Noam Chomsky interviewed by uncredited interviewer

Q: We want to talk about the two dominant power structures of the modern era: the national state and the transnational corporations. The first question is, could you please talk about the rise of this concept of the national state: Why was it created, and what were its consequences?

Well, the nation state is pretty much a European invention, I mean there were similar things, but the nation state in the modern form was largely created in Europe over many centuries. It's so unnatural and artificial that it had to be imposed by extreme violence. In fact that's the primary reason why Europe was the most savage part of the world for centuries. It was due to trying to impose a nation state system on cultures and societies that are varied and if you look at them had no relation to this artificial structure.

In fact the derivative effects were also the main reason the concept spread elsewhere. In the course of creating modern nation states, Europe developed a culture of savagery and a technology of violence which enabled it to conquer the world, and as it conquered the world it attempted to impose nation state systems wherever it went, also artificial and violent. If you look at today's major conflicts around the world, most of them are the residue of European efforts to impose nation state systems where it doesn't make any sense, which is almost everywhere. The few exceptions to this are places of European colonization where they simply exterminated the indigenous population, like the United States and Australia. So there you get more homogeneous societies. On the other hand, the primary reason why the savage conflicts in Europe ended in 1945 was that it was recognized that if they continued this game any longer, they'd just wipe themselves out. So you have, since 1945, a peace internal to Europe. Germans and French don't regard it as their highest goal in life to slaughter each other anymore.

In the course of the development of the nation state system, there also developed on the side various economic arrangements which about a century ago turned into what became contemporary corporate capitalism, mostly imposed by judicial arrangements, not by legislation, and very tightly integrated and linked to the the powerful states. So today you can't dissociate the powerful states, the G8, the ones that are meeting in Edinburgh, which is really G1 or G3 or something like that with little participation of others, from this hisory. It's impossible to distinguish the modern dominant states from the multinational corporate system, the conglomerates that rely on them, that have a relation of both dependency and domination to them.

In fact, two centuries ago, James Madison in a very early period of modern capitalism described the relation of business to government as that of "tools and tyrants." He said that businesses are the "tools and tyrants" of government. By now that's become virtually the definition of the world. Multinational corporations are the tools and the tyrants of the powerful states, so making a distinction between them is extremely hard.

Q: In the beginning of the nation state, what do you think were the social forces behind it and why did they do it?

Well, it began in the feudal period with lords and battles for power between feudal lords, kings, the Pope and other centers of power which gradually evolved into systems of nation states in which a combination of political power and economic interests converged enough to try to impose uniform systems on very varied societies. I mean, after all in Europe it's very recently, I mean in living memory, that the state system actually consolidated.

There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because she talks a different language. This is just a recent coalescence of political, cultural, economic power and now quite properly beginning to break up. So one of the healthiest developments in Europe in my opinion is the process of a kind of devolution which is proceeding at various rates in different parts of Europe. So in Spain, for example, Catalonia, the Basque country, and to a more limited extent others, are developing a substantial degree of autonomy.

I was just in England before coming here, it's not England really, I was in Scotland, and by now Scotland has a degree of autonomy, Wales has a degree of autonomy and I think these are natural developments back toward forms of social organization more related to real human interests and needs. Actually I've been under investigation, maybe I still am, by the Turkish state security courts for what they call preaching separatism. Namely in a talk I gave in Dyarbakir in south Eastern Turkey I actually said some favorable things about the Ottoman empire. Not that anybody wants the Ottoman empire back, but they had the right idea about many things. One was that they left people alone, partly because of corruption and weakness, but partly for doctrinal reasons. The whole area under the Ottoman empire had nothing like a state system. So in a particular city, the Greeks would take care of their affairs, and the Armenians would take care of their affairs, and others would run their part of the city. And it was kind of integrated. You could go from Cairo to Baghdad or Istanbul without crossing any border or posts or anything like that. That's probably the right form of organization for that part of the world and probably every part of the world. And those are tendencies that are pretty clear in Europe, mostly at the cultural level but to some extent also at the political level. I suppose it is a reaction to the centralizing tendencies of the European Union which are often quite autocratic, particularly the enormous power of the Central Bank. But it's all in connection with the high concentration of economic and political and social power that lies in the hands of the unaccountable private tyrannies that are closely linked to state power and rely on it.