is the way history was going, therefore there must be global solutions. Even though, of course, we were concerned about our own place, our own countries and so on. Nobody else produced global solutions and when I came to England, there was the crucial question of the fight against fascism, against the Nazis.

PAXMAN:
Do you think it was a mistake to adhere to those beliefs for as long as you did?

HOBSBAWM:
It didn't make much difference, as far as I was concerned. Whether I kept a party card, if you like, you know. I am not a quitter by nature. That is one thing, if you want an answer. I wanted to stay to pay tribute to a cause which was a good cause, a global cause. Never mind Stalin, never mind the Soviet Union, never mind anything. It didn't make any difference to what I did after. I went on doing what I had done before, teaching people, writing books and I took very little part in politics. I am not a political figure, I don't have the talent.

PAXMAN:
To the extent that you did, through your work, proselytise for that cause, do you now regret it, given that everywhere we've seen it attempted it's failed?

HOBSBAWM:
I did not proselytise for the Communist Party, I proselytised against capitalism and for the liberation of colonial peoples, for the poor against the rich. I don't regret that. Why should I?

PAXMAN:
When you look at the world, with all of the edifices that owed some sort of political antecedents to that belief, and you see this single great capitalist power, what do you feel?

HOBSBAWM:
I like America. I have worked in America, so, in a sense, it is a nice country. It has its drawbacks. I am sufficient of an old anti-imperialist to be suspicious of any world empires. Particularly world empires that don't have anybody to keep them in check. For the last 50 years, and it is lucky for us that this was so, there were two world empires who kept themselves in check. One was a more agreeable one that one would prefer to live under, the other was less agreeable, but they kept each other in check. One has disappeared and the net effect of this is, I think, the occupational disease of world conquerors, particularly people that feel their military power is unlimited, megalomania. There needs to be a learning curve because there are, even among the officials of the United States, a lot of people who believe that world empires live in the real world and the real world is a bit too complicated to be run single-handed from Washington. I hope that that learning curve can start or at least progress rapidly.

PAXMAN:
Thank you.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.