The Late Twentieth Century

...Despite the Cold War, however, the Age of Crisis was over: For both the capitalist and Communist worlds, the 1950s and '60s were, to use Hobsbawm's term, a Golden Age...

...Labor unions agreed to wage increases that, as subsequent experience showed, were lower than those a strike might have won them...

...The resulting international economy defeated attempts at control by individual states...

...This permitted many a business to move work from high- to low-wage nations, and some of them began, in turn, to industrialize on their own...

...That party, however, survived under another name (the Communist Political Association) and reached the height of its influence at precisely this time...

...official economic policies of both Right and Left "no longer worked...

...It also created a body of men, like Adolf Hitler, who regarded the fighting as the formative experience of their lives, as well as the idea of a nation permanently mobilized on the military model...

...In the East, the crisis was still more acute...

...At the end of World War II, he maintains, the Soviets thought "postwar politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-Fascist alliance" and did not plan to create a bloc of purely Communist client states—as shown, in his view, by the dissolution of the U.S...

...Although (as Hobsbawm admits) the logic of the Russian Revolution of 1917 went awry when it failed to inspire a pan-European uprising, the USSR appeared to be immune from the Depression, and Hitler's Germany coped with it much more successfully than the democracies did...

...In the West big business, having learned the lessons of the Depression, accepted organized labor as a negotiating partner and the creation of relatively generous welfare states...

...had ever known...

...Hobsbawm does not deny that the United States is much freer and more dynamic than the USSR ever was, and he could hardly be more critical of Soviet domestic society...

...For the end of the Soviet Union has created a vast zone of violence and social decay from Istria to Vladivostok?the womb in which the 21st century is struggling to be born...

...They managed to survive, the author argues, because in World War II the Soviet Union saved them from Nazism, the common foe of all regimes that claim the heritage of the Enlightenment...

...he even found merit in "some of the ruthless shocks" she inflicted on the country...

...Yet during the Age of Catastrophe, 1914-45—the first of the three phases into which Hobsbawm divides our century?the dictatorships prospered, and it was far from clear that liberal capitalism would even survive...

...Thanks to a wholly fortuitous rise in the price of oil, and the fact that the USSR was a major exporter, Leonid I. Brezhnev nonetheless managed to raise the standard of living significantly and, at the same time, to pursue "the suicidal course of trying to match American arms superiority...

...THE BEGINNING OF THE END, thinks Hobsbawm, came in the late 1960s when student unrest set off a working-class strike wave that undermined the nonconfrontational negotiating pattern of the two preceding decades and raised wage rates quite suddenly...

...Middle-class reformism was the only alternative to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he contended...

...Nobody had the slightest idea of how, in practice, the transition from a centralized state command economy to the new system was to be made...

...Finally, the investment in modern manufacturing methods that had raised productivity tended in the long run to obviate the need for unskilled labor...

...The Socialist market economy, Gorbachev's supposed alternative to capitalism and Communism, "was little more than a phrase...

...Hobsbawm argues plausibly that the events of 1989-91 marked the close of a century defined by the rise and fall of Communism...

...they were persecuted, and their parties were turned into fronts...

...and Soviet behavior are simply false...

...The consequences of the crumbling of the Communist bloc, Hobsbawn suggests, are "still not fully calculable, but mainly negative...

...By the 1980s the proletariat, confounding Marx' predictions, appeared to be historically doomed as work migrated to the Third World or was automated out of existence...

...the author, of course, is even today a member, albeit a highly unorthodox one, of whatever the British Communist Party is now calling itself...

...As the author observes, "it was increasingly evident that something was seriously wrong with all Socialist systems...

...All historians agree that as a cultural (rather than calendrical) unit the century began with the outbreak of World War 1.1 myself can't recall having read or heard any earlier speculation about when, in the historical sense, it might end...

...He claims, for example, that when in 1947-48 Communists were removed from the coalitions that governed Western Europe after the War, "The USSR followed suit by eliminating the non-Communists from their multiparty 'people's democracies.'" In fact, Stalin did not merely eliminate non-Communists from those regimes...

