[A note to read this article – This is in a PDF format as you go down reading every page has its footnotes numbered from 1 and it increases its number to 195 till the article ends. Pages are 63-98 – total pages 35.]

Class, Nation, and Capitalist Globalization:
Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question
Wade Matthews

Summary: This article will argue that scholars concerned with the nexus between socialism and nationalism have overlooked the work of Eric Hobsbawm, the foremost present-day Marxist historian and a key theorist of modern nationalism.

The article will repair that neglect by providing the first systematic analysis of
Hobsbawm’s encounter with the national question. It will contend that Hobsbawm’s work is a key site for those interested in exploring the clash between class consciousness and national identity, and that his historical and political writing provides a unique window on the nexus between nationalism and socialism in the last half of the twentieth century. The article will also suggest that Hobsbawm’s changing conception of the relationship between nationalism and socialism is
crucial to an understanding of the shifts his politics have undergone in the last three decades or so.

Eric Hobsbawm is ‘‘the premier Marxist historian working today’’.1 This
assessment is not simply based on the extent of a disciplinary expertise
which traverses centuries, continents and cultures, across social, political,
and economic history. It is founded on Hobsbawm’s mastery of generalization and synthesis and a corresponding ability to incorporate ‘‘theory’’
and ‘‘history’’ into his historical practice.2 The combination of these
strengths of breadth, craft and detail was particularly evident in his analysis
of the national question. Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century
Marxist historian, Hobsbawm has persistently addressed issues of

1. This assessment was made as long ago as 1978. For the citation, see H. Kaye, The British
   Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (New York, 1985), p. 131. For the earlier
   assessment, see J. Cronin, ‘‘Creating a Marxist Historiography: The Contribution of
   Hobsbawm’’, Radical History Review, 19 (1978–1979), p. 88. The political appellation could
   be dropped from this statement without causing argument. This was the opinion of Edward Said.
   See E. Said, ‘‘Contra Mundane: On Eric Hobsbawm’’, in idem, Reflections on Exile and Other
   Literary and Critical Essays (London, 2000), p. 474. For a general assessment of Hobsbawm’s
   historical practice, see E.D. Genovese, ‘‘The Politics of Class Struggle in the History of Society:
   An Appraisal of the Work of Eric Hobsbawm’’, in P. Thane, G. Crossick, and R. Floud (eds),
   The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London, 1984), pp. 13–36.
2. For a similar judgment, see R. Samuel and G. Stedman Jones, ‘‘Introduction’’, to idem (eds),
   Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London, 1982), p. ix.
   IRSH 53 (2008), pp. 63–99 DOI: 10.1017/S0020859007003343

2008 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

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nationhood and nationalism, and engaged with them from the angle of
their implications for historical materialism and socialist politics. However, despite this enduring preoccupation, and despite the widespread
recognition that Hobsbawm is among the first rank of nationalism
scholars, his encounter with the national question has not been systematically explored.3 In particular, the nexus between Marxism and
nationalism in Hobsbawm’s work has suffered undue neglect from those
concerned with explicating the results of socialism’s collision with national
identity.4
Nationalism has constituted a key, according to some the key, condition
for the production of modernity.5 Consequently, national identity, it is
commonly asserted, has trumped all rivals in the competition to fill
humanity’s need for meaning.6 Thus, against the expectations of Marx and
Engels, national identity not class-consciousness has dominated the
development of modern history, and nationalism not socialism has captured
the imagination of the wretched of the earth.7 Marxism’s defeat, it might be
argued, required explanation. This is the task that Hobsbawm set himself
from the early 1970s – a task that became more urgent as initial impediments
to socialist advance were transformed into socialism’s permanent derailment.8 Hence since the mid-1980s, and as an effect of Marxism’s ruin, the

3. A partial exception is R. Beiner, ‘‘1989: Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Nairn–
   Hobsbawm Debate’’, Archives Europe´ennes de Sociologie, 40 (1999), pp. 171–184. In histories of
   nationalism theory Hobsbawm’s work is given due prominence, but these histories tend to be
   descriptive rather than analytic. For an exception, see U. O¨ zkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A
   Critical Introduction (New York, 2002), pp. 116–127. An ‘‘anti-theoretical’’ critique of
   Hobsbawm’s view of the national question can be found in A. Hastings, The Construction of
   Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood (Cambridge, 1997), particularly pp. 1–34.
4. Two exceptions, although neither, obviously, consider his latest work, are B. Jenkins and G.
   Minnerup, Citizens and Comrades: Socialism in a World of Nation States (London, 1984), pp.
   64–85, and J.M. Blaut, The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism
   (London, 1987), pp. 101–135.
5. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
6. B. O’Leary, ‘‘Ernest Gellner’s Diagnoses of Nationalism: A Critical Overview, or, What is
   Living and What is Dead in Ernest Gellner’s Philosophy of Nationalism’’, in J.A. Hall (ed.), The
   State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), p. 40. For
   the same judgment from within the Marxist tradition, see G.A. Cohen, History, Labour,
   Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford, 1988), p. 146.
7. Even Marxists have admitted as much. See V. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism (Edinburgh,
   1974), p. 117; R. Debray, ‘‘Marxism and the National Question’’, New Left Review, I/105 (1977),
   p. 35; and G. Therborn, ‘‘Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of
   Twentieth-Century Marxism’’, New Left Review, I/215 (1996), p. 78. For Hobsbawm’s own
   arguments along these lines, see, in particular, E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’,
   in idem, Worlds of Labour (London, 1984), p. 59. This article originally appeared in Saothar
   (Journal of the Irish Labour History Society), 8 (1982). Throughout this article reference will be
   made to the essay’s republication in Worlds of Labour.
8. An indication of Hobsbawm’s growing concern with the national question is ‘‘negatively
   proved’’ by two summations of his work – one published in 1979, the other in 1985 – which
   64 Wade Matthews
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   national question has increasingly displaced other concerns in his work –
   the bandits of Spanish and Italian anarchism replaced by the bandits of
   Serbian and Croatian nationalism; socialist revolutionaries replaced by the
   revolutionaries of Scottish and Que´be´cois separatism; the worlds of labour
   replaced by the world of nations.9 By the beginning of the new century, the
   national question assumed the central object of his thought.10
   This article will provide a systematic analysis of Hobsbawm’s conception of the relationship between socialism and nationalism in both his
   historical work and his political interventions. The article will begin with a
   brief description of Hobsbawm’s ‘‘social being’’, the conditions, not of his
   own making, which shaped his thinking on nation and nationalism.11 The
   substance of the article will constitute an analysis of Hobsbawm’s
   understanding of the national question grouped around three issues: (1)
   Are socialism and nationalism incompatible?; (2) Do the workers have a
   country?; and (3) What is the future of nationhood and nationalism? The
   article will end with a brief examination of Hobsbawm’s assessment of the
   place of socialism and nationalism in our own time. To anticipate a
   conclusion, this article will argue that Hobsbawm’s encounter with the
   national question has not only given rise to a formidable, though
   conflicted, analysis of nation and nationalism, but has also been central
   to his conception of socialism’s past, present and future.
   WHAT IS HOBSBAWM’S COUNTRY? THE MAKING OF A
   MARXIST HISTORIAN
   What is Hobsbawm’s country? Egypt, where his English-born father of
   Russian-Polish Jewish heritage worked for the British Empire, and where
   Hobsbawm was born in 1917?12 Austria, where his Viennese-Jewish
   mother was born and where Hobsbawm spent most of his childhood?
   barely touch on his interest in nation and nationalism. See J. Cronin, ‘‘Creating a Marxist
   Historiography’’, pp. 87–109, and Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, pp. 131–166.
9. For Hobsbawm’s early work on ‘‘primitive rebels’’ and ‘‘bandits’’, see Primitive Rebels
   (London, 1959) and Bandits (London, 1969). For his work on labour history, see Labouring
   Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964) and Worlds of Labour. For his
   contribution to the historiography of international communism, see Revolutionaries (London,
   1973).
10. Something in evidence throughout Hobsbawm, The New Century (London, 2000).
11. This operation accords with Hobsbawm’s own view. In the ‘‘Preface’’ to The History of
    Marxism, he argued: ‘‘Both the thought and practice of Marx and subsequent Marxists are the
    products of their times [and we might add, place], whatever their permanent intellectual validity
    or practical achievement.’’ See E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Preface’’ in idem (ed.), The History of Marxism,
    Volume I. Marxism in Marx’s Day (Bloomington, IN, 1982), p. xii. The task of outlining
    Hobsbawm’s ‘‘social being’’ has been made much easier by the recent publication of his
    autobiography, Interesting Times (London, 2003).
12. This seems highly unlikely. For a brief account of his parents’ years in Alexandria, see E.
    Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London, 1987), pp. 1–3.
    Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question 65
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    Germany, whose language he first spoke and where he lived in his early
    teenage years before the death of his parents?13 England, where his uncle
    moved in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, and where Hobsbawm, who
    followed him, went to university? Great Britain, whose Communist Party
    Hobsbawm joined in 1936, in whose army he served during the years of
    World War II, and whose integrity he defended against the rise of
    fissiparous nationalisms in the 1970s?14 In truth, none fit. Hobsbawm is a
    Marxist historian who speaks and writes in at least four different languages
    (English, German, Italian, and French), who rejected the religion
    (Judaism) of his birth in favor of a secular ideology (socialism), and who
    throughout his life has lived in at least four countries (Austria, Germany,
    England, and the United States), felt at home in at least two others (Italy
    and France), but refers to none as his homeland. A rootless cosmopolitan,
    that most execrated figure of nationalist rhetoric, Hobsbawm does not
    have a country.15 Like those members of the ‘‘trade guild’’ (history) to
    whom he has long felt a deep allegiance, he constitutes a ‘‘migrant bird, at
    home in arctic and tropic, overflying half the globe’’.16
    It was not just his ancestry, the circumstances of his birth, and the
    involuntary geographical mobility of his early years that left him without a
    country. Rather Hobsbawm’s nationless identity17 was a direct consequence of his commitment to that internationalist ideology par excellence,
    Marxism, a commitment that mushroomed in the Berlin of the early
    1930s.18 This was not an unlikely place for such an identity to develop,
13. This would perhaps be the most likely candidate, at least for linguistic nationalists.
14. Some have made this claim. See T. Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London,
    1997), p. 42; Jenkins and Minnerup, Citizens and Comrades, p. 77; and P. Anderson, Spectrum
    (London [etc.], 2005), p. 292.
15. As Tom Nairn has suggested, although the internationalist speaks ‘‘from nowhere in
    particular’’, he or she is no freer of particularity than the nationalist – internationalism is a belief
    system of the order of nationalism, bias inheres in both. See T. Nairn, ‘‘Internationalism and the
    Second Coming’’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London [etc.], 1996), p. 268.
16. See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 415. If there is one ‘‘imagined community’’ that
    Hobsbawm belongs to it is perhaps the ‘‘imagined community’’ of historians. For his account of
    this community in his lifetime, see Interesting Times, pp. 282–297. Hobsbawm taught at
    Birkbeck College from 1947 to 1982, and then at the New School for Social Research from 1984
    to 1997.
17. The word ‘‘identity’’ is consistently misused and misunderstood according to Fredrick
    Cooper and Rogers Brubaker. See F. Cooper (with R. Brubaker), ‘‘Identity’’, in F. Cooper,
    Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 59–90. I use the
    term in the sense (described by Cooper and Brubaker, p. 65) of ‘‘a core aspect of [:::] selfhood or a
    fundamental condition of social being’’.
18. Horace B. Davis has suggested that ‘‘Internationalism ::: is the essence of Marxism’’. See H.B.
    Davis, Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism (New York [etc.], 1978), p. 18. Hobsbawm later
    characterized his initial encounter with Marxism as ‘‘liberating’’. See E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What Do
    Historians owe Karl Marx?’’, in idem, On History (London, 1997), p. 194. This article was earlier
    published in Diogenes, 64 (1969), pp. 37–56. Reference to the essay in this article will be to its
    republication in On History.
    66 Wade Matthews
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    especially not for a Jew. As the Weimar Republic descended into crisis,
    undermined by the ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of Hitlerite
    fascism, Jews increasingly found themselves constituted as Germany’s
    foundational ‘‘Other’’. In such circumstances, rather than an ‘‘opiate of the
    intellectuals’’, in Raymond Aron’s acerbic phrase, Marxism, for many
    (German) Jews, appeared a political necessity. As Hobsbawm later
    recalled: ‘‘We [Jews] simply choose a future, rather than no future, which
    meant revolution. But it meant revolution not in a negative sense but in a
    positive sense: a new world rather than no world.’’19 For Hobsbawm, that
    implied the global transformation of a system of production that had
    produced endemic poverty, war, and fascism – in short, a new world
    required world revolution. In the early 1930s this was not a quixotic
    Marxist fancy.20
    According to Age of Extremes, the twentieth century ‘‘cannot be
    understood without the Russian revolution and its direct and indirect
    effects’’.21 The same might be said of Hobsbawm.22 For him, as for so
    many other west European Marxists in the 1930s, the Soviet Union and its
    project of world revolution constituted an already existing alternative to
    capitalism and fascism, to an old order which events seemed to prove was
    no longer viable. In this vision, where Nazism offered national socialism as
    a salve to capitalism’s ills, the Soviet Union offered the socialist
    Cosmopolis free from poverty and want; where Nazism promised eternal
    war between races, the Soviet Union promised universal peace; and where
    Nazism exalted the supremacy of the German people and the irrational,
    the Soviet Union exalted universal equality and reason. In a world
    unhinged by economic and political collapse, it was an appealing vision.
