Beyond Nationalism and the Nation-State

Radical Approaches to Nation

İlker Cörüt, Joost Jongerden, İlker Cörüt, Joost Jongerden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto dell'immigrazione

This book centerson one fundamental question: is it possible to imagine a progressive sense of nation? Rooted in historic and contemporary social struggles, the chapters in this collection examine what a progressive sense of nation might look like, with authors exploring the theory and practice of the nation beyond nationalism.

The book is written against the background of rising authoritarian-nationalist movements globally over the last few decades, where many countries have witnessed the dramatic escalation of ethnic-nationalist parties impacting and changing mainstream politics and normalizing anti-immigration, anti-democratic and Islamophobic discourse. This volume discusses viable alternatives for nationalism, which is inherently exclusionary, exploring the possibility of a type of nation-based politics which does not follow the principles of nationalism.

With its focus on nationalism, politics and social struggles, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political and social sciences.

PART I

Collective action, self-rule, and autonomy

1

A democratic nation

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the idea of nation beyond the state

Joost Jongerden and Cengiz Gunes

Introduction

At a court hearing on June 18, 1981, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Central Committee member Mazlum Doğan corrected the interrogating judge with the following words:

Let me say this: as I have stated before, the PKK’s program does not say it wants to establish a Kurdish state on a Marxist–Leninist basis. It wants the formation of an independent, democratic, united country, and the state will be national, democratic, and there will be an administration in which the people will govern themselves.

(Pirtûk û Wêje 2017)

Mazlum Doğan, a celebrated martyr within the PKK, had started to study economics at Hacettepe University in Ankara in 1974. Shortly after he arrived in Ankara, he became a key person within a group of Kurds and Turks, most of them students who had taken part in an extended process of group formation that had started in 1972–1973 and resulted in the establishment of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in November 1978 (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, Gunes 2012, Jongerden and Akkaya 2012). In a preparatory meeting on the group’s political approach in Antep in September 1977, the leading figure in the group, Abdullah Öcalan, had declared in a similar vein: “We are waging a struggle for the liberation of humanity not for nationalist purpose. We aimed at applying Marxism-Leninism in Turkey and Kurdistan … From the beginning we did not emerge exclusively for only one nationality” (Akkaya 2016: 170).

Though initially the main political objectives of the PKK could be summarized as 1) the unification of Kurdistan and 2) the transformation of Kurdish society through the elimination of relations of exploitation, the realization of these objectives was considered to be dependent on a process of state formation (PKK 1978). In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, however, this classical model of national liberation, in which a social revolution would follow the conquering or construction of a state, became a subject of investigation, critique, and self-critique within the PKK (Akkaya 2016). The critique involved an assessment of the gains of national liberation movements, which did not deliver on their promises, and the developments within, among others, the Soviet Union. While in Marx’s work, the abolition of the state and its replacement by a new political power is an aim of social evolution (Draper 1970), the state had become increasingly powerful in the Soviet Union, creating a form of state-capitalism. The self-critique included the PKK’s orientation toward the idea of the state and the reproduction of traditional gender hierarchies within its own ranks. Following the capture of Abdullah Öcalan in Nairobi, Kenya and his subsequent imprisonment in Turkey in February 1999, this process of critique and self-critique took a constructive turn: critique and self-critique became connected to ideological reorientation and a program for political action (Jongerden 2019).

Through the writing of his defense texts and drawing on numerous thinkers from Murray Bookchin to Ferdinand Braudel and from Marie Mies to Judith Butler, Öcalan was able to develop a form of politics that no longer hinged on the idea of the state but was based on the self-organizing capacities of people, through which not only the Kurdish issue could be solved politically, but the whole Middle-East transformed (Gunes 2019b). This new political idea became the most visible and received the most international and scholarly attention in the way it became expressed in Rojava, the western part of Kurdistan located in the north of Syria. When the regime collapsed in 2012, a network of local councils became the foundation of a self-administrative structure (Knapp et al. 2014). However, similar working practices were developing across Kurdistan in Bakur (Southeast Turkey), Rojhelat (Nothwest Iran), and Başur (North Iraq) (Akkaya and Jongerden 2013, Yarkin 2015, Gunes and Gürer 2018, Gunes 2019a, Jongerden 2019).

In this chapter, we will discuss this political proposal and working practice as a reformulation of the right to self-determination beyond the state and nation-state form. The article provides a general overview and is based on previous research projects and work from the authors (Akkaya and Jongerden 2011, Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, Akkaya and Jongerden 2012, Casier and Jongerden 2012, Jongerden and Akkaya 2012, Jongerden and Akkaya 2019, Jongerden 2017, 2019, Gunes 2012, 2019a, 2019b). We will first discuss the background to the Kurdish question: the emergence of Turkish nationalism in the early decades of the 1900s in the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey on basis of the idea of nationalism in 1923. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the emergence of Kurdish resistance to the Turkish state from the 1960s onwards. In the paragraphs that follow we will focus on the PKK and its ideological reorientation, in which it rejected state formation and developed a political project based on the self-organizing capacities of people, and how this created the political possibility of a nation beyond nationalism and statism.