...Besides, he says rightly, average Soviet citizens were "at ease in the system" Gorbachev was trying to change, and for most of them "the Brezhnev era spelled not 'stagnation' but the best times they...

...It "had plainly lost the justification that had sustained...

...In any case, what is the importance of a specific plan as opposed to a systematic willingness to exploit whatever opportunities presented themselves...

...Institutions based upon this social stratum—labor unions, and both Socialist and Communist parties—were vulnerable not because poor people or people engaged in low-paying jobs had disappeared, but because they now constituted the kind of lumpenproletari-at that veered to the Right where it had any political inclinations at all...

...They knew very little else...

...At this point, the advanced countries and every developing area except Hong Kong established mixed economies that were "backed, supervised, steered, and sometimes planned and managed by governments...

...Those years derive their unity from the legacy of World War I. For the Great War largely destroyed the empires that had made Europe stable for a hundred years, with consequences that are still visible in Bosnia...

...Several East European countries had begun their attempts at renovation much earlier, and they were in a similar predicament...

...Meanwhile, competition among nations had intensified beyond all previous measure...

...The Age of Extremes—a very interesting book, though a very flawed one—is not a standard survey...

...Then Gorbachev's failure showed that the disintegration could not be reversed...

...At first the crisis seemed to be confined to the West, especially the United States...

...But its real victims, in West and East alike, were to be traditional Socialism and the classic industrial working class...

...It is a collection of essays on special topics, held together by the proposition that the 1914-91 era "forms a coherent historical period that has now ended...

...The Golden Age was followed in the 1970s and '80s by the Age of Crisis, concluding with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's fall...

...This conception, in both its Leninist and Hitlerian manifestations, dominated the epoch and led the way to disaster...

...But on all foreign policy questions he is an ultrarevisionist...

...Moreover, the Communist parties of France and Italy remained completely legal mass organizations...

...These halcyon years, writes Hobsbawm, marked a fundamental moment of change: "the end of the seven or eight millennia ...when the overwhelming majority of the human race lived by growing food and herding animals...

...Before 1945 the "international economy" meant only the export of goods from one country to another...

...Instead of a modern economy based on information management, the Soviet Union was building a 19th-century economy revolving around steel, electricity and internal combustion, and after 1970 even this slowed down...

...High profits were reinvested in mass production techniques, once peculiarly American, that penetrated the whole world and permitted a dramatic increase in the global standard of living...

...Communist cadres in the past, namely that socialism was superior to capitalism and destined to replace it...

...Some of the author's attempts to demonstrate similarities between U.S...

...By the '60s, what Hobsbawm calls the "decisive innovation of the Golden Age"—corporate behemoths producing goods in so many parts of the globe that national borders were "merely complicating factors"—had come into existence...

...Communism "had proved to be unreformable even where serious and intelligent attempts at reform had been made...

...The subject simply did not come up, perhaps because until recently the World War II dispensation appeared to be so remarkably enduring...

...Whether these policies succeeded fantastically (as in Korea), moderately (as in Mexico), or not at all (as in Ghana) "depended on local conditions and human errors," not economic theory, or rather theology...

...With its collapse in 1989, and the collapse two years later of the Soviet Union, the question is finally on the table...

...Indeed, in the Communist bloc, national economies also grew impressively—perhaps by rates that briefly outstripped those of the West...

...In 1989, when they fell, no one defended them...

...Flush with oil money, "the regime had stopped trying to do anything serious" about its visibly declining industrial base...

...Communist Party in 1944...

...It was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan who told British voters (in 1959), "You've never had it so good," but a lot of national leaders might have made similar claims...

...The only thing that made the Soviet system work, and could conceivably transform it," says Hobsbawm, "was the command structure of the Party/State," but glasnost undercut its authority...

...The situation prompted Hobsbawn to become a critic of the British Labor Party's left wing...

...And that little was not encouraging...

...As the citizens of the fin de siecle tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them into the third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended...