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Hobsbawm on Nationalism and Revolution

This piece is a part of our ongoing series, entitled “Rethinking the Revolutionary
Canon.”

By Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz

At the time of his death in 2012, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was the most
recognized British historian around the world. Born in Egypt and raised in Vienna
and Berlin, Hobsbawm was a fierce critic of nationalism. A close analysis of
Hobsbawm´s work, especially his “Age” quartet, The Age of Revolution: Europe
1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire:
1875–1914), and The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, reveals
Hobsbawm’s evolving skepticism and opposition to nationalism. He would come
to argue that nationalism, driven by industrial capitalism, undermined the
universalist goals proposed by revolutionary movements, particularly in Europe.  

Over the course of his career, his understanding of nationalism evolved from an
initially more orthodox Marxist analysis—where modes of production and class-
interest defined nationalism—to a more nuanced, cultural understanding of the
category. In 1994, when Age of Extremes was published, the demise of
Communism and the resurgence of nationalism in Europe led to Hobsbawm´s
late critique of nationalism and his reimagination of the values of the
Enlightenment as a way to subvert nationalism. Thirty plus years earlier in 1962,
when The Age of Revolution was first published, Hobsbawm´s thesis of the dual
revolution, industrial revolution (economic) in the United Kingdom, and political
revolution in France, took an Marxist approach to the period.[1] Nationalism,
politically on the Left during the French Revolution, gradually shifted into a
movement that divided revolutionary forces in the 1830s with the formation of
the ‘Young’ nationalist movements. Hobsbawm saw in the emergence of these
nationalist movements the beginning of the end of revolutionary prospects in

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Europe, since they were ”elitist,” and bourgeois membership underlined the class
interest that preceded nationalist ideology. Thus, in his view, nationalism had
been shorn of any positive relationship to revolution. 

The question of nationalism reappeared briefly in The Age of Capital (1975),

wherein Hobsbawm referred to it as “the nightmare of the nations” while writing
about the revolutions of 1848. For Hobsbawm, 1848 was “objectively” a revolution
in the sense that popular movements instigated the fall of regimes throughout
continental Europe, halted only in Scandinavia, Russia, and at the Pyrenees. Yet it
lacked organized, determined revolutionary leadership and a coherent class base.
Revolutionary forces were divided and faced a clear counter-revolutionary
movement driven by the fear instilled in propertied groups by the uprisings. As a
result, progress was framed as economic development, whereas the only
permissible violence was interstate warfare. As Hobsbawm noted, from 1848
onward there was to be no further revolution in Western Europe. Class politics
prevailed, undercutting the unity of the revolutionary forces before 1848. The
triumph of the bourgeoisie, Hobsbawm argued, signaled the end of the
revolutionary era. As he wrote, “The British (industrial) revolutionary had
swallowed the French (political) revolution.”[2]

As Richard Evans summarizes, The Age of Capital was highly criticized for the
lack of analysis of nationalism.[3] Hobsbawm tells the story of the triumph and
consolidation of the capitalist system, not the rise and consolidation of
nationalism. Only in the context of 1848 did he treat the point. Revolution,
especially in the French political sense, was marginalized. However, together, The
Age of Capital and his installment, The Age of Empire (1987), became the story of
capitalist development, where the prospects of revolution, bourgeois or working-
class, steadily receded, while nationalism became increasingly significant by tying
it together with capitalism.

In the latter book, imperialism has a Marxist meaning, most famously expressed
in Lenin´s work Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism. However, empire
describes a mode of political rule, not an economic process.[4] The focus shifts
away from the bourgeoisie, whether as agents of revolutionary change or servants
of capital, to the global forms of rule developed first by Britain and then by other
capitalist powers. Such a form of rule—imperialism—created the basis for new
and powerful forms of nationalism, both the imperial nationalism of the major
powers, as well as nationalist opposition to imperial rule. The development of
capitalism during the “Age of Empire” pushed the world in the direction of state
rivalry, imperialist expansion, conflict and war. This came to a head in 1914 and
managed to rally the national components of the working classes to the detriment
of revolutionary prospects. When the First World War broke out, in August 1914,
almost all the socialist parties of the Second International abandoned their
commitment to internationalism and supported their national governments.[5]

Age of Extremes (1994), considered Hobsbawm´s masterpiece, crescendoed and

made plain his pessimism about nationalism and revolution. If revolution became
less relevant in The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, it became again
pivotal in Age of Extremes. Nonetheless, revolution is not portrayed as it was in
Age of Revolution with its dual revolution dialectic, where the Marxist predictions
of either bourgeois or proletarian revolution prevailed in his analysis. Politically,
both nationalists and social democratic movements operated within the
increasingly accepted context of the nation-state rather than ‘internationalism’,
revolution had been replaced by war as the principal form of collective violence as

