Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991

672 Pages·1995·17.702 MB·English

by  Eric Hobsbawm

Also by Erie Hobsbawm
THE AGE OF REVOLUTION 1789-1848
THE AGE OF CAPITAL 1848-1875
THE AGE OF EMPIRE 1875-1914
A E
ge of xtremes
THE SHORT TWENTIETH CENTURY
1914-1991
Eric Hobsbawm
An Abacus Book
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph 1994
This edition published by Abacus 1995
Copyright © Eric Hobsbawm 1994
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of
the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
ISBN 0 349 10671 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Abacus
A Division of
Little, Brown and Company (UK)
Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London WC2E 7EN
Contents
Illustrations vii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
The Century : A Bird's Eye View 1
Part One: The Age of Catastrophe
1. The Age of Total War 21
2. The World Revolution 54
3. Into the Economic Abyss 85
4. The Fall of Liberalism 109
5. Against the Common Enemy 142
6. The Arts 1914-45 178
7. End of Empires 199
Part T wo: T he Golden Age
8. Cold War 225
9. The Golden Years 257
10. The Social Revolution 1945-1990 287
11. Cultural Revolution 320
12. The Third World 344
13. ‘Real Socialism’ 372
Part Three: The Landslide
14. The Crisis Decades 403
15. Third World and Revolution 433
16. End of Socialism 461
17. The Avant-garde Dies - The Arts After 1950 500
18. Sorcerers and Apprentices - The Natural Sciences 522
19. Towards the Millennium 558
References 587
Further Reading 610
Index 615
Illustrations
1. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife (Roger Viollet)
2. Canadian soldiers among shell craters, 1918 (Popperfoto)
3. War cemetery, Chalons-sur-Mame (Roger Viollet)
4. Russian soldiers, 1917 (Hulton Deutsch)
5. The October revolution: Lenin (Hulton Deutsch)
6. May Day poster, c. 1920 (David King Collection)
7. A German banknote for twenty million marks (Hulton Deutsch)
8. The Wall Street crash of 1929 (Icon Communications)
9. British unemployed in the 1930s (Hulton Deutsch)
10. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (Hulton Deutsch)
11. Italian Fascists marching past Mussolini (Hulton Deutsch)
12. Nazi rally at Nuremberg (Robert Harding Picture Library)
13. Anarchist militia in Barcelona, 1936 (Hulton Deutsch)
14. Adolf Hitler in occupied Paris (Hulton Deutsch)
15. US ‘Flying Fortresses’ raid Berlin (Popperfoto)
16. The battle of Kursk, 1943 (Robert Harding)
17. London burning, 1940 (Hulton Deutsch)
18. Dresden burned, 1945 (Hulton Deutsch)
19. Hiroshima after the atom bomb, 1945 (Rex Features)
20. Josip Broz, Marshal Tito (Rex Features)
21. A British wartime poster (Imperial War Museum)
22. Algiers, 1961 (Robert Harding Picture Library)
23. Premier Indira Gandhi (Rex Features)
24. A US cruise missile (Rex Features)
25. A silo for Soviet SS missiles (Popperfoto)
26. The Berlin Wall (Popperfoto)
27. Fidel Castro’s rebel army in Santa Clara (Magnum)
28. Insurrectionaries in El Salvador (Hulton Deutsch)
29. Anti-Vietnam War demonstration, London (Hulton Deutsch)
30. Iran, 1979 (Hulton Deutsch)
31. Michael Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Rex Features)
32. The Berlin Wall falls, 1989 (Hulton Deutsch)
33. Stalin removed in Prague (BBC Photographic Library)
34. Agricultural terracing in the Liping valley, China (Comstock)
35. Electron micrograph of a bacterium (Science Photo Library)
36. Chinese peasant ploughing (Robert Harding)
37. Turkish immigrant couple in West Berlin (Magnum)
38. West Indians arriving in London in the 1950s (Hulton Deutsch)
39. Africa at the end of the century (Gideon Mendel)Network)
40. Ahmedabad, India (Robert Harding)
41. Chicago, USA (Robert Harding)
42. Rush hour in Shinjuku, Tokyo (Rex Features)
43. Railyard, Augsburg, Germany (Comstock)
44. Motorways, cars and pollution in Houston, Texas (Magnum)
45. The first moon landing, 1969 (Hulton Deutsch)
46. A 1930s cannery, Amarillo, Texas (FPG)Robert Harding)
47. Dungeness nuclear power station (Rex Features)
48. Deindustrialisation in North England, Middlesbrough (Magnum)
49. The refrigerator (Robert Harding)
