Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [209]
21
Third World
I
In 1962 I persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to give me a travel grant to South America, in order to enquire into the subject-matter of my recent book, Primitive Rebels, in a continent where it could be expected to play a more prominent part in contemporary history than in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Those were the days when foundations still sent their air travellers by first class, by airlines whose names record a vanished past – Panamerican, Panair do Brasil, Panagra, TWA, though, except for Peru, the old national flag carriers still seem to survive. For about three months in 1962–3 I made the circuit of South America – Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia – in this luxurious style, implausible for an enquirer into peasant rebellion. It was the first of numerous visits to continental Latin America in subsequent years, both to Mexico and to various parts of South America, indeed to all countries in that continent bar the Guyanas and Venezuela. Probably the longest unbroken period I have ever spent outside the United Kingdom since 1933 is the half-year or so I spent with my family teaching, researching and writing from Mexico to Peru in 1971. It is a continent on which I have many friends and pupils, with which I have been associated for forty years, and which, I do not quite know why, has been remarkably good to me. It is the only part of the world where I have found myself not surprised to meet presidents, past, present and future. Indeed, the first one I met in office, the canny Víctor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia, showed me the lamp-post on the square outside his balcony in La Paz from which his predecessor Gualberto Villaroel had been hanged by a rioting crowd of Indians in 1946.
After the triumph of Fidel Castro, and even more after the defeat of the US attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. Though this also drew me there, my chief reason was practical, namely linguistic. Historians who deal with the activities of ordinary people must be able to communicate with them by mouth, and Latin America was the only part of what was known as the Third World where large numbers of them spoke languages within my reach. For I was not concerned simply with a geographical region, but with a much larger unknown, that is to say the 80 per cent of men, women and children who live outside the zone inhabited until the last third of the twentieth century primarily by people with (notionally) white skin.
For the first half of my life these 80 per cent knew nothing of the world and, give or take a few thousand individuals, the world knew practically nothing about them. Nothing is more impressive to someone of my age than the extraordinary discovery, since 1970, of the First World by the peoples of the Third World or – since these terms themselves belong to the era of the Cold War – of the possibility that poor people from anywhere can change their lives for the better by moving to the rich countries. Of course, with the rarest exceptions, such as the USA since the 1960s, we do not want them to come, even when we need them. A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit-making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. We have come to be so familiar with the century’s inhumanity that we no longer distinguish between refugees and the Afghan and Kurd emigrants transported in coffin-ships by emigration contractors, like the Italians and Russian Jews of the 1880s, who had just discovered that they did not have to live and die in the paesi and shtetls of their birth.
For the first forty years of my life it was simply not so. Language – not the ‘national’ languages but what illiterates really spoke, the dense localized dialects