    For the young Hobsbawm it was overwhelming: there was only one
    means to overcome the seemingly interlaced absurdities of capitalism and
    fascism – worldwide socialist revolution, the project begun by the
    Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Thus when Hobsbawm
    became a communist in the Berlin of 1932, beginning an association which
    would last until the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, he was
    not only endorsing the view that communism offered a universal
    alternative to economic catastrophe and fascism. He was also affirming
19. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Intellectuals and the Class Struggle’’ in Revolutionaries, p. 300. Italics appear
    in the original. In Interesting Times, p. 62 he claimed that most militant Zionists were socialists
    of one sort or another, ‘‘mostly of various Marxist convictions’’.
20. See Hobsbawm, ‘‘Intellectuals and the Class Struggle’’, p. 300. In addition, see J. Saville, ‘‘The
    Communist Experience: A Personal Appraisal’’, in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist
    Register 1991 (London, 1991), p. 3, and R. Samuel, ‘‘The Lost World of British Communism’’,
    New Left Review, I/154 (1985), p. 38.
21. E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London,
    1994), p. 84.
22. See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 217.
    Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question 67
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    that socialist revolution was his homeland and that the sole community
    worth imagining or belonging to was one that included all the peoples of
    the world.23 The memory of this moment would leave a deep imprint on
    his life; indeed Hobsbawm’s intellectual and political contributions would
    be insensible without it.
    When Hobsbawm left Germany for England in 1933, then, he had
    already committed himself to a set of beliefs that would endure and been
    gripped by what he later characterized as ‘‘that typical twentieth-century
    passion, political commitment’’.24 Like Germany, his new home had also
    been rocked by the almost worldwide crisis of capitalism.25 However,
    unlike Weimar Germany, England did not give birth to a mass
    revolutionary workers’ movement. Thus, although Hobsbawm remained
    a communist during the initial years of his stay in London, the
    circumstances made it hard to imagine life as a professional revolutionary,
    at that time his preferred vocation. Having escaped Berlin shortly after the
    rise of Hitler, in England he would explore Marxism through books rather
    than the immediate struggle against fascism as he had in the last months of
    his life in Berlin. With the memories of those times still ‘‘spiritually’’
    present, it was during a three-year hiatus from politics before he began
    university that the disciplinary appellation of the identity Marxist
    historian was born.26
    The disciplinary and the political aspects of Hobsbawm’s identity
    coalesced in 1936 when he went to Cambridge to study history and
    joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).27 Active in the
    student communist milieu at Cambridge in the late 1930s, a time when
    the ranks of communism were swelled by the rise of fascism, the Spanish
    Civil War, and the politics of the Popular Front, Hobsbawm spent the
    war years fulfilling a number of banal duties in the British army, perhaps
    barred from more active involvement by his Bolshevik politics.28 The
    experience of the Popular Front period and the ‘‘People’s War’’, however,
    constituted crucial moments in Hobsbawm’s political formation, moments which would in part determine not just the character of his Marxist
23. Ibid., p. 137. Also see Samuel, ‘‘The Lost World of British Communism’’, pp. 10 and 11.
24. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 11.
25. Ibid., p. 46.
26. Ibid., pp. 95–98.
27. For the history of the CPGB during this period, see A. Thorpe, The British Communist
    Party and Moscow, 1920–1943 (London, 2001), and M. Worley, Class Against Class: The
    Communist Party in Britain between the Wars (London, 2002). But note the critique of these
    histories in J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘‘‘Nina Ponomareva’s Hats’: The New Revisionism, the
    Communist International, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1930’’, Labour/Le
    Travail, 49 (2004), pp. 147–188.
28. This suggestion is Hobsbawm’s. See his Interesting Times, p. 154. On Hobsbawm’s own
    experience of communism at Cambridge, see ‘‘Interview with E.J. Hobsbawm’’, Radical History
    Review, 19 (1978–1979), pp. 111–131.
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    politics but also his understanding of the potential value of patriotism to
    international socialism. Allowing reconciliation between communists,
    national social democrats and conservative patriots, the Popular Front
    against fascism provided Hobsbawm with crucial strategic insights into
    the way socialism could be advanced in conditions where revolution had
    been either stalled or temporarily defeated.29 Indeed, popular resistance
    to fascism was central to the political and intellectual development of
    many of the members of the Communist Party Historians’ Group
    (CPHG), of which Hobsbawm was a prominent member throughout the
    late 1940s and 1950s.30 Developments in British communism in the
    immediate period after 1945 – the ‘‘British road to socialism’’ – were also
    important in this respect.31 This period in British communism’s history
    constituted a self-conscious attempt by the CPGB to extend the strategy
    of the Popular Front into the immediate postwar years, aligning the cause
    of national reconstruction to international socialism;32 it also overdetermined the tradition of British Marxist historiography, a tradition
    which would have a disproportionate influence on the development of
    Anglo-American intellectual thought in the last half of the twentieth
    century.33
    Thus, Hobsbawm’s commitment to international communism remained
    intact through and immediately after World War II. More surprisingly, it
    remained intact throughout 1956 – that year of the revelation of Stalinism’s
    crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary – as well. Hobsbawm’s decision
    to remain a member of the CPGB is surprising because so many other
    members of the CPHG, including E.P. Thompson, John Saville, Christopher Hill, and Victor Kiernan, believed it necessary, for Marxism’s good,
29. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Fifty Years of People’s Fronts’’, in idem, Politics for a Rational Left:
    Political Writing, 1977–1988 (London, 1989), p. 107.
30. On the CPHG, see E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’’, in M.
    Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton (London, 1978), pp.
    21–48, and B. Schwarz, ‘‘‘The People’ in History: The Communist Party Historians Group,
    1946–1956’’, in R. Johnson et al., Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics
    (London, 1982), pp. 44–95. For an account of the relationship between the CPHG and the
    national question, see D. Renton, ‘‘Studying Their Own Nation without Insularity? The British
    Marxist Historians Reconsidered’’, Science and Society, 69 (2005), pp. 559–579. Also consider P.
    Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester, 2006), pp. 82–86.
31. On this period in the CPGB’s history, see D. Childs, ‘‘The Cold War and the ‘British Road’,
    1946–53’’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), pp. 551–572.
32. For the immediate pre-history of the CPGB’s attempt to make communism compatible with
    the nation, see G. Roberts, ‘‘Limits of Popular Radicalism: British Communism and the People’s
    War, 1941–1945’’, Chronicon, 1:3 (1997), pp. 1–19.
33. On the tradition of British Marxist historiography, see Kaye, The British Marxists, and H.
    Kaye, The Education of Desire: British Marxists and the Writing of History (London [etc.], 1992).
    For the tradition’s influence on the development of history and cultural studies, see D. Dworkin,
    Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies
    (Durham [etc.], 1997).
    Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question 69
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    to leave.34 According to Hobsbawm’s autobiography, he stayed because he
    believed it was important to remain true to the memory of those
    communists who had, as E.P. Thompson said, put ‘‘their bodies between
    fascism and freedom’’.35 Moreover, formed in the immediate prelude to
    Hitler’s rise to power, he maintained that it was simply more difficult for
    him to leave than for those who had joined somewhere else and at some
    other time. In this way, Hobsbawm argued, his political formation in the
    shadow of the Weimar Republic’s imminent collapse – ‘‘when being a
    communist meant not simply fighting fascism but the world revolution’’36
    – constituted an overwhelming factor in his decision to remain within what
    he would later call the ‘‘universal church’’37 of communism.38
    However, there were others within the CPGB equally committed to the
    memory of those who laid their lives down for anti-fascism, and equally
    resolved to avoid the characteristic anti-communist terminus common to
    those Cold War times, who thought it necessary to leave the party in 1956.
    For some, including some who had dodged fascist bullets, that was what
    1956 was about. For them, remaining true to the memory of the struggle
    against fascist barbarism precisely meant renouncing Soviet communism.
    Hobsbawm did not interpret 1956 this way. It is difficult to imagine,
    however, that he was only prevented from doing so ‘‘out of loyalty to a
    great cause and to all those who had sacrificed their lives for it’’.39 This
    might be true in retrospect but it was not necessarily true at the time, as
    Hobsbawm himself has admitted.
    Nonetheless, although what was true at the time can only be a matter of
    speculation, it might be noted that Hobsbawm’s continuing association
    with international communism allowed him access to an international
    milieu characterized by comradeship and intellectual fraternity, a milieu
    that would have been denied him had he renounced communism in 1956.
    For example, in Primitive Rebels he acknowledged the help and support
    his path-breaking research on ‘‘archaic’’ forms of social movement had
    received from various functionaries and officials in the Italian Communist
    party. From this it might be concluded that his politics were not always an
    obstruction to his career as a scholar.40 In other words, in some countries,
34. This should not imply that Hobsbawm was unsympathetic to communist dissent. He
    contributed to the communist dissident press, and signed his name to a dissident letter that
    appeared in Tribune and the New Statesman in 1956.
35. E.P. Thompson, The Fascist Threat to Britain (London, 1947) p., 16, cited in B.D. Palmer,
    E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (London, 1994), p. 50. For Hobsbawm’s
    explanation for why he stayed, see his Interesting Times, pp. 141 and 217–218.
36. Ibid., p. 217.
37. Idem, Age of Extremes, p. 73.
38. See E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Emancipation of Mankind – Eric Hobsbawm interviewed by Peter
    Glotz’’, in idem, Politics for a Rational Left, p. 201.
39. Idem, The New Century, p. 159.
40. Idem, Primitive Rebels, p. vi.
    70 Wade Matthews
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    at least, his communist party membership operated as a ‘‘code of entry’’41
    to intellectual circles, places and, in some cases, institutions which would
    have otherwise been sealed off to him.
    Whatever his individual reasoning, Hobsbawm’s resolution that international socialism was best served within the CPGB did not prevent him
    being critical of actually existing socialism or from expressing fraternity,
    though limited, with other socialist groupings. For example, his CPGB
    membership was no obstacle to his participation in various projects of the
    British New Left, although he was always unsympathetic to socialist
    humanist politics.42 Nonetheless, he contributed pieces to The New
    Reasoner, E.P. Thompson and John Saville’s journal of communist dissent,
    and to the New Left Review, house journal of the New Left, in the 1960s.43
    This, in some ways, connects with his later statement that he and those
    who left the CPGB in 1956 were fighting for the same things.44
    However, in reality, Hobsbawm remained unconvinced by the practical
    political benefits of such projects, something reflected in his contribution
    to their purpose – academic not political.45 In fact, following 1956
    Hobsbawm mostly quit political activism of any type.46 After the CPGB’s
    failure to reform itself in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary,
    Hobsbawm’s socialist activism was confined to history writing, involvement with short-term political protest movements, including those against
    nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and to interventions over the
    future of the Labour Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s.47 Embedded
41. The phrase is Hobsbawm’s and can be found in Interesting Times, p. 326.
42. Unfortunately, in his autobiography his originally friendly criticism of the New Left
    descended into derision. See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, pp. 211–212.
43. For an outline of The New Reasoner’s history, see B.D. Palmer, ‘‘Reasoning Rebellion: E.P.
    Thompson, British Marxist Historians, and the Making of Dissident Political Mobilization’’,
    Labour/Le Travail, 40 (2002), pp. 187–216.
44. As he later remarked about his relationship with the communist dissidents: ‘‘Those of us who
    stayed stood for the same things, were fighting for the same things’’. See E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘1956’’,
    Marxism Today, (November 1986), p. 21. For more on 1956 and the CPGB, see J. Saville, ‘‘E.P.
    Thompson, the Communist Party and 1956’’, in J. Saville and C. Leys (eds), Socialist Register
    1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism (London, 1994), pp. 20–31.
45. See E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Dr Marx and the Victorian Critics’’, New Reasoner, 1 (1957), pp. 29–39;
    idem, ‘‘Hyndman and the SDF’’, New Left Review, I/10 (1961), pp. 69–72; and idem,
    ‘‘Parliamentary Cretinism’’, New Left Review, I/12 (1961), pp. 64–66.
46. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 211.
47. Hobsbawm’s political activism is recounted throughout Interesting Times. For his
    intervention, largely, he claims, unintended, over the future of the Labour Party in the late
    1970s and early 1980s, see his essay ‘‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’’, Marxism Today,
    12:9 (1978), pp. 279–286. This essay was later republished in M. Jacques and F. Mulhern (eds),
    The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981), pp. 1–19. In the same edition see
    Hobsbawm’s ‘‘Response’’ to the debate his article started, and his ‘‘Observations on the Debate’’,
    pp. 64–71 and pp. 167–182 respectively. For a later account of his role in the debate, see his
    Interesting Times, pp. 263–272. Note the critique of this account in Anderson, Spectrum, pp.