50. The television set (Robert Harding)
51. The supermarket (Rex Features)
52. The portable tape-cassette player (Robert Harding)
53. Neville Chamberlain fishing (Popperfoto)
54. Earl Mountbatten of Burma (Hulton Deutsch)
55. Lenin, 1917 (Hulton Deutsch)
56. Gandhi on the way to negotiate with the British government
(Rex Features)
57. Stalin (FPG International)Robert Harding)
58. Hitler’s birthday parade, 1939 (Hulton Deutsch)
59. ‘Chairman Mao’ by Andy Warhol (© 1994 The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library)
60. The corpse of Ayatollah Khomeini lying in state (Magnum)
61. George Grosz savages the German ruling class
62. British workers march on London (Hulton Deutsch)
63. Anti-Vietnam War demonstration, Berkeley, California (Magnum)
64. Claims to world conquest
65. After the Gulf War, 1991 (Magnum)
66. Homeless (Rex Features)
67. Waiting to vote in South Africa (Rex Features)
68. Sarajevo eighty years after 1914 (Popperfoto)
(Copyright holders are indicated in italics)
Preface and Acknowledgements
Nobody can write the history of the twentieth century like that of any
other era, if only because nobody can write about his or her lifetime as
one can (and must) write about a period known only from outside, at
second or third-hand, from sources of the period or the works of later
historians. My own lifetime coincides with most of the period with which
this book deals, and for most of it, from early teen-age to the present, I
have been conscious of public affairs, that is to say I have accumulated
views and prejudices about it as a contemporary rather than as a scholar.
This is one reason why under my professional hat as a historian I avoided
working on the era since 1914 for most of my career, though not
refraining from writing about it in other capacities. ‘My period’, as they
say in the trade, is the nineteenth century. I think it is now possible to
see the Short Twentieth Century from 1914 to the end of the Soviet era
in some historical perspective, but I come to it without the knowledge of
the scholarly literature, let alone of all but a tiny sprinkle of archive
sources, which historians of the twentieth century, of whom there is an
enormous number, have accumulated.
It is, of course, utterly impossible for any single person to know the
historiography of the present century, even that in any single major
language, as, let us say, the historian of classical antiquity or of the
Byzantine Empire knows what has been written in and about those long
periods. Nevertheless, my own knowledge is casual and patchy even by
the standards of historical erudition in the field of contemporary history.
The most I have been able to do is to dip into the literature of
particularly thorny and controverted questions - say, the history of the
Cold War or that of the 1930s - far enough to satisfy myself that the
views expressed in this book are tenable in the light of specialist
research. Of course, I cannot have succeeded. There must be any
number of questions on which I display ignorance as well as
controversial views.
X Preface and Acknowledgements
This book, therefore, rests on curiously uneven foundations. In addi­
tion to the wide and miscellaneous reading of a good many years,
supplemented by what reading was necessary to give lecture courses on
twentieth-century history to the graduate students of the New School for
Social Research, I have drawn on the accumulated knowledge, memories
and opinions of someone who has lived through the Short Twentieth
Century, as what the social anthropologists call a ‘participant observer’,
or simply as an open-eyed traveller, or what my ancestors would have
called a kibbitzery in quite a lot of countries. The historical value of such
experiences does not depend on being present on great historic occasions,
or having known or even met prominent history-makers or statesmen. As
a matter of fact, my experience as an occasional journalist enquiring into
this or that country, chiefly in Latin America, has been that interviews
with presidents or other decision-makers are usually unrewarding, for the
obvious reason that most of what such people say is for the public record.
