Noam Chomsky on Scottish Independence

well I think national capital isn't gonna like it and there may be some harsh reactions but it may be a another step towards the gradual fragmentation of the nation-state system in Europe so other things are happening elsewhere like Catalonia may have a referendum so far it's not clear whether the government will permit it certainly the population wants it and it would be a referendum for greater degree of autonomy as something silver might happen to the Basque Country there were other part part of the reaction to the centralization of the European Union has been a rise of regionalism and local cultures local languages moves towards a local autonomy these are kind of conflicting processes European Union policies have now been very heavily centralized so much so that the national governments of virtually abandoned independent socio economic policies adding over the brussels bureaucrats so this is a natural reaction to it UK is a little different because they were never totally absorbed into the European Union so they themselves have kept separate but now these are for the development it wouldn't surprise me terribly if something similar happened in Wales you the UK has been in kind of a funny construct for a long time I'm just what Britain is is highly contested is it England is it collections at a federal collection even the so-called English Constitution is of course not written Constitution is very ambiguous about that and a lot of debate about it but I think it's I mean the nation-state altogether is a pretty artificial construct in nation states were established almost entirely by violence and they bring together and they force into a single mould the people who often have little to do with one another they speak different languages they have their own cultures they've different traditions different religions you know and the effort to mold them into a single entity with a role subjected to the same fixed national culture and social commitments service to state power and so on that's been pretty hard even the effort to establish borders has been a very very violent process Europe was the most savage place in the world for centuries while the nation-state system was being imposed finally Europe is now free from internal wars there's a lot of debate about the reason and the the political science literature enough talk about the Democratic peace and so on my feeling is the reason is the basic reason is quite different Europeans did recognize had to recognize in 1945 that if they ever try to fight another war though there's wipe out everything you can't fight wars with that degree of destructive power so therefore it moves to a period of more or less peaceful integration but if you look around the world whether conflicts raging all over the place virtually all of them have to do with nation-state systems and boundaries that were imposed by the imperial powers almost everywhere I said take Iraq the British carved out Iraq in their own interests not in the interests of the people of the region and there are sharp differences among the Kurds and the Shiites Sunday and so on furthermore Britain drew the boundaries of Iraq for their own interests again they want they drew the northern boundaries so that Britain not Turkey would be able to exploit the oil resources they drew the southern boundaries so that Iraq would be almost landlocked that's why the Principality of quate was separated out and if you look around Africa is the same thing Asia you know I said take Pakistan the British drew a line called the Durand Line separating what was India from Afghanistan now separates Pakistan from Afghanistan the line cuts right through the Pashtun area and so we kind of pushed under stunt Pashtun never accepted it the Afghans never accepted it now if people cross that border we call them terrorists they may be going home you know and the same is true of just about every that take say the us-mexico border that was established by a war of aggression in which the u.s. conquered half of Mexico you take a look at the names of the cities in the southwest and western United States San Francisco San Diego's Santa Cruz I mean Spanish names people went it was a pretty open border for a long time people went up and back for work for visiting relatives and cultural reasons commercial whatever the board has been slowly militarized the sharp increase in militarization was actually in 1994 and that was connected with NAFTA the so-called free trade agreement the US officials understood perfectly well and in fact said that the effective NAFTA will likely be to drive impoverished Mexicans across the border NAFTA is going to essentially wipe out Mexican agriculture Mexican campesinos can be perfectly efficient but they cannot compete with highly subsidized the US agribusiness so they'll be driven off the land that's still happening right now people are compensating those are being driven off the land well what do they do a lot of them come the earth so you get an illegal immigration problem you have to militarize the border the things like that are going on all over the world I mean I remember it struck me very not that I didn't know it but it struck me very dramatically sixty years ago my wife and I were students we were living in Israel and we were kind of hitchhiking you know students backpacks and we were hitchhiking up in northern Israel and we were just walking one evening and a car a Jeep came along on a road behind us and the guy got out of the Jeep and started yelling at us and and Hebron told us you got to come back what had happened is we'd walked into Lebanon at that point the border was unmarked now I suppose it's bristling with you know tanks and so on but and the border was just artificially drawn right through the Galilee by the British and French for their own purposes I had nothing do with the people there and all the same is true almost everywhere and one of the