    289–290.
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    in the academic world from the late 1940s (he received his first academic
    post at Birkbeck College, London University in 1947), Hobsbawm mostly
    eschewed the political activism that was characteristic of the ‘‘way of life’’
    of other contemporary socialist historians.
    Hobsbawm’s alienation from political practice is, as he himself
    admitted, arresting, not only given the trajectories of figures like E.P.
    Thompson and Raymond Williams, with whom he might be compared,
    but also because he claimed to have been gripped by political commitment
    from an early age.48 A historian who happened to be a socialist rather than
    a socialist-historian, Hobsbawm, as a chapter in Interesting Times
    suggests, was a ‘‘watcher in politics’’. This sense of himself as a ‘‘watcher
    in politics’’ was reflected in his ‘‘mode of writing’’. Whether in his
    historical writings or his historically informed political journalism,
    Hobsbawm wrote from an Olympian perspective, a perspective that
    perhaps came easily and appropriately to a figure who was consistently
    forced to live in between homes. Deracination, however, gave rise not just
    to a sense of political detachment, but also to a disavowal of human agency,
    whether in history or everyday political practice. Rather than seek out
    those alternative ‘‘practices of possibility’’ or ‘‘resources of hope’’ that
    other socialists saw as crucial to socialism’s future after 1956, Hobsbawm
    was a Marxist historian who was primarily interested in interpreting the
    world, not changing it. A form of historical practice that was predominantly concerned with patterns and structures was unlikely to give rise to
    new forms of socialist praxis – there was a (political) world of difference in
    tone between The Making of the English Working Class and The Age of
    Revolution.
    49
    By some time during the 1960s (The New Century suggested as early as
    1956),50 Hobsbawm believed that the socialist project was doomed.51 His
    awareness of Marxism’s historic crisis – what he called the ‘‘forward march
    of labour halted’’ – came relatively early. Strangely enough, although not
    from the perspective of classical Marxism, intimations of communism’s
    absolute defeat for Hobsbawm appeared most clearly in the capitalist West
    not in the communist East. Of course Hobsbawm was cognizant of
    socialism’s travails east of the Elbe, signified by the dates 1956 and 1968,
48. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 263.
49. More often than not Hobsbawm and Thompson are grouped together in the category
    ‘‘British Marxist historians’’. This grouping needs to be considered with care. Hobsbawm in
    Interesting Times pointed to significant differences when he (again) questioned the value of
    Thompson’s critique of Althusserian Marxism. See Interesting Times, p. 215. Further
    divergences between Hobsbawm and Thompson are pointed to in an unpublished paper by
    Bryan Palmer on Hobsbawm’s historiographical achievements. I thank the author for allowing
    me to read this unpublished piece. Also see Palmer, ‘‘Reasoning Rebellion’’, pp. 187–216.
50. Hobsbawm, The New Century, p. 159.
51. As Hobsbawm later admitted in ‘‘Goodbye to All That’’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), After the
    Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London, 1991), p. 116.
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    the Sino-Soviet split, and the wretched condition of socialism’s stateplanned economies. However, he believed that once it became clear that
    the working class in advanced capitalist societies had not only deserted
    revolution but was structurally incapable of perpetuating it, the project of
    world revolution had to be abandoned. If this wasn’t problem enough, he
    caught early sight of another potentially insurmountable obstruction to
    socialist progress. In the late 1960s there appeared a force in western
    Europe that socialists (and many liberals) had claimed to have already
    reckoned with: nationalism.52 Its return, Hobsbawm felt at the time, and
    later admitted, would prove fatal to the ‘‘universalism’’ of the historic
    Left.53
    THE JOURNEY AND THE DETOUR: SOCIALISM AND
    NATIONALISM
    Despite the Communist Manifesto’s claim that national particularism
    would be swept away by the establishment of a global market, Marxists in
    the twentieth century were forced to come to terms with capitalism’s
    world of nations and its consequences for Marxist theory and socialist
    practice. How could an ostensibly cosmopolitan ideology operate within a
    world populated by nationalisms?54
52. For a brief history of this moment, consult B. Anderson, ‘‘Introduction’’, in Balakrishnan,
    Mapping the Nation, pp. 1–16.
53. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Identity Politics and the Left’’, New Left Review, I/217 (1996), pp. 38–47.
    On the ‘‘universalism’’ of the Left, see N. Lazarus, S. Evans, A. Arnove, and A. Menke, ‘‘The
    Necessity of Universalism’’, Differences, 7 (1995), pp. 75–145. The traditional Left’s
    ‘‘universalism’’ is most often read today as a cover for ‘‘Eurocentrism’’. For a rejection of this
    argument, see P. Bhanu Meta, ‘‘Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason’’, Political Theory,
    28:5 (2000), p. 63.
54. The question of whether Marxism should be properly represented as a cosmopolitan or an
    internationalist ideology is fraught. Most Marxists, as Alejandro Cola´s has suggested, have
    preferred ‘‘socialist internationalism’’ as a description of their politics, although he argues that
    ‘‘socialist internationalism’’ is a species of ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’. See A. Cola´s, ‘‘Putting
    Cosmopolitanism into Practice: The Case of Socialist Internationalism’’, Millennium: Journal
    of International Studies, 23 (1994), pp. 519 and 515. Other commentators have preferred to make
    a clear distinction between ‘‘internationalism’’ and ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’. This is the position of
    Tim Brennan in his ‘‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’’ New Left Review, 7 (2001), p. 77:
    ‘‘The cosmopolitan ideal envisages less a federation or coalition of states than all-encompassing
    representative structure in which delegates can deliberate on a global scale. By contrast,
    internationalism seeks to establish global relations of respect and cooperation, based on
    acceptance of differences in polity as well as culture.’’ Thus the distinction between
    ‘‘internationalism’’ and ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ is seen to resolve around the nation state.
    Internationalism, as Perry Anderson and others have suggested, is premised on the ‘‘primacy’’
    of the nation state; cosmopolitanism is premised on the transcendence of the nation-state system.
    See P. Anderson, ‘‘Internationalism: A Breviary’’, New Left Review, 14 (2002). Following
    Anderson, Robert Stuart has suggested ‘‘Cosmopolitanism is opposed to nationalism; ‘inter’
    nationalism is founded upon it’’. See R. Stuart, Marxism and National Identity: Socialism,
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    Marxists have offered a number of solutions to socialism’s national
    dilemma.55 In one view (associated with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg)
    it was argued that Marxists should have nothing to do with nationalism
    because it undermined class-consciousness and diverted the proletariat
    from their ‘‘true’’ class interest.56 In another view (associated with
    Leninism), it was argued that Marxists, under certain circumstances, could
    marry social and national liberation to the benefit of world socialism.57
    Here, armed with ‘‘rights’’, and divided into ‘‘oppressor’’ and ‘‘oppressed’’,
    nations were figured as deserving of freedom and consequently of socialist
    support.58 However, beyond this instrumental nationalism, other Marxists
    claimed that nationalism (even national separatism) was a necessary detour
    on the journey toward socialism. In the discourse of English-speaking
    Marxism, this contention was most famously advanced by Tom Nairn in
    the context of the rise of separatist nationalisms in Britain in the last half of
    the twentieth century.59 Nairn’s argument in favor of ‘‘neo-nationalism’’
    prompted Hobsbawm’s reflections on the problem of nationalism for
    socialist politics in the late 1970s.
    Could Marxists become nationalists as socialists such as Nairn in his The
    Break-Up of Britain suggested they must? Not according to Hobsbawm.
    For him, Marxists could be nationalists neither in theory nor in practice.60
    They could not be nationalists in theory, he argued, because nationalism
    Nationalism, and National Socialism during the French Fin de Sie`cle (New York, 2006), p. 188,
    n.1. Marx himself, according to James Petras, made a distinction between ‘‘internationalism’’ and
    ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’, arguing that the former would constitute a stage on the way to the latter. See
    J. Petras, ‘‘Marx and Engels on the National Question’’, Review of Politics, 33 (1971), p. 811.
    Marx’s politics might then be described as ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’, his projected end-state
    characterized as a ‘‘worldwide socialist community’’ which had done away with nation states.
55. For a general overview of debates among Marxists on the national question, see M. Lo¨wy,
    ‘‘Marxism and the National Question’’, New Left Review, I/96 (1975), pp. 81–100, and A.W.
    Wright, ‘‘Socialism and Nationalism’’, in L. Tivey (ed.), The Nation State (Oxford, 1981), pp.
    145–170.
56. On Luxemburg’s ‘‘proletarian internationalism’’, see J-H. Lun, ‘‘Rosa Luxemburg and the
    Dialectics of Proletarian Internationalism and Social Patriotism’’, Science and Society, 59 (1995–
    1996), pp. 498–530.
57. For an account of the Leninist view of the relationship between national liberation and
    world socialism, see W. Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and
    Strategy (Princeton, NJ, 1984), pp. 28–42.
58. Such was the ubiquity of this view among Marxists in the twentieth century that one
    historian could claim by the 1980s that it was ‘‘difficult to remember that internationalism was
    once a cornerstone of radical social thought’’. See S.E. Bronner, Rosa Luxemburg: A
    Revolutionary For Our Times (New York, 1987), p. 17.
59. T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977). The book
    has been recently republished (on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original publication) with a
    new introduction. See Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (Melbourne, 2003).
60. Marxists [:::] and historians. For his argument that historians can not be nationalists, see E.
    Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity’’,
    Diogenes, 168, 42:2 (1994), pp. 51–63.
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    was irrational and sustained by a set of myths which Marxists should
    refuse because they bore no relation to historical reality – a set of myths
    bankrolled by the premise that nations constitute the ‘‘a priori eternal data
    of human society’’.61 Nor could Marxists be nationalists in practice,
    Hobsbawm contended, because ‘‘nationalism by definition subordinates
    all other interests to those of its specific nation’’.62 In his view, nationalism
    undermined two central axioms of Marxist politics: that nation states are
    fractured by class and that nationalism constituted a form of class
    collaboration antagonistic to socialism. In addition, he claimed that
    nationalism was antithetical to the Marxian vision of ‘‘some form of
    association or organizational union of nations, possibly preceding [:::] the
    eventual dissolution of national into global or generally human culture’’.63
    Nationalism, according to Hobsbawm, blotted out the Marxist horizon of
    a universal socialist culture.64
    For Hobsbawm, the correct Marxist attitude toward nationalism in
    practice was ‘‘not unsympathetic, but contingent and not absolute’’.65 ‘‘The
    fundamental criterion of Marxist pragmatic judgment’’, he declared, ‘‘has
    always been whether nationalism as such, or any specific case of it,
    advances the cause of socialism; or conversely, how to prevent it from
    inhibiting its progress; or alternatively, how to mobilize it as a force to
    assist its progress’’.66 From this strategic parti pris Hobsbawm damned
    Nairn’s political prescriptions in The Break-Up of Britain: national
    separatism would not help socialism dig capitalism’s grave. Hence
    although Marxists were ‘‘neither for nor against independent statehood
    for any nation’’67 in principle, and did not maintain the a priori view that
    big nations were to be preferred to small ones, in his opinion there was no
    good reason for supposing that the break-up of Britain (or any other
    existing state) would advance international socialism. To Hobsbawm’s
    mind the establishment of national states as such could not be transformed
    into an agent producing socialist change either in addition to or as a
    replacement for the ‘‘Marxian historic mechanism’’ – which, he argued,
61. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, New Left Review, I/105 (1977),
    p. 10. For a more recent claim that nationalism is ‘‘irrational’’, see A. Vincent, ‘‘Power and
    Vacuity: Nationalist Ideology in the Twentieth Century’’, in M. Freeden (ed.), Reassessing
    Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (London [etc.], 2001), pp. 139–140.
62. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 9.
63. Ibid., 4. For a similar view, consult R.N. Berki, ‘‘On Marxian Thought and the Problem of
    International Relations’’, World Politics, 24 (1971), pp. 97–99.
64. The vision of an ‘‘association or organizational union [of nations]’’ is internationalist; the
    ‘‘dissolution of national into global or general culture’’ is cosmopolitan. See Hobsbawm,
    ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 10. For the distinction between ‘‘internationalism’’ and ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ see n. 54.
65. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 8.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 9.
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    ‘‘includes the formation of some nation-states as an essential part of
    capitalist development, and a crucial strategic role for some national
    movements; but not what nationalism requires, namely a charter for any
    such state or movement’’.68 Painting nationalism red, Hobsbawm warned,
    would distort socialist ideology and obliterate the ‘‘science’’ of Marxist
    theory.69 With Nairn, the detour, he alleged, had become the journey.