The people from whom illumination comes are those who can, or want
to, speak freely, preferably if they have no responsibility for great affairs.
Nevertheless, though necessarily partial and misleading, to have known
people and places has helped me enormously. It may be no more than the
sight of the same city at an interval of thirty years - Valencia or Palermo
- which alone brings home the speed and scale of social transformation in
the third quarter of the present century. It may be simply a memory of
something said in conversations long ago and stored away, sometimes for no
clear reason, for future use. If the historian can make some sense of this
century it is in large part because of watching and listening. I hope I have
communicated to readers something of what I have learned through doing so.
The book also, and necessarily, rests on the information drawn from
colleagues, students, and anyone else whom I buttonholed while I was
working on it. In some cases the debt is systematic. The chapter on the
sciences was submitted to my friends Alan Mackay FRS, who is not only
a crystallographer but an encyclopedist, and John Maddox. Some of what
I have written about economic development was read by my colleague at
the New School, Lance Taylor, formerly of MIT, and much more was
based on reading the papers, listening to the discussions and generally
keeping my ears open during the conferences organized on various
macro-economic problems at the World Institute for Development Econ­
omic Research of the UN University (UNU/WIDER) in Helsinki when
it was transformed into a major international centre of research and
discussion under the direction of Dr Lai Jayawardena. In general, the
summers I was able to spend at that admirable institution as a McDonnell
Douglas visiting scholar were invaluable to me, not least through its
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
proximity to, and intellectual concern with, the USSR in its last years. I
have not always accepted the advice of those I consulted, and, even when
I have, the errors are strictly my own. I have derived much benefit from
the conferences and colloquia at which academics spend much of their
time meeting their colleagues largely for the purpose of picking each
others’ brains. I cannot possibly acknowledge all the colleagues from
whom I have derived benefit or correction on formal or informal occa­
sions, nor even all the information I have incidentally acquired from
being lucky enough to teach a particularly international group of students
at the New School. However, I think I must specifically acknowledge
what I learned about the Turkish revolution and about the nature of
Third World migration and social mobility from term papers produced
by Ferdan Ergut and Alex Julca. I am also indebted to the doctoral
dissertation of my pupil Margarita Giesecke on APR A and the Trujillo
Rising of 1932.
As the historian of the twentieth century draws closer to the present he
or she becomes increasingly dependent on two types of sources: the daily
or periodical press and the periodic reports, economic and other surveys,
statistical compilations and other publications by national governments
and international institutions. My debt to such papers as the London
Guardian, the Financial Times and the New York Times should be
obvious. My debt to the invaluable publications of the United Nations
and its various agencies, and the World Bank, is recorded in the biblio­
graphy. Nor should their predecessor, the League of Nations, be forgot­
ten. Though an almost total failure in practice, its admirable economic
enquiries and analyses, culminating in the pioneering Industrialisation and
World Trade of 1945 deserve our gratitude. No history of economic social
and cultural changes in this century could be written without such sources.
Most of what I have written in this bopk, except obvious personal
judgments of the author, readers will have to take on trust. There is no
point in overloading a book such as this with a vast apparatus of
references or other signs of erudition. I have tried to confine my
references to the source of actual quotations, to the source of statistics
and other quantitative data - different sources sometimes give different
figures - and to the occasional support for statements which readers may
find unusual, unfamiliar or unexpected, and some points where the
author’s controversial view might require some backing. These references
are in brackets in the text. The full title of the source is to be found at
the end of the volume. This bibliography is no more than a full list of all
the sources actually cited or referred to in the text. It is not a systematic
guide to further reading. A brief pointer to further reading is printed