reactions to all of this is the kind of coalescence of more or less coherent groups than ever totally so into regions that they where they feel more comfortable in running their own affairs and I think that's pretty much with the Scotland referendum is about you not simple I mean you can't separate yourself from the world these days maybe Bhutan can't but most states can't so Scotland if it moves towards independence in some form we don't know what form would have to figure out ways of determining how it can become enmeshed in the international treaty system that's not so simple like pick Wendy go back couple hundred years when the American colonies separated themselves from England they one of their main tasks immediately was to become what was called treaty worthy to be treated by the European that European powers were of course the dominant powers to be treated by the European powers as a nation which could enter into their system so it has become treaty worthy worthy of accepting treaties that had a double-edge at the time the colonies American liberated colonies wanted for two reasons one to be accepted by the European powers to be treated you know by the international treaties of the day the other was because the Westphalian system the you know the reigning system permitted each state to operate freely without interference in its internal affairs and for the American colonies I was extremely important because they had two major tasks one was to maintain slavery and the other was to wipe out the indigenous population and they didn't want interference with that so if they became treaty worthy they would be permitted to run their own internal affairs without European interference and that was not a small point like Britain and say at the time the major power was moving towards abolition of slavery and getting there was moving there and had also been protecting the to the Native Americans but once the United States became treaty worthy it was free from those external constraints I'm just a little bit like the current international system which police in principle says you know how to interfere with the affairs of other countries Lex a South African of South Africa during the years when it was struggling to maintain apartheid its claim was you know just not vacuous was that the UN Charter guarantees that each state can run its own affairs internally so what does the world have to say about apartheid that was their argument it was actually accepted by the legal authorities for a long time you saying I mean that's nationalism but has its positive aspect but it can be very ugly I don't have to give a historical examples we have plenty of them you well my guess will be that if there is a move towards autonomy in Scotland it'll be mild reforms nothing's going to be smashed they'll be slow evolutionary changes and the way Scotland will interact with England with European Union with the United States with international treaties and capitalists sufficiently internationalized so there's going to be plenty of links and plenty of power different won't power won't devolve to the local level if the international financial system is just too powerful for that so until that's dismantled all states are going to be and meshed in the webs that it develops I mean in the case of the European Union's extreme the windows bunk and the Brussels bureaucrats are in effect dictating policy for states that's even the Wall Street Journal had an article pointing out that no matter what government wins an election in Europe you know communists fascists whatever maybe they follow the same policies because the policies are not being determined by the countries in fact we saw that pretty dramatically when the George Papandreou hinted barely that maybe there ought to be a referendum in Greece for people to decide if they wanted to accept the EU policies and there was just a uproar furor how can you ask the people what do they have to do it this stuff is all determined by the bankers and the bureaucrats in Brussels so it's in you know without really substantial changes in the international order any small state like say independent Scotland would have to accommodate itself to that somehow you well I read Jim Coleman's comments I mean if it's simply withdrawing that doesn't help much if it's withdrawing in order to concentrate on other things which I presume he meant like developing vigorous social movements which will lead to which will lay the basis for substantial socio-economic change and if we throwing means let's put our energy into that then it could be positive if withdrawing simply means I'll stay home on referendum days and it doesn't mean anything you well first of all is it very easy to imagine because we live in an alternative to capitalism let me take say the big banks which have enormous power where did the wealth and power come from well actually there was a study by the International Monetary Fund a little while ago of the big banks in the United States you know and it determined that their profits almost entirely derived from taxpayers their profits traced back to thee there's a government insurance policy it's not formal but it's tacit it's called too big to fail it means that if you get in any trouble the taxpayer bail you out that provides the big banks with enormous profits it's not just the bailouts the visible bailouts it means that they get access to cheap credit they get inflate inflated credit ratings all sorts of mechanisms which are highly profitable to them it also means that they can engage in risky transactions which tend to be profitable and they'll have to worry too much because if it goes wrong you run cap and hand to the state and they bail you out is that capitalism very remote from capitalism in fact almost everything you do say you have a computer I'm sure you use the Internet is that a capitalist development I was developed places like this in fact right where we're sitting under Pentagon