    It was transparent, Hobsbawm suggested, why Marxists had championed nationalism in the past. The criteria here was the advancement of
    bourgeois society – that is, Marx, for example, had supported particular
    nationalisms to the degree that they could be understood as promoting the
    development of the capitalist mode of production.70 But this ‘‘nationalism’’
    was not nationalist in the current sense of that term, Hobsbawm argued,
    because ‘‘it did not envisage a world of nation-states irrespective of size
    and resources’’ – it held that only a limited number of states were viable on
    certain economic, military and political criteria – and because it ‘‘de facto
    abandoned the national homogeneity of most accepted ‘nation-states’’’.71
    Hobsbawm also conceded the strategic value of marrying national and
    social liberation during the anti-fascist period and in the context of
    imperialism.72 In both cases, he believed, nationalism could be understood
    as a progressive force facilitating rather than inhibiting socialist advance.
    But in his commentary on The Break-Up of Britain, Hobsbawm offered
    no contemporary example of nationalism that Marxists could champion to
    international socialism’s advantage, an assessment that drew the ire of
    those Marxists still committed to the project of anti-imperialist
    nationalism.73 Indeed Hobsbawm maintained that even in those situations
68. Ibid., p. 12. Italics in the original.
69. Ibid., p. 22.
70. Ibid., p. 4. For more on Marx’s support for certain nations in the nineteenth century, see E.
    Benner, Actually Existing Nationalism: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels
    (Oxford, 1997), pp. 144–158; and M. Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor
    Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park, PA,
    1998), pp. 48–51.
71. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 4. For Hobsbawm’s understanding of viability, see his The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975), pp. 103–121.
72. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 10. For more on (British)
    Marxism’s reconciliation with nationalism in the anti-fascist period and beyond, consult S.
    Howe, ‘‘Labour Patriotism, 1939–83’’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism and the Making and
    Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1 History and Politics (London, 1989), pp. 127–139.
73. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, pp. 11 and 22. For the argument
    that Hobsbawm’s assessment of nationalism was insensitive to national liberation in the colonial
    and neo-colonial world, see Blaut, The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of
    Nationalism, p. 101. Blaut’s judgment, it should be noted, overlooks two of Hobsbawm’s
    earlier essays, ‘‘Vietnam and the Dynamics of Guerilla War’’, and ‘‘Civilian versus Military in
    Twentieth Century Politics’’, originally published in 1965 and 1967 respectively, which were
    reprinted in Revolutionaries. The 1967 essay concluded: ‘‘The tragedy of the underdeveloped
    world in the 1950s and 1960s was that the United States and its allies, when it came to the point,
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    where socialists had supported national movements previously such a
    strategy was not beyond challenge. There were few cases, he lamented,
    where ‘‘Marxists succeeded in establishing or maintaining themselves as
    the leading force in their national movement’’.74 More often ‘‘they
    [Marxists] have either become subordinates to, or been absorbed by, or
    pushed aside by non-Marxist or anti-Marxist nationalism’’.75 In the end,
    Hobsbawm suggested, there could be no amicable marriage between
    Marxism and nationalism – the relationship always ended in divorce with
    nationalism running away with the family property. In such circumstances, he concluded, ‘‘the Luxemburgist case is not entirely unrealistic’’.76
    Shortly after publishing his critique of The Break-Up of Britain
    Hobsbawm overturned this view. In the context of Thatcherism’s
    ascendancy, he provided a strategic explanation for why socialists must
    embrace ‘‘national patriotism’’ for socialism’s good.77 Indeed, given the
    preferred ‘order’ to ‘progress’ – Mobutu to Lumumba, Ky or Thieu to Ho-Chi-Minh, any Latin
    General to Fidel Castro.’’ This is an order of sympathies consistent with sensitivity to anticolonial liberation. See Hobsbawm, ‘‘Civilian versus Military in Twentieth Century’’,
    Revolutionaries, p. 191. In connection with this it should be remembered that Hobsbawm’s
    book Bandits had ranged across Asia and Latin America, sympathetically portraying figures and
    movements otherwise ignored by international historiography at the time of the book’s
    publication in the 1960s.
74. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, pp. 10–11. For a more recent
    elucidation of this argument, see S. Makdisi, C. Casarino, and R. Karl, ‘‘Introduction: Marxism,
    Communism and History’’, in Makdisi et al. (eds), Marxism beyond Marxism (New York, 1996),
    1–13; and F. Jameson, ‘‘Globalization and Strategy’’, New Left Review, II/4 (2000), pp. 49–68.
75. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 11.
76. Ibid., 13. For an explication of the ‘‘Luxemburgist’’ solution to the national question, see
    Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement, pp. 83–94. For an argument that
    Luxemburg deserves to be taken seriously by scholars of nationalism today, see J. Cocks, ‘‘From
    Politics to Paralysis: Critical Intellectuals Answer the National Question’’, Political Theory, 24:3
    (1996), pp. 54–56. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
    Spread of Nationalism (first published in 1983) was partly written as a critique of Hobsbawm’s
    (‘‘Luxemburgist’’) position in his debate with Tom Nairn over ‘‘the break-up of Britain’’ as
    Anderson later admitted in an ‘‘Afterword’’ to the 2006 revised edition of Imagined
    Communities. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
    of Nationalism (London [etc.], rev. edn 2006), pp. 208–209. In the same ‘‘Afterword’’ Anderson
    also claimed that an original inspiration behind the writing of Imagined Communities was to
    counter the ‘‘Eurocentrism’’ of Hobsbawm’s theory of nationalism.
77. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, in Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left, pp. 51–62.
    The article originally appeared in Marxism Today in January 1983. At this time Hobsbawm was
    on the editorial board of the CPGB periodical. See Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, p. 164.
    Hobsbawm did not make a distinction in ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’ between patriotism and
    nationalism. Indeed in his unusual formulation ‘‘national patriotism’’ he appeared to conflate
    the two. For an argument that nationalism and patriotism should be distinguished, see M. Viroli,
    For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–17.
    Viroli castigates Hobsbawm’s elision of patriotism and nationalism on p. 1, n.1 – although he
    focuses on Hobsbawm’s elision of these phenomena in his Nations and Nationalism since 1780.
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    New Right’s successful exploitation of the ‘‘national interest’’ during the
    Falklands conflict, he argued that socialism must be reconciled to
    nationalism rather than constitute its ideological antithesis. A product of
    his newly found conviction that ‘‘the national’’ constituted the necessary
    ground of all politics,78 Hobsbawm believed that Marxism had to
    appropriate national identity for socialist ends. In the early 1980s, along
    with Stuart Hall and other figures associated with the CPGB journal
    Marxism Today, Hobsbawm thus urged socialists to agitate for a vision of
    socialism that was not antagonistic to national belonging.79 Marxists,
    Hobsbawm argued, might be right to be wary of patriotism because it
    obliterated class-consciousness and was traditionally associated with, and
    better adapted to, a politics of reaction.80 But, for him, it was precisely
    because of this that they needed to meld their class politics with national
    patriotism.81 The detour, for Hobsbawm, was now an intrinsic part of the
    journey.
    Consequently in this register, nationalism was not necessarily a barrier
    to socialist advance. The proof of the pudding, Hobsbawm contended, had
    been in the eating. In the mid-Victorian period Chartists had married a
    ‘‘militant class-consciousness’’ to national chauvinism;82 through the
    Popular Front strategy the Comintern had allied patriotism to socialism’s
    anti-fascist cause; and following the end of World War II, communist
    parties in Italy and France had mobilized the national tradition for socialist
    ends.83 Each case had met with some success, and part of that success,
    Hobsbawm alleged, rested on the ability of socialists to ‘‘wrest away
    national traditions from the bourgeoisie, to capture the national flag so
    long waved by the right’’.84 None of this success, he claimed, proved that
78. For an explication of this point, see M. Freeden, ‘‘Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?’’,
    Political Studies, 46 (1998), pp. 748–765; and P. Lekas, ‘‘The Supra-Class Rhetoric of
    Nationalism’’, East European Quarterly, 30 (1996), p. 275.
79. For an account of Hobsbawm’s Marxism Today period, see H. Pimlott, ‘‘From ‘Old Left’ to
    ‘New Labour’? Eric Hobsbawm and the Rhetoric of ‘Realistic Marxism’’’, Labour/Le Travail,
    56 (2005), pp. 175–198.
80. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, p. 58.
81. Ibid.
82. For an argument that class reinforced nationality, and nationality class, in Britain in the
    nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see J. Hinton, ‘‘Voluntarism and Jacobinism: Labor, Nation,
    and Citizenship in Britain, 1850–1950’’, International Labor and Working Class History, 48
    (1995), pp. 68–90.
83. The examples are outlined in Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, pp. 58–59. For this general
    argument reinforced with particular reference to the Popular Front period, see Hobsbawm,
    ‘‘Fifty Years of Peoples’ Fronts’’, pp. 103–117.
84. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, p. 60. This strategy had a long history in British socialism.
    For this history, consult P. Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the
    British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge, 1998). For a shorter account that also considers the postWorld-War-II period, see M. Taylor, ‘‘Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century
    Britain’’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 971–987.
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    patriotism was any less susceptible ‘‘to ruling-class jingoism, to antiforeign nationalism and [:::] to racism’’85 than socialists had traditionally
    supposed. But when socialism and patriotism were harnessed together, he
    argued, they multiplied not only ‘‘the force of the working-class but [also]
    its capacity to place itself at the head of a broad coalition for social change,
    and they even give it possibility of wresting hegemony from the class
    enemy’’.86 Patriotism, in this view, was a contested discourse open to
    socialist inflection, while socialism’s ability to define the national interest
    was supposed paramount to the Left’s ability to realize political
    hegemony.87 For Hobsbawm, in this mind, Marxism could not be antinationalist but must paint itself in the national colors.88
    Thus, in the context of socialist defeat, Hobsbawm dispensed with the
    notion that socialism was likely to end up subordinate to nationalism in
    any marriage of the two. Indeed, from the perspective of his critique of The
    Break-Up of Britain, Hobsbawm’s ‘‘socialist patriotism’’ was likely to
    torpedo the central animating purpose of Marxist politics: that nations are
    divided by class and that ideologies of national patriotism favor class
    collaboration rather than class conflict.89 In addition, his ‘‘socialist
    patriotism’’ obliterated if not the internationalism then certainly the
    cosmopolitanism which he had previously argued was the ultimate
    horizon of the Marxian worldview. In his earlier mind, it was dangerous
    for Marxists to be patriots; in his latter mind, it was ‘‘dangerous to leave
    patriotism exclusively to the right’’.90 In the earlier, Marxists should not
    paint nationalism red, in the latter he advised socialists to get out their
    paint brushes.
    However, there was no good reason for supposing that his ‘‘socialist
    patriotism’’ was not widening ‘‘the already evident gap between Marxism
    as the analysis of what is, or is coming into being, and Marxism as the
    formulation of what we want to happen’’,91 as he had argued that Nairn’s
85. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, p. 60.
86. Ibid. For his historical demonstration of this point, see Hobsbawm, ‘‘Fifty Years of Peoples’
    Front’’, pp. 103–117. For a dissenting view, consider Anderson, Spectrum, p. 290.
87. This idea was a feature of Stuart Hall’s analysis of national identity in the 1980s. See S. Hall,
    ‘‘The Battle for Socialist Ideas in the 1980s’’, in idem, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism
    and the Crisis of the Left (London, 1988), pp. 191–192.
88. In this mind Hobsbawm would find himself in company with a lot of non-Marxist socialists
    – including (according to Paul Ward) Hugh Dalton, Ramsay MacDonald, and Richard
    Crossman. See P. Ward, ‘‘Preparing for the People’s War: Labour and Patriotism in the
    1930s’’, Labour History Review, 67 (2002), p. 172.
89. For the argument that nationalism obscures class conflict, see J. Schwarzmantel, ‘‘Nation
    versus Class: Nationalism and Socialism in Theory and Practice’’, in J. Coakley (ed.), The Social
    Origins of National Movements: The Contemporary West European Experience (London, 1992),
    pp. 48–49.
90. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Falklands Fallout’’, p. 60.
91. Idem, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 13.
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    separatist nationalism did. Just as dangerously, his (British) patriotism, in
    concert with his dismissal of Scottish separatist nationalism, left him open
    to the charge that his internationalism was a disguise for ‘‘big-state’’
    nationalism.92 The charge is partly justified – although in this register
    Hobsbawm was an instrumental nationalist rather than a nationalist, i.e. he
    only supported the maintenance of Britain’s ‘‘national’’ integrity because
    he believed the alternative was actively harmful to the future of British
    socialism – and his conflicted understanding of Marxism’s relation to
    nationalism invited it.
