Joe
Hobsbawm argued that nations emerged only recently with modernism and, writing in 1989, that globalism fated them to imminent obsolescence. History has not looked kindly upon this thesis, and he offered some begrudging caveats in a 1992 edition. Contrasting historians like Smith (1986) have correctly foreseen nationalism's persistence and proliferation because few other non-religious constructs meet human needs for identity, continuity, and collective immortality that an ethno-national myth provides.
Hobsbawm argued that nations emerged only recently with modernism and, writing in 1989, that globalism fated them to imminent obsolescence. History has not looked kindly upon this thesis, and he offered some begrudging caveats in a 1992 edition. Contrasting historians like Smith (1986) have correctly foreseen nationalism's persistence and proliferation because few other non-religious constructs meet human needs for identity, continuity, and collective immortality that an ethno-national myth provides.