contracts for decades before it was handed over to a private enterprise to market Bill Gates is the richest man in the world basically - he introduced some marketing innovations undoubtedly but the basic technology and hardware and the software the big ideas the hard work was mostly done in in the state sector and one or another way there directly or indirectly in one fashion and he also has a monopoly rights he managed to get in at a time which grants Microsoft something like monopoly rights for operating systems like if you buy a computer you get Windows no well reliance on the creative work in the state sector and on monopoly rights is pretty remote from capitalism and we have a kind of a mixed state capitalist system but it's not capitalism can you imagine alternatives to that it's very easy actually capitalism would be an alternative but they're much better ones so for example you can easily imagine systems in which say the big banks do not maintain their profit and their ability to crash the system because of taxpayer munificent easy to imagine and in fact there are many other forms of organization of production of distribution and so on which are in fact being developed so their work around enterprises in many places the old Rust Belt their big cooperative many big cooperative movements Atlantic region and Canada many other places these are all alternatives you know germs of another society imagining something more free and justice not only not hard but you can see bits and pieces of it development you well you do what's possible it stages of history under particular circumstances there's no point there's no master answer to this at different times there are different things to do there are times when it's possible to introduce a radical change in the society of the most dramatic case was in 1936 in Spain when a large part of Spain was taken over by partially coordinated peasant and worker movements which created the germs of a left libertarian society didn't last long not because it failed but because it was crushed by force I mean the Communists the fascist liberal democracies that disagreed on a lot of things but they agreed on one thing we have to crush freedom so the first year of the Spanish Civil War so-called was basically a year devoted to crushing the libertarian forces of the left communists in the lead but fascists and liberal democracies participate or will wrote about this not entirely as he said he didn't entirely understand what was happening and there's much extensive work by now but that's essentially what happened well that was a moment when a radical that would circumstances were ripe for a radical change and it wasn't just out of nothing on this decades of preparation for the preliminary efforts trials crushed to rebuild educational programs people sort of had in their head what you could do be kind of because of decades of struggle and that's how things can happen it happens in other respects too and it takes a the American civil rights movement which was a partial success not a huge success but a partial significant success the background had been laid for decades of work most of which got nowhere or almost nowhere in 1960 a couple of black students sat in a lunch counter arrested the next day more students pretty soon you had Freedom Riders formation of snake which was the forefront of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he was kind of the forefront of the civil rights movement appreciate you had a mass movement and things changed the it was a moment it was it took will and energy and effort but but kind of you know that the time was ripe for it because of work over long periods and I think that's the weight changes take place you I think we comprehended it then and long before people carrying out a slave revolution understood the nature of power very well people struggling for the rights everywhere have understood the nature of power and we still understand it there's nothing I don't think there's anything deep and invisible the structures of power those we have to unravel like because a the European Union you want to understand the structure of power in the European Union you have to understand the way the bureaucracy works the banks work the Bundesbank works and so on but the nature of power I don't think that's very obscure you we're too complex for that lots of things are happening I mean there's many general comments you can make about them so for example you can talk about the international treaties that are being created and ask what they are right now for there's two huge treaties being negotiated the trans-pacific and transatlantic partnership and you can ask what they are actually you can't really say in detail because they're negotiated in secret of course not entirely in secret they're not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing them which tells you what they're going to be but they're secret from the general population more or less but you can study the nature of these what the doing it's been done good articles in Lemont diplomatic and Public Citizen elsewhere and and when you unravel that you discover a good deal about the structure of power you read this morning's newspaper and you find that the US and Japan have failed to impose on their populations something they were trying to do in secret so far I feel well all of that can be studied and it but there's no single sort of phrase you can make up slogans if you like but there are no illuminating single phrases that capture the complexity of human life you

Channel: Stuart Platt

Views: 92,856

Rating: 4.7633138 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky (Author), Chomsky, Scotland (Country), Scottish Independence (Political Ideology), Gordon Asher, Leigh French, Stuart Platt

Id: J7HpE4k5JLc

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 04 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ohhaiimnairb]

Isn't he more of a Democratic socialist?