A 2003 interview with Eric Hobsbawm illuminates his views on Tito's Yugoslavia and the future of multiculturalism
ANDREW BROWN'S BLOG
In 2003 I made a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme on ethnic cleansing, inspired, in part, by a profile I had written for this paper of Benny Morris, who believes in it. Half way through the research, I was at the annual Guardian features party, and there, sitting alone in a corner amid the drums and bass, was Eric Hobsbawm. I went over and we shouted at each other until we had agreed an interview about nationalities and how they can live together. Some of it was used in the programme, but there are still some interesting fragments in the transcript. Here is one:
AB: You say that [ethnic cleansing] shouldn't be accepted, but can we hope to roll it back? To take a practical example – when you look at Kosovo, is there any way in which a fractured, formerly multi-ethnic society can be put back together?
EH: Well it was done. It was done in Yugoslavia under Tito, so the fact is it can be done. If you start splitting societies, that is the safest recipe for ethnic cleansing - whether it's multi-national societies or multi-national empires, that's what happens - so my answer would be avoid splitting societies.
AB: [But] I don't see that the United Nations could ever use Tito's methods. Or should actually.
EH: What was Tito's method in this respect?
AB: Well I mean he ran a full on Stalinist dictatorship which did indeed suppress an awful lot of inter-ethnic bad feeling, but at a price which I don't think that the United Nations could possibly pay.
EH: I think you make a mistake there. You see Tito believed in fact in Yugoslavia as a mixture or a federation of equal nations. The only really bad feeling he created was against the Serbs, who had been used to being rather predominant. And when Tito fell, in fact it was very largely the Serbs and the Croats who broke the thing up. There's much you can say against Tito indeed, but not that he oppressed nations …
AB: No, I said that he oppressed impartially without regard to nationality, but I think he oppressed on a scale which the United Nations could not do.
EH: The United Nations can't do anything anyway because United Nations depends on the force which is given to it by the Security Council. So the United Nations isn't in the business. Who else can do it? I mean at the moment the Americans are in a position to do something about it. They might start in the Middle East with the Israel-Palestine business. They're trying in fact to get people to live together in Iraq at the moment and I suppose there is a reasonable chance of success there, I would have thought.
Well, he was wrong about Iraq, of course, but I don't think that anyone then could have foreseen or imagined the incompetence with which the Americans there assumed their colonial role. And his general point about the future of multiculturalism is encouraging and realistic.
It seems to me that in a way the ideal wouldn't be that people live together and love each other and everybody in all the schools sings, you know, Indian songs with as much enthusiasm as English; the ideal is that people should live with each other and co-exist and know that they have to go on co-existing in spite of the frictions which are necessary to human life.
That's not a bad ideal to aim at, and, unlike the rest of this post, it might have something to teach us about the role of religions. One of the great roots of intolerance is the belief that frictions could and should be abolished.
EH: Well it was done. It was done in Yugoslavia under Tito, so the fact is it can be done. If you start splitting societies, that is the safest recipe for ethnic cleansing - whether it's multi-national societies or multi-national empires, that's what happens - so my answer would be avoid splitting societies.
AB: [But] I don't see that the United Nations could ever use Tito's methods. Or should actually.
EH: What was Tito's method in this respect?
AB: Well I mean he ran a full on Stalinist dictatorship which did indeed suppress an awful lot of inter-ethnic bad feeling, but at a price which I don't think that the United Nations could possibly pay.
EH: I think you make a mistake there. You see Tito believed in fact in Yugoslavia as a mixture or a federation of equal nations. The only really bad feeling he created was against the Serbs, who had been used to being rather predominant. And when Tito fell, in fact it was very largely the Serbs and the Croats who broke the thing up. There's much you can say against Tito indeed, but not that he oppressed nations …
AB: No, I said that he oppressed impartially without regard to nationality, but I think he oppressed on a scale which the United Nations could not do.
EH: The United Nations can't do anything anyway because United Nations depends on the force which is given to it by the Security Council. So the United Nations isn't in the business. Who else can do it? I mean at the moment the Americans are in a position to do something about it. They might start in the Middle East with the Israel-Palestine business. They're trying in fact to get people to live together in Iraq at the moment and I suppose there is a reasonable chance of success there, I would have thought.
Well, he was wrong about Iraq, of course, but I don't think that anyone then could have foreseen or imagined the incompetence with which the Americans there assumed their colonial role. And his general point about the future of multiculturalism is encouraging and realistic.
It seems to me that in a way the ideal wouldn't be that people live together and love each other and everybody in all the schools sings, you know, Indian songs with as much enthusiasm as English; the ideal is that people should live with each other and co-exist and know that they have to go on co-existing in spite of the frictions which are necessary to human life.
That's not a bad ideal to aim at, and, unlike the rest of this post, it might have something to teach us about the role of religions. One of the great roots of intolerance is the belief that frictions could and should be abolished.
guardian.co.uk
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