by Eric Hobsbawm.

Pantheon Books. 101 pages. $19.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

One of the best books that I read in college was Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution. It was the standard work on how revolutions erupted, functioned, sputtered and continued to smolder. The style was clear, forthright and analytically sound, a standard that he still maintains in this new book, after years of teaching in London, at M.I.T., Stanford, and the New School for Social Research in New York. Eighteen honorary degrees have not burdened his clear-eyed assessment of the world around us.

Much as I’d like him to, Hobsbawm doesn’t prophesy or predict: he calls the contemporary shots as he sees them and weighs in with his long-range historical perspective. The war in Iraq comes in for scathing criticism, a unilateralist nightmare: “It is the megalomaniac American policy since 9/11 that has very largely destroyed the political and ideological foundations of the country’s former hegemonic influence [and] that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy.” It hasn’t worked, it isn’t working, and it won’t work. He dismisses the Donald Rumsfeld doctrine as pure poppycock: “quick wars against weak pushovers followed by quick withdrawals.”

Hobsbawm looks out upon a world where empires have ended, states have multiplied (the number has quadrupled since 1913), the line between war and peace is no longer sacrosanct, and the number of internal and ethnic struggles has escalated. Independent militias threaten state sovereignty in an era when the state itself seems unable to protect its own citizens and borders.

Globalization has spawned what Hobsbawm calls “free-market capitalism,” widening the gaps between the rich and poor, increasing regional disparities, producing “unbalanced and asymmetric growth,” and creating immigration problems, particularly for the economies of the West. He doesn’t suggest that globalization has caused these problems all by itself — populations abandoning the countryside and moving into concentrated urban areas is another factor — but he certainly suggests it underscores most of them.

These upheavals in turn have led to “endemic worldwide armed conflict, typically fought within states, but magnified by foreign intervention,” and “an era of genocide and compulsory mass population transfers” that Hobsbawm sees no end to any time soon.

Any gleams of hope? Well, most of us now consider ourselves citizens, not subjects. The Human Rights agenda, however selective, may bode well for a brighter future. The United States, born of revolution, may yet re-invent itself after the debacle of the Bush years, though “it is the only major empire that has also been a major debtor.”

Historians tend to see more of the same. The rest of us continue to hope, however naive and deluded we may be. ON EMPIRE: America, War, And Global Supremacy,

samcoale@cox.net