According to Noam Chomsky, modern nation states have left behind a trail of violence since their foundation, which ultimately led to the two world wars. By imposing nation-state structures on the colonies, the European powers set in motion a seemingly endless chain of wars and conflicts. This also applies to the USA, which, according to Chomsky, "is one of the few countries in the world that has probably never had peace for a single year." The founding of the USA was based on a long war of extermination against the indigenous population. Added to this is the almost thousand-year war that the Global North has waged against the predominantly Muslim South. In order to counter current global threats such as climate change, pandemics and war, nation-state structures need to be overcome in favor of comprehensive internationalism. Despite all its shortcomings, the EU is a step in the right direction to make borders more permeable. However, internationalism is repeatedly torpedoed by the USA in particular, whether through the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran, the patenting of vaccines or the undermining of climate agreements.
Noam Chomsky, linguist and author of more than 100 books, University of Arizona
Fabian Scheidler, co-founder of Kontext TV, author of "The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization"
Moderated by Nermeen Shaikh, co-host of Democracynow
Nermeen Shaikh: Professor Chomsky your response to what Fabian said. And in particular the whole question of the effects of the foundation of the state.
Noam Chomsky: Well it is contested but I think there's reasonably good evidence of the kind that's been accumulated by anthropologists like Brian Ferguson, Douglas Fry, Stephen Corry and others that the several hundred thousands of years of human existence prior to the agricultural revolution and the formation of the first city-states and later was not a particularly violent period. In fact we can see this from contemporary evidence about groups that still live under these circumstances. There are conflicts but not the kind of organized violence, class structure and so on that took place with the coming of the nation state. I can't run through the long history of the last thousand years or so, but just take a look at our immediate past. The most violent areas of the world were Europe. European states were being formed in that period. Remember that Italy and Germany are pretty recent state formations, they were being formed in the 18th, 19th century, while Britain and France were struggling over who dominates what areas. The state system as it emerged through the last couple hundred years was extremely violent. It finally led to two horrendous wars, the first and second world war. A large part of them was determining where the state system should exist within Europe. In fact the main reason why we haven't seen any major wars among powerful states is that they reached the point where the next time they would have a war they'd all be destroyed. There's no way to have a war among major states any longer, or everything's over. So Europe moved towards the beginning of the erosion of this nation-state system. Centuries and centuries of trying to create it, since 1945 it's been slowly eroded. It's a difficult process, a lot of fragmentation and reaction, but the European Union – with all of its major flaws – is some kind of a step towards eroding the boundaries of the major states. The Schengen agreement, which is one of the positive sides of the European Union, enables you to travel from Spain to Eastern Europe without crossing any borders. In that sense it's rather like the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was horrible in many ways, but it was a loose structure in which local regions could take care of themselves. So if you were in the Greek community in Beirut you ran your own affairs. You could travel from Cairo to Baghdad to Constantinople, Istanbul, without crossing any borders. The imperial states, mostly Britain and France, moved in and imposed state structures with no concern for the interests of the populations, they have nothing to do with them. The same happened all over Africa. That's why you see straight lines on the map, the state borders. The imperial powers imposed state structures in their own interests with no concern for the fluid overlapping complex relations within those societies. So of course it always leads to violence and brutality, that's almost natural. Today, we have to face the fact that we have to move towards an erosion of this system, also, as Fabian said, an erosion of the structures of authority and domination that exist within it, towards a more fluid structure of the international social order which will break down structures of authority and domination and also erode borders. Every crisis we are facing now, and there are major crises, is international, they don't have borders. The pandemic doesn't stop at a border, global warming doesn't stop at a border, the nuclear war will destroy all of us. The erosion of democracy over the world is infectious, it happens in one place, it affects others. There have been thousands of years, in the Western world a couple of hundred years, of establishing state structures which had their benefits, but