Nation-state structures are disintegrating in many parts of the world. According to Noam Chomsky, the USA could be on the brink of a possible civil war - a scenario that almost came true with the storming of the Capitol in January 2021. High-ranking military officials are already planning war games for this eventuality. At the same time, the EU is disintegrating due to the "neoliberal plague" and its internal weaknesses, in particular the anti-democratic construction of the "Troika", which has imposed crushing austerity programs on the populations, leading to anger, resentment and the rise of right-wing demagogues. A "reactionary international" is forming, including Donald Trump, Bolsonaro's Brazil, Eastern European leaders such as Orban, the Gulf dictatorships, right-wing Israel and Modi's India. In contrast, a progressive international is fighting for a different world after the pandemic.
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, you've said – and Fabian's book of course does the same – that the nation-state system has perpetrated violence on a virtually unprecedented scale. You mentioned the European union as a means of – at least in some sense – transcending the limits imposed by nation states. Now is it your sense that that model itself is, rather than being universalized, is itself crumbling within the EU, with Brexit but not only with Brexit? Do you see the nation state – apart from the US where there's no evidence at all that this might happen – but elsewhere that the state could become less powerful?
Noam Chomsky: Well, I should say that the United States is facing a possible situation of breakdown that goes beyond the European Union. The United States is facing possible civil war. It's not a fringe idea. Just a couple of days ago, two highly regarded senior military commanders, general John Nagl and another lieutenant colonel wrote a remarkable open letter to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the top military officer in the United States, General Milley. These are incidentally not fringe characters, they are right at the center of the top military establishment, highly regarded. They reviewed for him his constitutional duties in case President Trump refuses to leave office if he loses the election. [Noam Chomsky’s dog barks. Chomsky comments: “Somebody else wants to get into the act.” Laughter.] Trump could surround himself by paramilitary forces of the kind that he sent to terrorize Portland recently. Notice he didn't send the military which probably wouldn't have followed his orders. He sent paramilitaries like the border tactical units of the border guards who terrorized people in the desert right south of where I live in Tucson. Suppose he surrounds himself with them or militias. This letter from Nagl said it is your duty, General Milley, to send in military forces, maybe the 82nd airborne division, to force them out of office. It's never happened in the history of parliamentary democracy. They are not alone, there's a transition integrity project, on a very high level, leading figures in both republican and democratic parties and other respected analysts and so on, all right from the mainstream. They've been actually running war games, war games to see what might happen after the election. And they just released their findings, they said in any scenario other than a Trump victory, the scenarios lead to civil war because we have a megalomaniac sociopath sitting in the White House. It's not like, say, Richard Nixon, not the most lovely person in presidential history, but a human being. In 1960, he probably won the election, the election went to Kennedy through machinations by the Democratic Party operatives in Chicago and elsewhere. Nixon didn't challenge it, he placed the welfare of the country above his personal ambitions. So he let it go by, though he probably won. The same thing happened 20 years later with Al Gore when the election was pretty obviously stolen for Bush. Al Gore said, well I’m not going to destroy the country. Today it's different, we don't have a human being in power, resemblance to a human being but quite different, and the country's different. So what's happening in Europe where there is fragmentation – I'll come back to that in a moment – is happening in even worse ways here and it's very imminent.
