NIALL FERGUSON'S WARNING: Why Shouldn't It Be as Bad as the 1970s? (HOBSBAWM'S QUOTES)

NIAL FERGUSON'S WARNING: Why Shouldn't It Be as Bad as the 1970s?

 

It is also troublesome that there is no historical precedent for the global supremacy the US government has been trying to establish, and it is quite clear to any good historian and to all rational observers of the world scene that this project will almost certainly fail.The most intelligent of the neo-imperial school, that excellent historian Niall Ferguson, has no doubts about this probable failure, though, unlike people like me, he regrets it.

I would summarise the realtions between empires, war and peace as follows. Empires were mainly built, like the British empire, by aggression and war.In turn, it was war -usually, as Niall Ferguson rightly points out, war between rival empires- that did for them,. Winning big wars proved as fatal to empires as loosing them- a lesson from the history of the British empire Washington might take to heart. International peace is not what they created, but what gave them a chance to survive. That superb book Forgotten Armies gives a vivid picture of how European power and hegemony in south-east Asia, apparently so splendid and secure, collapsed in a matter of weeks in 1941-2.

(...)

Will the US learn this lesson, or will it be tempted to maintain an eroding global position by relying on politico-military force, and in so doing promote not global order but disorder, not global peace but conflict, not the advance of civilisation but of barbarism? That, as Hamlet said, is the question. Only the future will show. Since historians are, fortunately, not prophets, I am not professionally obliged to give you an answer.

(…)

In these circumstances, there is no prospect of a return to the imperial world of the past, let alone the prospect of a lasting global imperial hegemony, unprecedented in history, by a single state, the US, however great its military force. The age of empires is dead. We shall have to find another way of organising the globalised world of the twenty-first century.

 

(Eric Hobsbawm quotes from his book "Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism" (2007, pages 50-55, 70-71 (Why American Hegemony Differs from Britain´s Empire)  and 81 (On the End of Empires) "