they've had many horrible consequences. I should add that the same is true in the United States. There's a lot of talk in the United States now about endless wars. We have to get out of these endless wars like Afghanistan. The United States has been in an endless war since 1783. It's one of the rare countries in the world that probably hasn't had a year of peace. One of the major reasons for what's called the American revolution was the Royal Proclamation of King George III in 1763, which barred the colonists from moving beyond the Eastern mountain range, the Appalachian mountains. They were not permitted to move into what was called Indian territory, the territory of the numerous Indian nations. They were barred by the British for their own not pretty reasons, but that's another story, it was a question of who would monopolize trading rights and things like that. But the colonists weren't accepting that. They wanted to carry out an aggressive war against the Indian nations and expand their own territory and control. Now that was also true of great land speculators like George Washington who wanted to move to the West for speculation and profit. As soon as the British were gone, the war started against the Indian nations. An ugly horrifying history of extermination, expulsion, treaty violation, the conquest of half of Mexico in a war of aggression. Finally it reached what's called the national territory. But that was a century ago. Then come many other wars. So this is somewhat similar to the imposition of the state system in Europe during the same period. These are not ancient constructions, they're being constructed in recent years. As for the second world war, it was to a significant extent about who's going to control XXX. Russia, the French and the growing Prussian empire have been fighting about that for years. There's also been a thousand-year war of the Northern powers, that includes Russia, against the mostly Muslim South, which has had horrifying effects all over the world, including the imposition of state systems and all of the internal repression, internal structural violence, which Fabian was talking about, that goes with it. So yes, I think that picture is basically right, it's not ancient history, it's not just the city-states of Mesopotamia, it's going on, like in my own lifetime for example, still going on, so it's right in front of us. We have major problems in trying to overcome all of these structures of violence and exclusion.
We're seeing it right now in a very dramatic way with regard to the preparation of vaccines and the distribution of vaccines. It's a major humanitarian crisis right on the agenda right now. Sooner or later some vaccines will be available, we don't know which right now, China seems to be in the lead, others may be coming along. They should be available to everyone like the polio vaccine. When Jonas Salk finally managed to create the first polio vaccine it wasn't patented. They said this is part of the world environment like the air we breathe. Everyone has access to it, freely. That's the way a covid-19 vaccine should be, but it's not what's happening. The major drug corporations are trying to monopolize it in the neoliberal framework. They are given basically monopoly pricing rights, radically opposed to free trade and what's called free trade agreements. So if one corporation manages to get a vaccine they're supposed to own it and make the profit from it, huge profits, because of the ridiculous patent rights, granted monopoly pricing rights, granted in the trade agreements. There is an international organization, COVAX, trying to bring together countries of the world to cooperate in developing a vaccine and to work out the crucial distributional properties to make sure that the vaccine goes to those who need it, like poor people in Africa, not to those who can pay for it like the rich countries who can monopolize it for themselves. Well it's a kind of an uneven effort, partially working, partially not. It just got a hammer blow a couple of weeks ago. Trump announced the US is pulling out of it, breaking down the small steps towards internationalism which are required to deal with the crisis. The same with pulling out of the Paris negotiations. The same with trying to destroy the World Health Organization. The same with what secretary of state Pompeo did two days ago. The United States broke down and destroyed the agreement with Iran in opposition to the whole world, greatly increasing tensions in that region. There have been UN sanctions, the United States wants them to be reinstituted. It did bring it to the Security Council: no support, one country, Colombia, said okay, the rest said no. A couple of days ago, Mike Pompeo got up and said the sanctions are reinstituted because we say so. And if the Security Council is against it, too bad for them. We're the godfather, we run the world, and we smash anybody in the faces in our way. That's the ludicrous extreme opposite of the internationalism that's necessary. It's imposing state violence to an extent that no country in history has ever attempted it. The Nazis wanted to control Eurasia, not the whole world. That's the kind of thing we're actually facing. And we've got to deal with it very quickly or we're all going to be finished.
