 You know, interestingly enough, the legal part of it and this is really a question of technology being allowed to completely override the existing legal boundaries both domestically and internationally. Domestically first, the United States has at least a law officially that you cannot take away life and liberty of an American citizen without due process of law. And the American position now, the establishment position is due process of law means the president has looked at it and said it's okay or defense secretary has looked at it or somebody has looked at it and said it's okay, it does not be the judicial process. Now don't you think it spins that this is a completely going back to medieval ages where you know anybody can decide that your freedom of life or liberty has no meaning? Well, there are a couple of things I would say about that. One is, you know, sovereign is he who decides upon the exception. Ultimate test of sovereignty is to decide when the law does not apply. This is something that was formulated by a great jurist first for the Weimar Republic then for the Nazis and in the United States has from virtually its origins defined itself as an exceptional state, a state which is exceptional among the committee of states. This constant notion of exceptions. Now you have come to a point where for the last 12 years there is a permanent state of exception in which the president's powers to take the law and redefine it according to presidential degree as it were or just share exercise of power. You have come to that point. And yes, now there is no judicial process. Again, you know, these are things that have been happening step by step. Habeas corpus, Guantanamo Bay, Habeas corpus was finally set aside in this war and terror. Definition of torture, acceptance of torture. As you redefine in lots of kinds of torture and no longer torture, but then you take the next step and say that in order to save lives in the future, you are authorized to torture. So all of this paraphernalia of rights is being abrogated precisely at the time when countries are being bombed in the name of human rights. Precisely at the time when those rights are being abrogated by the high authorities of the United States, between the Supreme Court of the United States and the President of the United States, one after the other, all the bases on which liberal democracies have supposedly based themselves. You know, the whole issue of the Westphalian state, the sovereignty of the state, as you have said is not being redefined in the context of imperial sovereignty. Of course, this is the colonial sovereignty as we knew it earlier. Now it's become also something which is a cross-border across the world. Otherwise, Westphalian state only applied to certain countries, but not to the colonial colonized countries because that, of course, were not recognized as entities which needed this kind of definition. But this destruction of the Westphalian state, the right to protect, being converted into a right to attack, how do you see international law playing itself in the next 10, 15 years? Don't you think this is really something which is going to rebound sooner rather than later? You see, the Westphalian state was really a historical process or the conceptual basis for historical process. That was applied strictly to the Western states, did not apply to the colonial world. Decolonization creates an immediate crisis for that historical usage of the Westphalian state where any number of states now arise which call themselves nation states, which are by definitions of that kind nation states. And now you have to treat them the way you were formally supposed to treat each other. So the question now then comes, how do you abrogate the rights of sovereignty for this new type of nation state that has arisen outside the heartlands of advanced capital? You know, so part of it is actually reconstructing the basis of the colonial order without requiring colonies. Yes, in that sense, the right to protect, the legal right to protect doctrine which has now been also somehow accepted by the United Nations General Assembly is being talked about as a new basis for intervention, is really a modification of the nation state to certain set of states which can intervene in others and others who are recipients of such intervention who do not have the right to protect the sovereignty. The colonial powers always rule you in your own interest. Some of them call them its civilizing mission. Some of them, you know, there was different kinds of terminology, it was always in your interest. Again, accepting it by the United Nations General Assembly, you know, this is coercive acceptance. Which of these countries would really like to be the target of it? And great many of them know that they might be. Tomorrow the target. And yet the imperial center has the power to coerce. And but this is also happening in another way. The nation state, I think, is being dissolved in a very particular way and a new type of state is coming into being. Not only in the backward capitalist countries but also in the ghast schools. Where the nation state is being dissolved and being replaced by a market state. Where the, look, I mean, the claim of the nation state was that it represented the people of that nation state to the rest of the world. And secondly, that it acted for the well-being of the people of that country. That essentially two claims that the nation state made, formally that is it. Now what you have is that the only task left for the state is to represent the market forces, that is to say finance capital, to its inhabitants and make them obey the orders of the market, regardless of their well-being, the well-being of the population no longer is. You know, if you really look at that, today it's happening also in the heart of Europe. Greece. But if you really look at it before, then you would find this is also something which has been imposed to the IMF, particularly at the World Bank, to the structural adjustment program, for instance, in Africa, as well as large parts of Asia and Latin America. So we have the colonial model in terms of the market state reemerging. But you see, my point is that now it is happening in the heartlands of capital itself and this universalization of this is the gift that the collapse of Social Democracy has given us. Well, one could also argue, jazz, that there's a gift of collapse of Socialism, as so with union, and that that has really led to the possibility. Oh, absolutely. I actually divide this history very quickly in three periods, the history of law. There was a colonial period in which there was one law for the advanced capitalist countries and there was no law for the rest of the world. Then you have a period when the American Empire, you know, when the Americans become the world leader of a single empire and the great constraint on them was a systemic one, which is the existence of the Soviet Union and the Socialist bloc generally, which imposed upon both sides certain norms and limits, constraints within which to work. The collapse of the Soviet Union takes away that system of constraints. So we are back to that. That is the real fact. At the same time, just at the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, Social Democracy succumbed completely to the neoliberal order and it is the acceptance of neoliberalism by Social Democrats, which creates a consensus. One could, you know, just one could discuss that some of the day perhaps that Social Democracy was in fact the attempt by Capital to protect the, from Socialism advancing further. Once Socialism, Socialism bloc collapses, Social Democracy is of course its position vis-à-vis Capital becomes much more, but that is really some, we can have another, another date. But coming back today, what you are really saying is we have reemergence of at least a colonial legal system officially sanctioned by the United States. It is a right to attack any country, anywhere in the world and also by global finance capital, it can impose its policies on any country irrespective of wishes of the people of that country. So sovereign space currently is no longer on the agenda, the global agenda. My question really was how long do you think this can sustain itself? Do you think this condition of illegal systems, if we will, internationally as per international law is defined in international law and countries operating their own internal sovereignty, this can continue for long? I think it can continue for very long. It will depend entirely on the level of social and caste trans. All of this that we are talking about is the most ferocious attack of Capital on the peoples of the world, certainly since the 1930s but since well before that and it can succeed. As long as resistance does not come up. That is really the practice. If the resistance does not come up, this kind of extra legal exercise of centralized power of capital in which the states even of the most advanced countries can become mere agents of that finance capital will continue. There is a barbaric moment in which your politics is run entirely by money. Some countries of Europe are somewhat protected against that but that is the trend. Money runs state directly. Really the issue right now is what is the kind of resistance that develops. Thank you Ajaz. I think it has been a very interesting discussion and let us look at the resistance next time we meet.