The Age of Extremes - End of Imperialism

End of Imperialism

Hobsbawm has very mixed feelings about the end of the nineteenth-century imperial order, largely because he is no happier with the nation-states that replaced the empires. "... had made the habitual and sensible process of international negotiation suspect as 'secret diplomacy'. This was largely a reaction against the secret treaties arranged among the Allies during the war... The Bolsheviks, discovering these sensitive documents in the Tsarist archives, had promptly published them for the world to read."

"The botched peace settlements after 1918 multiplied what we, at the end of the twentieth century, know to be the fatal virus of democracy, namely the division of the body of citizens exclusively along ethnic-national or religious lines." "The reductio ad absurdum of... anti-colonialist logic was the attempt by an extremist Jewish fringe group in Palestine to negotiate with the Germans (via Damascus, then under the Vichy French) for help in liberating Palestine from the British, which they regarded as the top priority for Zionism. (A militant of the group involved in this mission eventually became prime minister of Israel: Yitzhak Shamir.)"