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he had identified beginning in 1848. Even the October Revolution arose from the
turmoil produced in Russia by popular revulsion against the war and from the
chaos that it generated. The problems with the October Revolution, as Hobsbawm
acknowledged, were that it did not happen according to the Marxist schema of
revolution, but rather a national revolutionary scheme made prevalent over the
course of the nineteenth century. Not only that: with the Communist
International, Lenin established the Bolshevik model of a vanguard party as the
revolutionary method to be adopted globally. Hobsbawm believed that the
Leninist model of revolution had undermined the cause of nationalism in
recognising and accepting nationalism among oppressed people and advocating
their national right to self-determination. In Lenin´s idea, he pandered to
nationalist sentiment as a tactic in his longer-term strategic internationalist
revolutionary  goal, but in doing so he set in place an institutional structure that
would eventually used to undermine this objective.[6] Its failure in 1991 proved
Hobsbawm, and Lenin, wrong. In fact, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the
retrenchment of nationalism in Europe after its demise sparked Hobsbawm´s
negative views on nationalism, which he blamed as one of the causes of the fall of
Communism. Nationalism is no longer to be class-driven, but as a mass
movement that stressed the centrality of the nation. Nationalism eliminated any
possibility of a class revolution.

It was in the wake of communism´s collapse that Hobsbawm made his most
original contribution. He turned to the Enlightenment as a tool to imagine a
future beyond nationalism. In his article “Barbarism: A User´s guide,” published
shortly before Age of Extremes in 1994. In rethinking revolution, Hobsbawm
argued that the only way to stimulate a renewed international revolutionary
agenda was to reimagine the political project of the Enlightenment. He
understood Enlightenment as an emphasis on reason and science that could
appeal to broad social forces from liberals to communists since these political
movements were born from it. This claim were made in the context of 1994, a year
of strong nationalist violence in Europe (in Yugoslavia) and in Rwanda, where the
Hutus perpetrated genocide against the Tutsis “justified” by a type of racial
nationalism. These two events sparked not only the attention of western
audiences, but also highlighted the violence that nationalism generated and the
return of the shadow of genocide in the European imagination. Hobsbawm
reframed Rosa Luxemburg’s famous two ultimatem, as laid out in her 1915
pamphlet against the First World War: socialism or barbarism.[7] For
Hobsbawm, the choices were between the “Enlightenment” (Liberalism,
socialism, communism) or Barbarism (nationalism). As he wrote:

“I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated
descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment (…) it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build
societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on this earth, and for the
assertion and defense of their human rights as persons.”[8]

In sum, between The Age of Revolution (1962) and Age of Extremes (1994),
Hobsbawm became increasingly pessimistic about the prospect of revolution. By
1994, he concluded that revolution was no longer possible, as nationalism was on
the rise as a reactionary force that led to extreme violence in places like
Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The re-calibration of Enlightenment values, as he saw
them, was Hobsbawm´s last attempt to accommodate his post-communist
identity to a world dominated by global capitalism and nation identities that
blinded one another to the global systems of oppression working against their

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own interests.                                             

Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh researching the
political commitment of Eric Hobsbawm and his passion for politics since 1977.
His current research interests lie broadly in the history of the European Left,
political theory, political violence, and historical memory. He is on twitter
@ICiuarriz.

Title image: Eric Hobsbawm with Ticlia, adopted by his family in 1971.
Photograph taken of Marlene Hobsbawm

Endnotes:

[1]Hobsbawm´s concept of a dual revolution was problematic in Marxist terms.

Hobsbawm´s division of an economic revolution in Britain and a political one in
France disaggregated two aspects of revolution usually combined in the Marxist
concept of Bourgeois revolution which is central for the transition to capitalism.
Moreover, at the time, Hobsbawm was challenging the idea that the transition to
capitalism occurred in the 17th century after the Civil War and the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ of 1688-1689, as he and others such as Christopher Hill had argued
during their years in the Communist Party Historians´ Group (1946-1956). See:
David Parker, Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: debates of the
British Communist historians, 1940-1956 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2008).

[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1975), 15.

[3] Richard Evans, Eric Hobsbawm. A life in History (London: Little & Brown,
2019), 474-479.

[4] On how Marxists, including Hobsbawm, have interpreted and analysed

‘imperialism’, see:  Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism. A critical
Survey (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[5] On the contradictions of Marxism internationalism and national identity in

this period, see: Robert Stuart, Marxism and National Identity. Socialism,
Nationalism, and National Socialism during the French Fin de Siècle (New York:
State University of New York Press, 2006).

[6] For a recent state of the filed on Soviet communism and nationalism, see:
Peter Shearman, Rethinking Soviet Communism (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015)

[7] For a deeper understanding of Rosa Luxemburg´s analysis of nationalism, see:

A. Walicki, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Question of Nationalism in Polish Marxism
(1893-1914)’ in The Svalonic and East European Review (Seer), Vol. 61, No. 4,
October 1983, 565-583.

[8] Ibid, 336.

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