by ANDREW WHITEHEAD
The renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm has watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement – and notes that it’s now the middle class, not the working class, that is making waves.
“It was an enormous joy to discover once again that it’s possible for people to get down in the streets, to demonstrate, to overthrow governments,” says EJ Hobsbawm at the close of a year of revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world.
He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of revolutions.
Born just months before the Russian revolution of 1917, he was a Communist for most of his adult life – as well as an innovative and influential writer and thinker.
He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an advocate of revolutionary change.
Now in his mid-nineties, his continuing passion for politics is reflected in the title of his most recent book How to Change the World – and in his keen interest in the Arab Spring.
“I certainly felt a sense of excitement and relief,” he says, talking to me in his north London home, which is strolling distance from Hampstead Heath.
Books about jazz – he was once a jazz critic – jostle for space on the shelves with works of history in several languages.
“If there is to be a revolution, it should be a bit like this. At least in the first few days. People turning up in the streets, demonstrating for the right things.”
But, he adds: “We know it won’t last.”
The historian in him draws a parallel between the Arab Spring of 2011 and Europe’s “year of revolutions” almost two centuries earlier, when an uprising in France was followed by others in the Italian and German states, in the Hapsburg Empire, and beyond.
Arab democracies?
“It reminds me of 1848 – another self-propelled revolution which started in one country then spread all over the continent in a short time.”
For those who once crowded Tahrir Square and are now worried about the fate of their revolution, he has a word of comfort.
“Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn’t failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success – though no longer in the form of a revolution.”
However, with the possible exception of Tunisia, he sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative government in the Arab world.
Not enough notice has been taken, he says, of the differences between Arab countries in the throes of mass protests.
“We are in the middle of a revolution – but it isn’t the same revolution.”
“What unites them is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces – a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests.”
The importance of social media extends to the other global movement of the past year, the Occupy protests North America and Europe. That too has caught Eric Hobsbawm’s attention, and to a large extent his admiration.
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