The Long Goodbye

National Interest, The, Summer, 2001 by Neil McInnes

Historians are of course entitled to frame their narrative as the answer to a particular question; there is nothing wrong with such selectivity. A philosopher even says, "History books, indeed, ought commonly to be more, not less, selective than they are; greater selectivity would be a step towards objectivity, not away from it." [7] There remains an obligation to ensure that answers to one question do not contradict the answers to other equally valid questions. Each historian cannot do his own thing regardless of others in the field. For example, one cannot tell the story of the Soviet Union and the Cold War as though it were all about the effort to realize a communist ideal and had nothing to do with nationalism and ethnicity. Hobsbawm tries to do just that. In his history, as in his essays on nationalism, he is slave to the Marxist prejudice, as old as the Communist Manifesto, that "the workers have no fatherland", and so nationalism and ethnicity could never determine their actions whenever socialism was an option.

It makes nonsense of the history of the last century to accept the Marxist decree that "proletarian internationalism" would prevail and nationalism would vanish and leave nothing but a wrack of folk dancing behind. Hobsbawm was still arguing in 1990, when ethno-nationalism was about to rend the Soviet empire and the independent Balkans, that nations and nationalism were about to disappear. In what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "a work of great learning that is equally a work of vast delusion", Hobsbawm was saying that "the great achievement of the communist regimes in multinational countries [was] to limit the disastrous effects of nationalism within them." Moynihan continues,

The spell of Marxism, however, persisted to the moment of utter falsification and will no doubt continue on impervious to experience. ... Hobsbawm's entire work seems directed at explaining away, or even denying, the plain fact that the vertical category of nationalism has proven far more powerful than the horizontal category of class consciousness. [8]

This stubborn error persisted not only through his Age of Extremes but into On the Edge of the New Century, where Hobsbawm says wistfully that "the reappearance of dramatic nationalist hostilities in these [ex-communist] countries is in some ways inexplicable, particularly because they seemed to have almost disappeared." Grudgingly admitting that they did re-appear, he still insists that this was not what blew the USSR or Yugoslavia apart. Multi-ethnic states, whether managed by Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs or communists, come undone for reasons a good Marxist can acknowledge, such as war or economic failure, and it is only then that ethnic communities cast around for "new loyalties." So, in this telling, ethno-nationalism remains a secondary, derivative and artificial force, never a prime mover in history. This willful blindness to glaring fact is comforted by ending the "short twentieth century" in 1991, before the clamor of ethnonationalism became deafening.