    Hence, when it came to the nexus between socialism and nationalism
    Hobsbawm appeared caught in two minds. In one moment he suggested
    that Marxists could not be nationalists and endorsed a ‘‘Luxemburgist’’
    interpretation of the national question. Marxists, he argued, could not
    ‘‘avoid swimming dead against the stream of local patriotism’’, a position
    reinforced by the historic fact that socialist movements that had sought to
    mobilize nationalism for their own purpose ‘‘tended to become national
    not only in form but in substance i.e. nationalist’’.93 This was a past he
    lamented and warned Marxists against repeating in the context of the rise
    of separatist nationalism. In another moment, however, he suggested that
    socialists should attempt to define the nation in socialist ways and that the
    success of socialism was dependent on a (socialist) rearticulation of
    nationalism. In this mind he argued that socialists could not legitimate
    their ideological discourse unless it was reconciled to what Gramsci called
    the ‘‘national-popular’’.94 What might explain the disjunction between
    these two views?
    One obvious candidate is context. His socialist-patriotism was framed in
    the depths of Left defeat and New Right triumph, when it appeared that
    national identity had finally trumped class-consciousness; his socialist
    internationalism was framed in a period when hopes for socialist advance,
    no matter how attenuated, could still be entertained, no matter with what
    degree of hesitation. But there is another related explanation linked to
    Hobsbawm’s biography. The internal conflict within Hobsbawm’s understanding of the nexus between socialism and nationalism could be a
    consequence of the dissonance between his formation as a communist in
    Berlin during the early 1930s and his later experience of the Popular Front
    and the ‘‘People’s War’’ in Britain. Hobsbawm pointed to this discord in
    Interesting Times:
92. This, of course, was Tom Nairn’s charge. See Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, pp. 42–44.
93. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Reflections on ‘The Break-Up of Britain’’’, p. 13.
94. Gramsci’s concept of the ‘‘national-popular’’ was important to Hall’s attempt to build a
    nationalist socialism in Britain in the 1980s. On Hall’s vision of a socialism reconciled to national
    belonging, see S. Hall, ‘‘The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists’’, in C.
    Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL [etc.],
    1988), pp. 35–57.
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    Politically, having actually joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era
    of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my
    strategic thinking in politics to this day. But emotionally, as one converted as a
    teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied by an almost
    unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original
    home, the October Revolution, however sceptical or critical of the USSR.95
    The discord, as Perry Anderson has suggested, had an important impact on
    his thought.96 No more so, it might be argued, than on his thinking about
    the nexus between socialism and nationalism.
    DO WORKERS HAVE A COUNTRY? CLASSCONSCIOUSNESS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
    Does the proletariat have a homeland? When decrying the claims of all
    nationalities, whether dominant, residual or emergent, Marx and Engels
    answered this question with characteristic force: ‘‘The nationality of the
    worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free
    slavery, self-huckersting. His government is neither French, nor English,
    nor German, it is capital.’’97 Modern industry, according to Marx and
    Engels, ‘‘[had] stripped [the worker] of every trace of national character’’.98
    In a world where capital allowed ‘‘no other nexus between man and man
    than naked self-interest’’, where ‘‘egotistical calculation’’ had removed the
    veil from the ‘‘heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour’’,99 and where
    exploitation had been rendered cosmopolitan, the proletariat, they
    maintained, could have no interest in national particularisms. The
    proletariat was ‘‘an international historical subject’’ with ‘‘an international
    historical aim’’: the establishment of planetary socialism.100 In short, the
    workers did not have a country.101
95. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 218.
96. Anderson, Spectrum, p. 285.
97. K. Marx, ‘‘Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book, Das Nationale System Der
    Politischen Oekonomie (1845)’’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, IV (New York, 1975), p.
98. Italics appear in the original.
99. K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, in Marx and Engels, Collected
    Works, VI (New York, 1975– ), p. 494. For an explication of Marx’s argument that the
    bourgeoisie universalized capitalist relations of production, see S. Avineri, The Political and
    Social Thought of Karl Marx (New York, 1969), pp. 162–174.
100. Marx and Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, p. 487.
101. Marx’s and Engels’s understanding of the ‘‘world-historical’’ nature of the proletariat and
     its aims is represented here in M. Lo¨wy, ‘‘Fatherland or Mother Earth? Nationalism and
     Internationalism from a Socialist Perspective’’, in R. Miliband, L. Panitch, and J. Saville (eds),
     Socialist Register 1989: Revolution Today. Realities and Aspirations (London, 1989), p. 214.
102. Marx and Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, p. 502. Elsewhere in the
     Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels argued that the proletariat ‘‘must rise to be the leading
     class of the nation’’. An analysis of Marx and Engels’s encounter with nationhood and
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     By the beginning of the 1980s, Hobsbawm’s assessment of this thesis
     was blunt: not only was ‘‘it wrong to assume that workers have no
     country’’, but class-consciousness ‘‘neither excludes nor, usually, dominates national sentiments’’.102 In brief, for him, the assessment of Marx at
     his most cosmopolitan, and his followers at their most anational, had been
     seriously flawed: ‘‘working-class consciousness’’, he believed, ‘‘is probably
     politically secondary to other kinds of consciousness’’,103 particularly
     national consciousness. However, the claim that ‘‘the workers have a
     country’’ was no more satisfactory, he argued, than its opposite.
     A more nuanced interpretation of the relationship between proletariat
     and nationhood, Hobsbawm contended, was required to transcend the
     unhelpful dichotomy that maintained the working class was either
     internationalist or nationalist. Satisfied with proving the existence of
     working-class nationalism, or with explicating the determinative value of
     nation over class, and from there the invalidity of a Marxist conception
     of the national question, most students of nationalism have simply
     dismissed the Communist Manifesto’s thesis as wildly erroneous. Hobsbawm partly agreed. But if he could consent that workers do indeed (at
     certain historical moments) have a country, this did not imply for him the
     need to overthrow a Marxist analysis of the national question.
     Constructed during Thatcherism’s ascent, Hobsbawm’s assessment of
     the relationship between class and nation grew out of an awareness that
     proletarian identity was complex. If it was clear that the workers did have a
     country, it did not necessarily follow, he argued, ‘‘that they only have one,
     and we know what it is’’.104 It was not just that a ‘‘national’’ working class
     has never anywhere constituted an ethnically homogenous body.105 It was
     not just that bifurcations other than nationality – like those instituted by
     religion – were most likely to fracture any ‘‘national’’ working class.106
     And it was not just that most ‘‘national’’ working classes were composed of
     nationalism can be found in E. Benner, Really Existing Nationalism: A Post-Communist View
     from Marx and Engels (Oxford, 1995).
103. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, pp. 58 and 49. This did not lead to the
     conclusion that workers were necessarily and always nationalist. A similar distinction between
     ‘‘national identity’’ and ‘‘nationalism’’ can be found in Lo¨wy, ‘‘Fatherland or Mother Earth?’’, pp.
     213–214.
104. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, p. 60. For a similar argument from within
     the Marxist tradition, see G. Kitching, ‘‘Nationalism: The Instrumentalist Passion’’, Capital and
     Class, 29 (1984), p. 114. See also E. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford, 1994), p. 2.
105. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, p. 49.
106. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 118–124 for the reasons why. In addition, consult
     Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, p. 49, and idem, ‘‘Working Class Internationalism’’, in F. van Holthoon and M. van der Linden (eds), Internationalism and the Labour
     Movement (New York, 1988), pp. 12–13.
107. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, p. 49. On religion as a solvent of workingclass unity, see D. Geary, ‘‘Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850s–1930s’’, Australian
     Journal of Politics and History, 45 (1995), pp. 20–34.
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     individual workers with multiple sets of identification.107 It was that in
     most cases, he argued, a working class’s national identity did not
     necessarily conflict with its identity as a class. Indeed, no matter how
     virulent or chauvinistic any particular form of proletarian nationalism, it
     did not prevent the expression of what Hobsbawm, following Lenin,
     called a ‘‘trade union consciousness’’ – that is, ‘‘the recognition that
     workers as such need to organize effectively against employers in order to
     defend and improve their conditions as hired hands’’.108
     It was only when class solidarity conflicted with a worker’s national
     identity, or where a national movement existed prior to working-class
     formation, that national consciousness proved a solvent of proletarian
     unity. National identity, Hobsbawm argued, did not always and everywhere trump class, at least not in the objective sense of ‘‘trade union
     consciousness’’, and national identity was not automatically irreconcilable
     with class politics. What nationalism did tend to obliterate was something
     he called ‘‘socialist consciousness’’ – that is, an awareness of the
     international character of proletarian interest and intent.109 It was this
     form of social and cultural expression, Hobsbawm concluded, that had
     been decisively routed by nationalism.
     This argument would provide cold comfort for class warriors who,
     following The Communist Manifesto, sought to ‘‘point out and bring to
     the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of
     all nationality’’.110 More hopefully, Hobsbawm’s argument did point to
     the fact that national identity did not always and everywhere trump class.
     How else could one explain the genuinely ‘‘internationalist’’ character of
     ‘‘trade union consciousness’’ in places such as Budapest and Rhondda?111
     How else could one explain those situations, like that prevalent in pre-1914
     Vienna, where communal and national differences did not prevent a social
     democratic party from organizing workers on a class basis? Hence, it was
108. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Working Class Internationalism’’, p. 13, and idem, ‘‘What is the Workers’
     Country?’’, p. 49.
109. Hobsbawm, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country,?’’, pp. 57–58. See also idem, The Age of
     Empire, p. 121, and ‘‘Working Class Internationalism’’, pp. 9–10. For Lenin’s conception of
     class, see A. Shandro, ‘‘‘Consciousness from Without’: Marxism, Lenin and the Proletariat’’,
     Science and Society, 59 (1995), pp. 268–297.
110. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 121. Once again Hobsbawm’s distinction between
     ‘‘trade union consciousness’’ (an objective sense of class or class-in-itself) and ‘‘socialist
     consciousness’’ (the marriage of an objective and a subjective sense of class or class-in-and-foritself) owed much to the Leninist tradition. For an overview and critique of this distinction in
     Marxism, see A. Przeworkski, ‘‘Proletariat into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from
     Karl Kautsky’s The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies’’, Politics and Society, 7 (1977), pp.
     343–401.
111. Marx and Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, p. 497.
112. See Hobsbawm, ‘‘Working Class Internationalism’’, pp. 8–9, and The Age of Empire, p.
     120.
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     not only specific instances where class interest had proved resistant to
     fracture along communal or national lines within ‘‘national’’ working
     classes that advised caution when considering the relationship between
     class and nation. There were also concrete instances of genuine workingclass internationalism where class interest did transcend national borders
     and communal divisions, where, as Hobsbawm argued, workers experienced internationalism as a genuine reality of their class situation.112
     Nonetheless, class identity, in the sense of an objective sense of classness,
     did not prevent other forms of identity emerging within any particular
     working class, especially not national identity; and objective classconsciousness, far from guaranteeing the rise of a socialist consciousness,
     most often succumbed to other forms of identity when they came into
     conflict.
     Hobsbawm argued that Marxist theory could account for this. Although
     class, in its objective sense, was a feature of both pre-capitalist and
     capitalist societies, the span and depth of class-consciousness, he argued,
     was determined by the experienced scale of economic reality in which
     subaltern classes lived, labored, and struggled. Pre-capitalist societies,
     rooted in parcellized, essentially local, economic units were characterized
     by low ‘‘classness’’ among subaltern strata; class and class conflict still
     existed but class-consciousness was typically fragmented and bounded by
     the geographic scale of economic production.113 Constituted as ‘‘territorial
     states’’, capitalist societies, however, were typified by an expanded
     ‘‘classness’’, that is, by what Hobsbawm called ‘‘national’’ class-consciousness. In the modern economy, based on the interdependence of national
     economic units, the ‘‘real and effective classes are national’’.114 The
     working class’s lived experience was the ‘‘national economy’’; the ‘‘scale
     of class consciousness’’ was ‘‘‘national’ not global’’.115 A consciousness of
     the working class’s global interests in such a situation was an unrealized
     potential whose transposition to an existential reality awaited the genuine
     transnationalization of the world economy. Hence, if nation trumped class
     then the territorial logic of economic development, Hobsbawm argued,
     could explain why this was so.
     Thus, for Hobsbawm, there were material factors, immersed within the
     territorial logic of capitalist development, which explained the necessarily
     national form of proletarian consciousness. Not only had ‘‘the national
     economy of the state’’ been the most important defining force in workers’
113. Idem, The Age of Empire, p. 120.
114. Idem, ‘‘Class Consciousness in History’’, in I. Me´sza´ros (ed.), Class Consciousness and
     History (London, 1972), p. 10. See also idem, ‘‘The Development of the World Economy’’,
     Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3 (1979), pp. 313–314.
115. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Class Consciousness in History’’, p. 11.