Let's go back to Europe. Yes, the European Union is fraying and there are reasons for it. We should look into the reasons. There are basically two. One is that the way the European Union was designed, largely under German influence, German banks and so on. The economic system is dissociated from the political structure. The economic system is basically run by an unelected Troika, bureaucrats in Brussels: the European Council is unelected, the European commission unelected, the IMF of course unelected, the European Central Bank unelected. They make the basic decisions. The decisions are not in the hands of the people of the countries. Well that's a recipe for disaster. And it was made worse by the plague that has hit much of the world in the past 40 years, the neoliberal plague. Its major principle is that decisions have to be taken out of the hands of government. Government has a flaw, it's partially influenced by populations. So therefore decisions have to move to totally unaccountable institutions, private power completely unaccountable to the public. And the principle that it follows is pure self-enrichment. The major principle was announced to the world by the leading economic guru of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, at the same time that Reagan said government is the problem, Thatcher said there's no society, so we have to transfer decisions into the hands of unaccountable private power which is directed in principle solely to self-enrichment. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going to come from that. And it's happened. The result all over the world is anger, resentment, bitterness, all justified – a fertile territory for demagogues to come along: Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, others like them, saying “I’m your savior”. With one hand I stab you in the back, with the other hand I say I’m going to save you from what's happening. So yes, that's a very dangerous situation. I think these are the main reasons. What lies behind Brexit, the deindustrialization of England by both political parties. The Labour Party gave up on the working class, just the way the Democrats did here. Anger, bitterness, let's find some way out of this. But the way they are finding out of it happens to be suicidal. They'll turn themselves into even more of a vassal of the United States than they already are. But you can understand the decision. Somebody is responsible for this, I’m not responsible, so let's get out of it and start over. We're seeing similar things in Europe, understandably, and we have to recognize the plagues. One of it is the neoliberal plague, the other in Europe is the specific structure of the European Union which is deeply anti-democratic and has left people victims to the austerity policies – which, however, haven't had the same harsh effect in continental Europe that they've had in the United States because there's more of a social democratic structure remaining which somewhat protects people. But it has eroded.
Now there are responses to this. Just last weekend, there was a major response: the opening meeting of the Progressive International in Iceland, an international effort based on the Sanders movement in the United States, a progressive mass movement, and its European counterpart Diem25, Yannis Varoufakis’ initiative which is a transnational European movement seeking to preserve what makes sense in the European Union and to dismantle and overcome its very serious flaws. Lots of voices from the Global South. The first international conference, a possible way to save us from these disasters. There's a real kind of international class war going on, a major class war. There's ALSO an effort to construct a reactionary international, based in the White House. That's what the agreements between Israel and the Arab dictatorships are about: forging a component of the reactionary international in the Middle East, with the most reactionary states, gulf dictatorships, family dictatorships, the Egyptian dictatorship, Israel which moved very far to the right, bringing out tacit relations and turning them into formalized ones under the aegis of the United States. The reactionary international will include Modi's destroying secular democracy in India and turning it into a right-wing Hindu nationalist ethnocracy, crushing Kashmir, plus Orban and Hungary. This is what's happening. There is a reactionary international run by the White House where Mike Pompeo can just tell the world I don't care what you want, we're putting through your UN sanctions, you shut up. That's one international. The other is the progressive international. The first is trying to reconstruct the neoliberal system that caused these crises in a harsher and more autocratic form: more surveillance, more control, more centralized power, centralized economic power under the control of the White House. The progressive international is based on popular forces mobilizing all over the world. And there is a struggle as to what the post-pandemic world will look like. And those are two of the major forces, not the whole world. There's also China and its region and others, but those are two major forces. They all have to do with the kinds of things Fabian was talking about: the nature of the nation-state, the violence it brings with it, the chances to overcome it, the internal structural violence having to do with safeguarding the property relations of the very rich and imposing stagnation or decline on others. We should recognize how deeply rooted this is in what had been in the past the most democratic states. Take the constitution of the United States. In the 18th century it was a fairly progressive document, not today, today it's radically regressive, but then it was progressive. But remember what it was founded on. James Madison, the main framer, made it very clear to the Constitutional Convention that a prime responsibility of government – I’m quoting him – is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, protect the property rights of the opulent against the majority. The major scholarly work on the Constitutional Convention, that means the formation of the constitution, Michael Klarman – the gold standard of scholarship – is called The Framers Coup, the coup that the rich, wealthy, mostly slave-owning framers carried out against the population who wanted more democracy. The framers wanted less democracy and constructed the constitution to prevent it, because you have to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. Now that's the most democratic move of the 18th century. There's been history since, up and back, but we should bear in mind where we're coming from.
