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Arab democracies?
"It reminds me of 1848 - another self-propelled revolution which started in one country then spread all over the continent in a short time." For those who once crowded Tahrir Square and are now worried about the fate of their revolution, he has a word of comfort. "Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn't failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success - though no longer in the form of a revolution." However, with the possible exception of Tunisia, he sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative government in the Arab world. Not enough notice has been taken, he says, of the differences between Arab countries in the throes of mass protests. "We are in the middle of a revolution - but it isn't the same revolution." "What unites them is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests." The importance of social media extends to the other global movement of the past year, the Occupy protests North America and Europe. That too has caught Eric Hobsbawm's attention, and to a large extent his admiration. The movement dates back, he argues, to Barack Obama's election campaign, which successfully mobilised otherwise politically inactive young people, largely through the internet. "The actual occupations in most cases have not been mass protests, not the 99%, but the famous 'stage army' of students and counter culture. Sometimes that has found an echo in public opinion - and in the anti-Wall Street, anticapitalist occupations, that is clearly the case." Yet across the world, the old left of which Hobsbawm was a part - as participant, chronicler and would-be moderniser - has been on the margins of the mass protests and occupations.
"The traditional left was geared to a kind of society that is no longer in existence or is going out of business. It believed very largely in the mass labour movement as the carrier of the future. Well, we've been de-industrialised, so that's no longer possible. "The most effective mass mobilisations today are those which start from a new modernised middle class, and particularly the enormously swollen body of students. "They are more effective in countries in which, demographically, young men and women are a far greater part of the population than they are in Europe."
Wider push
Eric Hobsbawm doesn't expect the Arab revolutions to ricochet still further round the world, at least not as the harbinger of wider revolution. More likely, he believes, is a wider push for gradual reform of the sort which, in the 1980s, saw a movement of the young and middle class in South Korea wrest power from the military. Of the political dramas still playing out in Arabic speaking nations, he makes a point of harking back to Iran in 1979, the first revolution to be couched in the political language of Islam. One aspect of that revolution has found an echo in the Arab world in recent months. "The people who had made concessions to Islam, but were not Islamists themselves, were marginalised. And that included reformers, liberals, communists. "What emerges as the mass ideology is not the ideology of those that started off the demonstrations." While the Arab Spring has brought him joy, this aspect of it he regards as an "unexpected and not necessarily welcome" development.