116. Ibid.
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     lives;116 not only had the working class been nationalized from above
     through the state’s extension of citizenship and democracy, and through
     the homogenizing tendencies of national culture and education;117 but also
     working-class organization itself – ‘‘national’’ trade-union movements,
     ‘‘national’’ labour parties – had effectively nationalized workers from
     below. Indeed it was precisely mass working-class movements in the late
     nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argued, which had exerted
     pressure on states to deliver democracy and nascent forms of welfare,
     effectively transforming proletarians into citizens. Developments in the
     first three quarters of the twentieth century intensified this process, a
     process struggled for and endorsed by ‘‘international’’ class parties.118 The
     welfare state, national labour laws, positive trade union legislation, and the
     nationalization of industries – all the historic achievements of Western
     labour movements had deepened the ‘‘nationalization of the masses’’.119
     The logic of Hobsbawm’s argument, then, was clear: national identity had
     been as necessary and historically determined a form of consciousness
     among the working class as class identity, nationalism no less an authentic
     response to a capitalist world-system rooted in national states than
     socialism.120
     Hobsbawm’s analysis of the nexus between national identity and classconsciousness, then, destabilized (perhaps better, obliterated) many of the
     long-held axioms of Marxist theory. He argued that class-consciousness
     was most often trumped by national identity when the two came into
     conflict, although he noted that the two could coexist easily enough when
     not in competition. Nonetheless this argument contradicted the view of
     those Marxists, including Marx and Engels, who claimed that classconsciousness would ultimately extinguish national identity. In addition, if
     a trade-union consciousness had often coexisted with national identity,
     sometimes even nationalism, this was certainly not true of socialist
117. Idem, ‘‘What is the Workers’ Country?’’, p. 49, and The Age of Empire, p. 128.
118. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 149–151. For a similar reading, see C. Calhoun,
     ‘‘Nationalism and Ethnicity’’, Annual Review of Sociology, 19 (1993), p. 217.
119. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 126–129. For a similar argument, see Th. Van Tijn,
     ‘‘Nationalism and the Socialist Workers’ Movement’’, in Internationalism and the Labour
     Movement, pp. 611–623.
120. The phrase is taken from G.L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political
     Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third
     Reich (New York, 1975). For Hobsbawm’s elaboration of this process, see ‘‘Working Class
     Internationalism’’, p. 14. For an account of the ‘‘national integration’’ of European working
     classes in the nineteenth century, see M. van der Linden, ‘‘The National Integration of European
     Working Classes (1871–1914): Explaining the Causal Connection’’, International Review of
     Social History, 33 (1988), pp. 288–311.
121. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Working Class Internationalism’’, p. 7. On this point, also see J. Ehrenreich,
     ‘‘Socialism, Nationalism and Capitalist Development’’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 15
     (1983), p. 8.
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     consciousness, which, whether in 1914 or 1933, had been consistently
     undermined by the proletariat’s sense of national belonging. Socialist
     internationalism, Hobsbawm lamented, was more likely to be found
     among a small group of activist-intellectuals than among the mass of
     workers.121
     There were good historical materialist reasons, Hobsbawm suggested,
     for why nation had most often overtopped class, reasons moored in the
     material exigencies of the working class’s lived experience. A consciousness of themselves as a global class had been unavailable to the world’s
     workers for much of capitalism’s history. Why, then, had the proletariat
     most often chosen nation over class? Because, Hobsbawm argued, they
     inhabited national economies and national states. The workers did have a
     country, and they had a country because it was crucial to the maintenance
     of their material existence. Given the continuing uneven development of
     capitalism – the fact that workers’ conditions were not the same
     everywhere – this, he went on to suggest, was unlikely to change. Thus,
     Hobsbawm’s analysis of the nexus between class and nation coalesced into
     a version of what Alvin W. Gouldner has called ‘‘nightmare Marxism’’122 –
     that is, a type of Marxism that could account for Marxism’s defeat and
     explain why the establishment of a worldwide socialist community was
     impossible. In this view, an eternal national class-consciousness rather
     than the fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto’s call to global class war
     represented a more probable estimation of the working class’s future.
     Hobsbawm’s ‘‘nightmare Marxism’’ was not just informed by his
     reading of social reality or objective developments, but also by his ‘‘social
     being’’ – his detachment from political activism reflected in a ‘‘mode of
     writing’’ attuned to structure and pattern rather than human agency. Thus,
     his analysis of the nexus between class-consciousness and national identity
     often assumed the veneer of fatality, as though the hegemony of nation
     over class was a historically determined fact rather than a reflection of
     political contingency. Workers have been mobilized across ethnic and
     national lines in the past partly because of the political endeavors of class
     warriors and their organizations. Where class has trumped nation – and
     Hobsbawm often enough pointed to such examples – this agency has been
     paramount. In other words, Hobsbawm’s analysis of the relationship
     between national identity and class-consciousness obfuscated or underplayed the contingent effect of political agency in the determination of
     proletarian identity. Working-class consciousness is not necessarily
     secondary to national consciousness as Hobsbawm assumed. Rather the
     nexus between nation and class is in large measure a product of the
122. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, p. 129.
123. A.W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of
     Theory (New York, 1980), pp. 380–389.
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     presence or absence of the subjective mobilization of class forces. Formed
     in the turmoil of street-battles between communists and fascists, a Marxist
     historian might have been expected to recognize as much.
     NATIONHOOD, NATIONALISM AND THE WORLD
     ECONOMY: THE END OF NATIONS OR NATIONS AS THE
     END OF HISTORY?
     Capital’s accumulation imperative, and its corresponding need to
     universalize market relations, would necessarily undermine the national
     basis of industry according to the Communist Manifesto.
     123 In a world
     dominated by the capitalist mode of production, national industries,
     perhaps even national states, would be swept away by a world market
     whose limit was profit not nationality. National industry, scientific
     socialism’s founders claimed, would be destroyed ‘‘by industries that no
     longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from
     the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only
     at home, but in every corner of the globe’’.124 Thus capitalism,
     in the Communist Manifesto’s version of its advance, impelled
     cosmopolitanism.125 What did Hobsbawm make of this vision of
     universal development and national collapse? Through an analysis of
     his four-volume history of the modern world and his recent writing on
     the national question, this final section of the article will explore
     Hobsbawm’s understanding of the relationship between ‘‘Gemeinschaft
     and globalization’’126 in the last third of the twentieth century.
     Ritually lionized, although less often analysed,127 Hobsbawm’s history
     of the modern world can be read as a narrative of how capitalist
     globalization first created and then enervated the nation state, ‘‘the central
124. For the geographical implications of the Manifesto’s analysis of capitalism, see D. Harvey,
     Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, CA, 2000), pp. 21–40.
125. Marx and Engels, ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’, p. 488.
126. For an explication of this characteristic Marxist argument, see I. Wallerstein, ‘‘The
     Ideological Tensions of Capitalism: Universalism versus Racism and Sexism’’, in E. Balibar and
     Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), pp. 29–36. This
     constitutes only one of Marx’s understandings of the history of capitalism. In another version,
     also outlined in The Communist Manifesto, capitalist advance implied the establishment of
     national states. See G. Balakrishnan, ‘‘The National Imagination’’, in Balakrishnan, Mapping the
     Nation, p. 198.
127. T.J. Clark, ‘‘In a Pomegranate Chandelier’’, London Review of Books, 28:18 (21 September
     2006), p. 6.
128. An exception is Anderson, Spectrum, pp. 293–332. Both Edward Said and Go¨ran Therborn
     have offered insightful commentaries on the last volume, Age of Extremes. See Said, ‘‘Contra
     Mundane: On Eric Hobsbawm’’, pp. 474–483 and G. Therbron, ‘‘The Autobiography of the
     Twentieth Century’’, New Left Review, I/214 (1995), pp. 81–90. For a more critical assessment
     of Hobsbawm’s volume, see T. Nairn, ‘‘Breakwaters of 2000: From Ethnic to Civic
     Nationalism’’, New Left Review, I/214 (1995), pp. 91–103.
     Eric Hobsbawm and the National Question 87
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     institution of politics since the Age of Revolution’’.128 Indeed, structured
     by a conception of the shifting dialectic between liberalism and
     nationalism, his tetralogy of the contemporary world explains the rise
     and fall of the nation state both as a means of organizing the world
     economy and as a form of social and political organization.
     The first volume, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, maps the genesis
     of the ‘‘characteristic modern state’’ – ‘‘a coherent and unbroken area with
     sharply defined frontiers, governed by a single sovereign authority and
     according to a fundamental system of administration and law’’.129 The
     second volume, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, shows how this political
     superstructure was effectively universalized throughout Europe and
     explores the complementary imbrications of nation-building and capitalist
     development.130 The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 charts the process by
     which the capitalist world-economy was increasingly constituted as a set
     of rival national economies competing for profit and influence, tracks ‘‘the
     retreat of the free competitive market’’,131 and explains how the growth of
     protectionism, capitalist concentration and centralization, and imperialism
     prepared the way for the global conflagration of 1914-1918 and the
     apotheosis of economic autarky during the interwar period.132
     These results – war, the Great Slump, and fascism – would be explored
     in the first half of the final volume of the tetralogy, Age of Extremes: The
     Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1990. In its second half, the book tracked
     the post-World-War-II demise of both national economics and the
     national state. ‘‘By the end of the [twentieth] century’’, Hobsbawm
     concluded,
     [:::] the nation-state was on the defensive against a world economy it could not
     control; against the institutions it had constructed to remedy its own
     international weakness, such as the European Union; against its apparent
     financial incapacity to maintain the services to its citizens so confidently
     undertaken a few decades before; against its real incapacity to maintain what, by
     its own citizens, was a major function: the maintenance of law and order.133
     In short, the ‘‘range, powers and functions’’ of the nation state, which had
129. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 575. Benedict Anderson has a very different conception of
     the origins of nationhood and nationalism. See the chapter ‘‘Creole Pioneers’’ in his Imagined
     Communities, pp. 47–66.
130. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 113. For a more recent account of the ‘‘birth of the
     nation state’’, which links it to developments in the capitalist mode of production, see E.M.
     Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, 2002), pp. 166–181.
131. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, pp. 82–86 and 121.
132. Idem, The Age of Empire, p. 35. This period of ‘‘national economics’’ and its results was also
     tracked in idem, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, pp. 131–132.
133. Idem, The Age of Empire, pp. 40–43, 52–56, 64–73 and 142 in particular.
134. Idem, Age of Extremes, p. 576. For a rejection of Hobsbawm’s argument, see M. Mann,
     ‘‘Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation State?’’, Review of International
     Political Economy, 4 (1997), pp. 472–496.
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     been extending ‘‘almost continuously’’ from the eighteenth century
     onwards, had been precipitously diminished by the close of the Age of
     Extremes.134 Thus, despite the formal persistence of territorially embedded states (the ‘‘United Nations’’), at the dawn of a new millennium,
     Hobsbawm claimed, modern political economy had obliterated the idea of
     the sovereign, independent nation state to which the French Revolution
     had given birth. Thus, a history of the contemporary world which opened
     with the genesis of nationhood in the era of the dual revolutions, closed at
     the ‘‘end of history’’135 with the nation state’s denouement.
     The powers of the nation state, according to Hobsbawm, had been
     attenuated, above all, by an increasingly transnational mode of capitalist
     production. National economics, he claimed, had been overridden by ‘‘the
     new international division of labour’’, by the growing reach and power of
     transnational enterprises and by ‘‘the rise of offshore finance’’.136 In short,
     a world economy now constituted by ‘‘free economic flows across
     borders’’137 had ‘‘undermined a major, and since 1945, universal institution: the territorial nation state, since such a state could no longer control
     more than a diminishing part of its affairs’’.138 Intimations of this view had
     been present in his earlier writings. In 1979, for example, he maintained
     that ‘‘the emergence or re-emergence of forms of economic organization
     which not only cut across or transcend boundaries of national economies
     but compete with them and may be beyond their control, is hardly to be
     denied’’.139 His view that an increasingly global market augured the doom
     of the national state was repeated and extended in Nations and
     Nationalism since 1780 and in Age of Extremes.
     140 By the last century’s
     fin de sie`cle, according to both books, the co-dependent relationship
     between nationhood and capitalist development – characteristic of that
     period of modern history between the French Revolution and the era of
     decolonization – had been definitively sundered.
     Nation states, of course, cannot be reduced to their economic role, no
     matter how important ‘‘national economics’’ to effective independence.141
     In other words, the historic nation state has not only functioned as a
135. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 576.
136. Interestingly, despite believing that socialism is dead, Hobsbawm does not subscribe to
     Fukuyama’s ‘‘end of history’’ thesis. For an example of his rejection of Fukuyama’s argument,
     see E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘1989: To the Victor the Spoils’’, The Independent, 2 October 1990.
137. Idem, Age of Extremes, p. 277.
138. Ibid., p. 414.
139. Ibid., p. 424.
140. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Development of the World Economy’’, p. 315.
141. See idem, Nation and Nationalism since 1780, pp. 181–182 and Hobsbawm, Age of
     Extremes, p. 408.
142. The idea of ‘‘national economics’’ is associated with Friedrich List. For his ideas,
     particularly in relation to Marxism, see R. Szporluck, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx
     versus Friedrich List (New York [etc.], 1988), pp. 115–169.
