The nation state is a crumbling institution, according to Britain’s most illustrious historian, and he believes that football shows why.

Professor Eric Hobsbawm told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival yesterday that football was a “textbook illustration of the internal contradictions of globalisation in the period of the nation state”.

A section of his latest book Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism is devoted to the argument but “this has not been picked up by the critics except, you will not be surprised to hear, the Brazilian ones”.

Professor Hobsbawm remains, at 90, both revered and reviled for the lifelong commitment to Marxism that underpinned his classic histories of the past two centuries: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes.

However, he is also interested in football, and is intrigued by the way that the game has mutated into a global business dominated by the

“imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises” such as Manchester United and Real Madrid.

“Neither the local nor the national identification is what defines the economy of football today,” he said.

“What defines it is that since globalisation it’s been possible for a consortium of wealthy clubs in a particular set of Western European countries to build themselves up as global brands which have relatively little contact with their original local roots and hire people from all over the world.

“They make money by selling goods, such as T-shirts, by television and to a diminishing extent by people watching [live] football.”

Logically these clubs would prefer to limit the game to a super-league of teams playing together irrespective of national leagues and local loyalties, were it not for one thing: football’s marketability is rooted in nationalism.

“You see it whenever there’s a World Cup. What keeps the whole system going is the fact that football is something noneconomic for a large number of people who use it to identify themselves and their country.”

As he once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real in the form of 11 named people.”

For many Cameroonians, for example, the first time that they had a sense of themselves as members of an independent nation state was when their team played at the World Cup, Professor Hobsbawm said.

“This is a type of internal contradiction. There was a nice interview with Arsene Wenger [the manager of Arsenal] the other day which sketches it out very well. He said: ‘I’m not interested in national teams but I know we have got to have them because that’s what keeps the money coming in’.”

The consequences of this tension between globalised commerce and national and local loyalties are legion, according to Professor Hobsbawm. They include a weakening of the traditionally strong but economically poor national teams such as Brazil, which now export most of their players to Europe, and the rise of racism in counties such as Holland and Spain, where fans find themselves torn between pride in their clubs and prejudice against players from nations long thought of as inferior who are becoming increasingly prominent in their stadiums. Like their international football teams, Professor Hobsbawm suggests, nation states are finding that their strength is being eroded by the emergence of transnational interests. He questions whether any modern democracies would be able to field vast conscript armies as they did routinely in the 20th century.

“The process which turned peasants into Frenchmen and immigrants into American citizens is reversing.” However, he concluded: “The nation state is crumbling but we can’t do without it. The world is, in some sense, not fully globalisable. Just as clubs and world football must coexist, so globalisation must coexist with the national interests which still have enough leverage to establish themselves.”

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