Eric Hobsbawm explains the 'reinvention' of history

In an interview conducted by Eric Aeschimann, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm considers that "decolonisation brought on the creation of new states that are either deprived of a history or have a history that they don't want to accept. More recently, the end of the cold war provoked a sort of thawing of the history that had been put on ice at the end of the Second World War. Revisions of history are being imposed or trying to be imposed all over the place. All this has opened an extraordinary space for the reinvention of History, which is largely mythical because these stories are not written by historians, but by governments, movements, organisations, pressure groups. ... A nation only exists in relation to its past. ... This being so, it is not surprising that an ethnical group or allegedly ethnic group trying to establish its identity should start to reinvent its history. "

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