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     ‘‘national economy’’ – it has also functioned as a system of welfare,142 as a
     means of propagating war and securing civil order, and as a primary locus
     of meaning and identity. According to Hobsbawm, all these functions of
     the nation state – welfare, warfare, order and meaning – were in a state of
     rapid disintegration by the end of the twentieth century. National armies,
     once a force of national integration and central to both warfare and social
     order, were being increasingly privatized and professionalized, he claimed,
     rendering them more akin to the mercenary armies of the eighteenth
     century rather than the national conscription armies of the early
     twentieth.143 Privatized armies were a measure of the international order:
     ‘‘In military terms’’, Hobsbawm trenchantly surmised, ‘‘the idea of a
     ‘world of nations’, [was] a nonsense’’.144
     If nation states no longer fitted the role of warfare state in terms of
     international relations by the end of the twentieth century, they were no
     more likely to be able to guarantee the safety of their own citizens.145
     Indeed, in some cases, Hobsbawm noted, the national state was no longer
     the sole locus of legitimate violence, public law enforcement having given
     way to privatized policing.146 Economic developments had also imperiled
     the national state’s welfare functions. ‘‘Homes fit for Heroes’’, New Deals,
     and Beveridge Reports were anachronisms in an age where economic doxa
     maintained that all aspects of human life – including health, education and
     welfare – could be reduced to profit and loss. In such circumstances, the
     ties which bound citizens to their ‘‘nations’’ were being increasingly
     loosened. Personal meaning and forces of integration would now be found
     outside the ‘‘traditional’’ nation-state – as Hobsbawm believed they were
     in the exponential growth of ‘‘identity politics’’, whether of the religious
     fundamentalist or the ethnic nationalist type.147 Unburdened of its
     economic, political and meaning functions, the nation state, in this view,
143. On this point, see G. Eley and R. Grigor Suny, ‘‘Introduction: From the Moment of Social
     History to the Work of Cultural Representation’’, in idem (eds), Becoming National (New York,
     1996), p. 26.
144. Hobsbawm, The New Century, pp. 12–13. On the relationship between conscription and
     nationalism, see V. Kiernan, ‘‘Conscription and Society in Europe before the War of 1914–
     1918’’, in H. Kaye (ed.), History, Classes and Nation-States: Selected Writings of V.G. Kiernan
     (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 166–185. On the ‘‘privatization’’ of military services, see D. Harvey,
     Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London
     [etc.], 2006), p. 44.
145. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 185 and idem, ‘‘The Nation and
     Globalization’’, Constellations, 5 (1998), p. 7.
146. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 560. For a different reading of the global economy, see
     W.I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and the State in a
     Transnational World (Baltimore, MD, 2004).
147. Hobsbawm, The New Century, p. 34.
148. See Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, pp. 170 and 179, and idem, ‘‘Ethnicity
     and Nationalism Today’’, Anthropology Today, 8 (1992), p. 4.
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     survived as a mystical shell – a conclusion unhelpful to those still fighting
     to establish their own nation states free of imperial domination.148
     Hobsbawm’s vision of the nation state’s demise, however, was tempered
     by a significant caveat. As early as the late 1970s, Hobsbawm’s argument
     was complicated by his seemingly antagonistic opinion that ‘‘national
     economics’’ had not been extinguished by the global market but operated
     as its ‘‘rival’’.149 In this mind, he suggested that a transnational economy
     and national economies co-existed and that ‘‘one would not replace the
     other’’.150 Indeed, he claimed that ‘‘both [the transnational economy and
     national economies] are or have been growing in strength’’.151 The course
     of the next two decades did not alter this opinion. In Nation and
     Nationalism since 1780 he argued that national economies, ‘‘however
     undermined by the transnational economy, coexist and intertwine with
     it’’.152 In fact, beyond this cautious amendment to his ‘‘end of the nation
     state’’ thesis, Hobsbawm suggested that capitalist globalization did not
     imply that the ‘‘economic function of states have been diminished or are
     likely to fade away;’’153 while elsewhere he argued that the transnational
     economy was necessarily refracted through a national ‘‘political grid’’ and
     that, in certain cases, the national state’s welfare functions would actually
     increase.154 In this respect, at least, the nation state was now ‘‘indispensable’’.155 So much then for its demise.
     Hence, when it came to considering the relationship between capitalist
     globalization and the nation state, Hobsbawm waxed ambiguous.156 On
     the one hand, in the footprints of the Communist Manifesto, he argued that
149. See N. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge,
     1999), pp. 70–76, for a critique of Hobsbawm’s ‘‘end of the nation-state’’ thesis. Arguably,
     Hobsbawm has not been sufficiently attentive to the progressive role that nation form has played
     in the struggle against colonialism. As Gopal Balakrishnan has suggested, ‘‘The nation became a
     central figure in the radical political imagination of the twentieth century.’’ See Balakrishnan,
     ‘‘The National Imagination’’, p. 212.
150. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Development of the World Economy’’, p. 316. A similar argument is
     made in E.M. Wood, ‘‘Global Capital and National States’’, in M. Rupert and H. Smith (eds),
     Historical Materialism and Globalization (London, 2002), pp. 17–34.
151. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Development of the World Economy’’, p. 316.
152. Ibid.
153. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 182.
154. Ibid. For a similar argument, see idem, ‘‘The Nation and Globalization’’, p. 2. For a
     trenchant statement along these lines, see L. Weiss, ‘‘Globalization and the Myth of the
     Powerless State’’, New Left Review, I/225 (1997), pp. 3–37.
155. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Guessing about Global Change’’, International Working Class and Labor
     History, 47 (1995), p. 43.
156. Idem, The New Century, p. 84.
157. For scholarly overviews of the debate on the relationship between globalization and
     nationhood, see K. Neilsen, ‘‘Are Nation-States Obsolete? The Challenge of Globalization’’, in
     M. Seymour (ed.), The Fate of the Nation State (Montreal [etc.], 2004), pp. 153–172, and C.
     Bartolovich, ‘‘Global Capital and Transnationalism’’, in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A
     Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden, 2000), pp. 127–134.
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     the universalization of commodity production impelled the destruction of
     ‘‘national economics’’, and even of national states, whether in terms of their
     social, political or military function. On the other hand he tempered, if not
     contradicted, this view by asserting that ‘‘national economics’’ and the
     ‘‘welfare state’’, at least in developed countries, were becoming stronger
     and more deeply embedded in nation-states as the capitalist world
     economy became more and more transnational.
     At first sight, contradiction would appear the most obvious conclusion
     to draw. Antinomy, however, is not always the mark of a fatal flaw in
     argument; it may express conflicting tendencies in social reality. This is
     the most fruitful way to approach Hobsbawm’s understanding of the
     nexus between ‘‘Gemeinshaft and globalization’’. Thus his ambivalent
     assessment of the nation state’s future was a reflection of a contemporary
     reality constituted by both the IMF and uneven capitalist development,
     by global cultural homogeneity and wide divergences in the material
     conditions of labor.157 In a world where the life-chances of workers in
     Beijing and Brisbane were still poles apart, it was hard to argue that the
     ‘‘national economy’’ and the ‘‘national state’’ constituted residues of ‘‘prehistory’’.158 But it was equally hard to deny that ‘‘national economics’’
     and the ‘‘national state’’ retained their historic powers in a world
     dominated by the hegemonic order of capital and where the ideology
     of neo-liberalism ruled unchallenged. In such circumstances a vacillating
     ensemble of cosmopolitan and particularist reflexes perhaps constitutes
     an accurate reflection of objective developments.159
     Not just a fine-spun portrayal of social reality, the ambiguity in
     Hobsbawm’s assessment of the relationship between capitalist globalization and the nation state also spoke to and reflected the increasing
     sophistication and complexity of contemporary historical materialism – its
     aversion to reductionism, to simplistic explanations deriving from some
     final instance of determination, and of its increasing ability to incorporate
     modes of being and identity other than class into its theoretical orbit. It
     might be argued that these qualities have always characterized Marxism;
     but Hobsbawm’s complex view of the nexus between the nation state and
     capitalist globalization was a sure sign of historical materialism’s ability to
     comprehend our world’s ‘‘erratic unity of opposites’’.160 However, it also
158. On global cultural homogeneity, see Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Nation and Globalization’’,
     pp. 5–6.
159. On this point, consult Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 40.
160. For a recent interpretation of contemporary reality that accords with Hobsbawm’s, see D.
     Laibman, ‘‘Theory and Necessity: The Stadial Foundations of the Present’’, Science and Society,
     69 (2005), pp. 305–312.
161. I borrow this phrase from J. Petras, ‘‘Marx and Engels and the National Question’’, p. 797.
     For Hobsbawm’s own understanding of ‘‘dialectics’’ see Hobsbawm, ‘‘What Do Historians Owe
     Karl Marx?’’, p. 153.
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     reflected another contradictory reality: the more penetrating and complex
     Marxism became, the more vulnerable it was to nightmares. In other
     words, as historical materialism developed into an ever-more artful tool
     for understanding the world, it seemed less and less likely to provide an
     adequate guide for those who sought to change it. Always respectful of
     empirical controls, historical materialism increasingly faced a social reality
     that was imperiously set against it.
     If Hobsbawm’s analysis of the relationship between the nation state and
     capitalist globalization was characterized by complex ambiguity, part
     product of objective reality, part product of historical materialism’s
     increasing sophistication, what of his assessment of the future of
     nationalism? According to Hobsbawm, nationalism, like the national
     state, was vulnerable to the enlightenment derived from the flight of
     Minerva’s owl. In short, he believed nationalism was entering the dusk of
     its world-historical influence. Paradoxically, ‘‘the end of nationalism’’, he
     argued, was most clearly illuminated by the rise of ethnic nationalism and
     identity politics in the twentieth century’s final decades.161 Hobsbawm
     maintained that despite, but also because of, the emergence of separatist
     nationalisms in traditional nation states and the crystallization of ethnic
     nationalisms in post-socialist societies, that nationalism no longer
     constituted a major historical force in the way that it had ‘‘in the era
     between the French Revolution and the end of imperialist colonialism after
     World War II’’.162
     This argument – that ‘‘nationalism as a vector of historical change’’163
     was now in decline – constituted the most controversial claim of
     Hobsbawm’s mature analysis of the national question – it was the central
     argument of Nations and Nationalism since 1780 – although it was
     prefigured in his earlier work.164 The claim was controversial for it seemed
     to run against the grain of the facts, especially following the nationalist
     explosions which attended state socialism’s ruin in the last decades of the
     twentieth century.165
     Hobsbawm did not suppose, however, that there would be less
     nationalism around.166 Rather he claimed the nationalism that had
     facilitated ‘‘the building of a number of ‘nations’ that combined nation161. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 430.
162. Idem, Nation and Nationalism since 1780, p. 169.
163. Ibid., p. 150.
164. For an early indication of this argument, see, in particular, E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Some
     Reflections on Nationalism’’, in T.J. Nossiter, A.H. Hanson, S. Rokkan (eds), Imagination and
     Precision in the Social Sciences: Essays in Memory of Peter Nettl (London, 1972), p. 406.
165. For a critique of this claim from within the Marxist tradition see M. Lo¨wy, ‘‘Why
     Nationalism?’’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds), Real Problems, False Solutions: Socialist
     Register (London, 1993), pp. 129–130.
166. Hobsbawm, Nation and Nationalism since 1780, p. 181.
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     state and national economy’’167 would be less in evidence, the sort of
     nationalism based on a ‘‘body of citizens in a territorial state’’, which
     ‘‘extended the scale of human society’’, and which had constituted a
     ‘‘global programme’’ between the late eighteenth-century and the midtwentieth century.168 This kind of nationalism, he argued, not nationalism
     tout court, constituted a historical vector in decline. The ethnic and
     separatist nationalisms that had achieved ascendancy in the last three
     decades of the twentieth century were radically different to this
     ‘‘universalist’’ nationalism. ‘‘Nationalist’’ nationalism, unlike ‘‘universalist’’ nationalism, sought to break up existing states, based its claim to
     nationhood on appeals to ethnicity and language, and repudiated the
     legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.169 Like identity politics,
     xenophobia, and racism, ‘‘nationalist’’ nationalism, Hobsbawm suggested,
     was not evidence of nationalism’s revitalization but symbolic of the
     ‘‘distress and fury’’ and the ‘‘social disorientation’’ characteristic of the late
     twentieth century, a view wildly out of step with Benedict Anderson’s
     claim ‘‘that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing
     love’’.170 In Hobsbawm’s view, not only was ‘‘nationalist’’ nationalism
     more likely to constitute a ‘‘substitute for lost dreams’’171 rather than an
     expression of love, it was a pseudo world-historical force which claimed an
     illusionary vitality from a mistaken association with a ‘‘universalist’’
     nationalism that had transformed the world between the French Revolution and the 1970s.172
     Thus, as far as ‘‘universalist’’ nationalism was concerned, Hobsbawm
     believed that the Owl had flown – we could now illuminate what it was
     because its historical strength was exhausted. In fact, his verdict on
     nationalism’s future was not so clear-cut. This is not only because he
     maintained that we would not see less nationalism around – specifically,
167. Ibid., p. 169.
168. Ibid.
169. For the argument that ‘‘universalist’’ and ‘‘nationalist’’ nationalism are not as distinct as
     most thinkers, including Hobsbawm, think, see J. Habermas, ‘‘The European Nation-State: On
     the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship’’, in idem, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies
     in Political Theory, C. Cronin and P. De Greiff (eds), (Oxford, 1991, repr. 2000), pp. 111–117. In
     addition, see B. Yack, ‘‘The Myth of the Civic Nation’’, Critical Review, 10 (1996), pp. 193–211.
170. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Ethnicity and Nationalism Today’’, p. 4. For Anderson’s claim see Imagined
     Communities, p. 141. For a critique of Anderson’s representation of nationalism, see
     Balakrishnan, ‘‘The National Imagination’’, p. 204. Hobsbawm’s representation of modern
     nationalism has also drawn the ire of other scholars who claim that Hobsbawm’s theory of
     nationalism is explicitly ‘‘Eurocentric’’. For this charge, see Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural
     Practice in the Postcolonial World, p. 70, and A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender
     and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York [etc.], 1995), p. 151. But compare these views
     with that of Homi K. Bhaba in his ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
     Modern Nation’’, in idem (ed.), Nation and Narration (London [etc.], 1990), p. 291.
171. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 178.
172. Ibid., p. 179.
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     the sort that was based on ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, but, above
     all, because he believed that ‘‘citizen nationalism’’, modern-day manifestation of Enlightenment universalism, had a future as an opponent of
     capitalist globalization beyond the ‘‘end of history’’.173 Recalling his
     somewhat ambivalent argument about the future of the nation-state,
     Hobsbawm argued in the mid-1990s that ‘‘citizen nationalism’’ constituted
     not only the primary but the only realistic defense against the brutalizing
     effects of capitalist globalization and the significant, if errant, force of
     identity politics.
     His commitment to the virtues of citizen nationalism, of course, also
     recalled his almost life-long belief in the efficacy of the Popular Front. Like
     the cause of anti-fascism, citizen nationalism, he asserted, was a form of
     ‘‘identity politics’’ which was ‘‘based on a common appeal’’,174 and which
     could potentially marry national identity to social transformation. Hence,
     in the face of the ‘‘savageries of identity politics’’,175 Hobsbawm implored
     the Left (once again) ‘‘to recapture [national symbols] and, as it were, to
     refuse the devil’s armies the monopoly of the best marching tunes’’.176 As a
     descendent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, citizen nationalism,
     Hobsbawm believed, was ‘‘the only foundation for all the aspirations to
     build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on the Earth,
     and for the assertion and defense of their human rights as persons’’.177
     Citizen nationalism or barbarism – these were the alternative futures that
     Hobsbawm supposed humanity faced in the new century.
     What might account for Hobsbawm’s shift from socialist politics to a
     politics of ‘‘citizen nationalism’’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
     centuries? First Hobsbawm believed that nationalism was now the
     ‘‘inescapable’’ ground of politics. For him, ‘‘national consciousness’’
     constituted ‘‘the soil in which all other political sentiments grow’’.178 This
     conclusion was in keeping with his assessment that ‘‘where ideologies are
     in conflict the appeal to the imagined community of the nation appears to
     have defeated all challengers’’,179 including the socialist internationalism
173. Hobsbawm, The New Century, p. 88.
174. Idem, ‘‘Identity Politics and the Left’’, p. 45. Hobsbawm is now making much the same
     arguments as his opponents in the 1970s in the debate over the nexus between socialism and
     nationalism. See T. Nairn, ‘‘Post-2001 and the Third Coming of Nationalism’’, Arena Journal, 21
     (2003), pp. 81–97.
175. The phrase is Aijaz Ahmad’s. See his ‘‘Preface’’ to Lineages of the Present: Identity and
     Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London [etc.], 2000), p. xii.
176. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 145. See also idem, ‘‘The Crisis of
     Today’s Ideologies’’, New Left Review, I/192 (1992), p. 64.
177. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Barbarism: A Users Guide’’, New Left Review, I/206 (1994), pp. 46–47.
     Italics in the original.
178. Idem, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, p. 145. On this point, Hobsbawm is in
     agreement with Benedict Anderson. See his Imagined Communities, p. 3.
179. Ibid., p. 163.
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     which had originally inspired his attachment to world revolution. ‘‘We are
     all nationalists now’’180 – the words are John Dunn’s but Hobsbawm
     would agree with the sentiment.
     What was important, according to Hobsbawm, was what sort of
     nationalists we were. The only way that a future, an all too possible future,
     conducive to the imagined community of Le Pen or Tudjman could be
     averted, he believed, was through the reassertion of the values of citizen
     nationalism – values, that is, attached to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project.181 In terms of Hobsbawm’s biography, this was a politics
     that recalled the England of 1936 rather than the Germany of 1932. In the
     prevailing circumstances at the century’s fin de sie`cle, this politics,
     accordingly, was a popular front with the socialism left out – not a
     politics figured to advance socialism but a politics designed to salvage
     something from the wreckage of its ruin.
     A second explanation of Hobsbawm’s shift in politics, linked to the first,
     provides a deeper solution to the question. Hobsbawm’s politics of
     ‘‘citizen nationalism’’ accorded with his recently established assertion that
     the materialist conception of history did not provide an adequate resource
     for the attempt to change the world. In effect, Hobsbawm’s citizen
     nationalism constituted a recognition that what he considered the central
     axioms of Marxian politics – ‘‘the sense that the triumph of socialism is the
     logical end of all historical evolution to date; and the sense that it marks the
     end of ‘prehistory’ in that it cannot and will not be an ‘antagonistic’
     society’’182 – could no longer be entertained. For Hobsbawm, as a means
     of changing the world, as opposed to a means of interpreting the world,
     Marxism was dead – especially if it persisted in opposing nationalism. In a
     world where both nationalism and capitalism appeared something like
     permanent realities, socialist internationalism, he argued, was not just
     utopian but impossible. Henceforth Mazzini rather than Marx would
     constitute Hobsbawm’s political guide for the new century.183
     In truth, however, Hobsbawm’s citizen nationalism conflicted with
     other moments in his most recent assessment of the national question. For
180. J. Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge, 1979), p. 56.
181. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies’’, p. 64. At times, however, Hobsbawm’s
     ‘‘citizen nationalism’’ could descend into what looked uncomfortably like ‘‘nationalist’’
     nationalism; for example, in Interesting Times, where he argued that ‘‘The stubborn rearguard
     action of France in defiance of the global role of her language and culture may be doomed, but it
     also a necessary defence, by no means predestined to failure, of every language, and national and
     cultural specificity against the homogenization of an essentially plural humanity by the processes
     of globalization.’’ See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 337.
182. E. Hobsbawm, ‘‘Marx and History’’, in idem, On History, p. 164. This essay first appeared
     in New Left Review, I/143 (1984) pp. 39–50. Reference in this article will be to the essay as it
     appeared in On History.
183. Anderson makes this more general point about Hobsbawm’s politics. See his Spectrum,
     p. 312.
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     example, it was out of step with his almost ‘‘Luxemburgist’’ belief that ‘‘a
     ‘nation’, however we define it, is by definition exclusive and particular’’.184
     When advertising the merits of citizen nationalism, he directly contradicted this statement. Similarly, his citizen nationalism was bereft of the
     acute judgment, found in both The Age of Revolution and Nations and
     Nationalism since 1780, that even ‘‘universalist’’ nationalism contained the
     potential to turn into its opposite – that is, universalist nationalism was
     perpetually vulnerable to ethnic and particularistic immolation.185 In
     addition, even in his most trenchant endorsement of ‘‘citizen nationalism’’
     – where he advised the Left to appropriate the language of ‘‘national
     interest’’ – he could still remark that a political discourse rooted in
     conceptions of ‘‘the community’’ constituted an ‘‘ideological cop-out’’.186
     If ‘‘the community’’ could be described in such terms, why not ‘‘the
     nation’’? And, finally, his ‘‘citizen nationalism’’ conflicted with his belief
     that the major problems that faced the world in the new century – global
     ecological crisis, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the
     exponential growth of chemical and biological weapons – could not be
     solved within the framework of the nation-state.187 Solutions to these
     problems, he speculated at such moments, would need to be global not
     local. In such circumstances, citizen nationalism would appear an
     inadequate telos for the establishment of a society fit for all humanity.
     Given the global nature of the problems capitalism’s accumulation
     process has induced, it might have been supposed that the only imaginable
     alternative to global capitalism was one that mirrored its reach – a global
     socialism that transcended nationality and the national state. This is
     something like the homeland that Hobsbawm identified with on the streets
     of Berlin in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power: ‘‘a movement for all
     humanity’’,188 whose aim was ‘‘the emancipation of mankind’’.189 However, as Hobsbawm increasingly realized, you have to be positioned
     somewhere to say anything at all190 – and that ‘‘somewhere’’ was most
     often a nation state. Just as socialists have always been forced to operate in
     national paradigms, so actually-existing socialism of whatever type has so
     far been dependent on territorial embodiment.191
184. ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Nation and Capitalist Globalization’’, p. 1.
185. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 165, and idem, Nations and Nationalism since 1780,
     pp. 168–169.
186. Idem, ‘‘Identity Politics and the Left’’, p. 47. A very different understanding of
     ‘‘community’’ is provided in P. Chatterjee, ‘‘Whose Imagined Community?’’, in Mapping the
     Nation, pp. 214–225.
187. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies’’, pp. 58–59 and 64.
188. Idem, Interesting Times, p. 138.
189. Idem, ‘‘The Emancipation of Mankind’’, p. 187.
190. S. Hall, ‘‘Ethnicity: Identity and Difference’’, in Becoming National, p. 347.
191. For a superb short evocation of the problems of socialist internationalism, see T. Eagleton,
     ‘‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’’, in T. Eagleton, F. Jameson, and E. Said, Nationalism,
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     If socialist internationalism appeared an unlikely terminus of world
     history however, no more realistic was ‘‘socialism (or social democracy192)
     in one country’’, for reasons well illuminated in Hobsbawm’s work. To the
     degree that the nation state has been undermined by capitalist globalization, he explained, social democracy had suffered the most severe setbacks.
     Indeed, he believed that capitalist globalization was the precipitate cause of
     social democracy’s ruin: ‘‘The advance of the globalized economy struck at
     the foundations of the social-democratic Left, because it undermined its
     ability to defend its social constituency within national borders through a
     re-distributive fiscal policy, welfare, and macro-economic stimulation of
     full employment.’’193 At the beginning of the new century, the prospects
     for socialist internationalism and nationalist socialism, of world revolution
     and a socialist-inspired Popular Front, Hobsbawm argued, appeared
     hopeless. There was no journey, he concluded, only different types of
     detour.
     Marxist and non-Marxist commentators alike have repeatedly claimed
     that nationalism constitutes ‘‘Marxism’s great theoretical failure’’.194
     Indeed, according to one commentator, Marxists have not just got
     nationalism wrong, they have systematically evaded it.195 The claim is
     wide of the mark when applied to the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm.
     Hobsbawm has long been critically engaged with varied dimensions of the
     national question. As might be expected from a historian without a fixed
     home, Hobsbawm has swung between differing understandings of the
     national question, sometimes settling on a version which mimicked his life
     history of displacement and exile, sometimes reacting against that personal
     history by offering an understanding of the nation-state and nationalism as
     perpetual features of humanity’s future. His engagement with nationalism
     in other words has been marked by tensions derived from a political
     biography coterminous with the history of twentieth-century socialism.
     Emotionally committed to the project of world revolution, he has at
     times rejected nationalism tout court, seeing it only as a form of ideology
     that covers over class divisions within nation states, here alert to the way
     that the marriage between socialism and nationalism has most often
     worked in nationalism’s favor. In other moods, his version of nationalism
     has pointed away from this conclusion. Staring socialist defeat in the face,
     he has considered nationalism a perennial feature of modern society and
     Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1990), p. 34. For a more prosaic demonstration
     of these problems, see J. Dunn, ‘‘Unimagined Communities: The Deceptions of Socialist
     Cosmopolitanism’’, in Idem, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge, 1985), p.105.
192. See G. Therborn, ‘‘Social Democracy in One Country’’, Dissent, Fall (2000), pp. 59–65, for
     a more positive perspective on social democracy’s future.
193. Hobsbawm, The New Century, p. 102. See also idem, Age of Extremes, p. 417.
194. T. Nairn, ‘‘The Modern Janus’’, New Left Review, 94 (1975), p. 3.
195. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 3.
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     has counseled socialists to make their peace with it. In the absence of a
     viable socialist project he has even fallen back upon a certain version of
     nationalism as the only safeguard against a future characterized by
     barbarism. At once confirming nationalism’s victory over socialism and
     the seemingly perpetual existence of national belonging, such a politics has
     given rise to a series of ambiguities in Hobsbawm’s understanding of
     Marxism’s national question. Ambiguity – whether in interpretation or
     politics – is not always unproductive however. It has certainly not been
     unproductive in the case of Hobsbawm, who, in his encounter with the
     national question, has provided us with an intellectually decisive encounter
     between a Marxist and his nationalist world.
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