Backgrounds: A fading empire and ethno-political engineering

The Armistice of Mudros in 1918 had implied a surrender of the Ottoman Empire to the French and British empires and resulted in its de facto partitioning and the occupation of its capital city, Istanbul (Zürcher 2004). Remnants of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an umbrella organization in which Turkish nationalists became the dominant faction, started to organize a resistance against this surrender to the allied forces. Yet the leadership of CUP had a damaged reputation. Its inner circle had led the Ottoman Empire and the peasant population into a disastrous war with Russia; it had also initiated a series of processes, including mass deportations, mass executions, and the creation of famine, which had resulted in the genocide of the Armenian population (Ungor 2012).

Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk], a distinguished military officer, became the leading officer of the resistance against British and French occupation. Though a former CUP member himself, he had sufficient distance from the wartime leadership, and his success on the battlefield made him the leader of an emerging national resistance movement in Anatolia (Zürcher 2004). When, under his leadership, the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on October 29, 1923, on the lands east of what had been considered the heartland of the Empire, it was depopulated and impoverished. Many peasants had perished as fodder in the Ottoman wars, while genocide had decimated the Armenian population in Anatolia from a couple of million to about 65,000, and the Greek-Christians had been reduced from two million to 120,000 as a result of a League of Nations sanctioned population exchange (Ari 1995). In terms of religious and ethnic diversity, the main groups were Alevi and Sunni Muslims, Turks, and Kurds (Zürcher 2004).

Under the reign of Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk], his comrades in arms, and their Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) a process of nation-state building started. Modeled on the idea of nationalism, a political concept holding that the borders of political units (state) and cultural units (nation) should coincide, a politics of conversion had to turn Muslims into Turks. This conversion was referred to with such terms as “missionary work” and “internal colonization” (Jongerden 2007). As a result of the equation of citizenship with a Turkish cultural identity, the existence of other cultural identifications became perceived as an existential threat to the new state. Cultural difference became defined as a security issue, and the Kurdish language and expressions of a distinct Kurdish cultural identity were banned. In order to make use of citizenship rights, people had to describe themselves as Turks (Barkey and Fuller 1998). Since the first decades of the republic, a policy based on assimilation into what was considered a superior Turkish culture and a physical elimination of those who resisted was implemented (Bruinessen 1994). Thus it was in a context of harsh repression and cultural genocide that the PKK emerged between the two military coups of 1971 and 1980 (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, Gunes 2012).

Nation-state identity politics and its responses: The emergence of the PKK

The harsh repression in the 1920s and 1930s and failed attempts by Kurdish leaders to resist political submission, military occupation, and cultural denial had been followed by years of “silence” (Bozarslan 2008). Influenced by the resumption of the Kurdish struggle in Iraq under the leadership of Mulla Mustafa Barzani in 1961, a new generation of Kurdish activists emerged, organized around cultural and political magazines. It was from among these circles that the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Turkey (Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, TKDP) was established in 1965, while many other activists were active in the Workers’ Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi, TİP) (Gunes 2019a). Despite their different orientations, activists of nationalist TKDP and socialist TİP were able to work together in mobilizing the Kurdish population in 1967 in a series of protest meetings against “ethno-nationalist suppression and exploitation by the Turkish state elite and dominant classes” (Gundogan 2015: 389).

With Kurdish nationalism and socialist struggles on the rise in the 1960s and early 1970s, the PKK emerged from among university students in Ankara in 1972–1973. Most of the students were from modest backgrounds, and some of them had entered university as a result of a scholarship program. Frequent meetings and group discussions contributed to the carving out of a distinctive ideology and the forging of kindred spirits in the period 1973–1978, a process of group formation that resulted in the establishment of the PKK on November 27, 1978 (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011, Jongerden and Akkaya 2012). This process of group formation took place against a marginalization of the parliamentary TİP and a crackdown of the revolutionary left, which reached its peak in the military regime installed with the 1971 coup.

Over the course of the 1980s, the PKK would develop into the only revolutionary political party of significance in Turkey that struggled for Kurdish political rights and the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, attracting Kurdish activists many of whom were previously active within rival Kurdish political parties. Most of these Kurdish political parties, established and active in the 1970s, had not survived the coup of 1980. They either fell apart – like Tekoşîn, Kawa, and Rizgarî/Ala Rizgarî – or were pushed into insignificance – like TKDP-KUK, TKDP-KİP and TKSP-PSK. Though the coup and the severe repression unleashed after the military takeover in 1980 was an important factor, most of these parties were already weakened as a result of sectarian cleavages, which had initiated a process of separation and disintegration of the parties preceding the 1980 coup (Jongerden & Akkaya 2019). This sectarianism was partly an effect of cleavages between the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were involved in a struggle for survival, and partly an effect of disagreement about who or what represented “true socialism” with the Soviet Union, China, and Albania as the beacons (Gunes 2019b, Jongerden and Akkaya 2019).

The revolutionary left in Turkey, also prone to a sectarianism that had led to the scornful comment that it was growing by splitting up, was moreover weakened by the influence of Kemalism. Its rhetoric of anti-Americanism and its adherence to an independent Turkey was nationalism mistaken for anti-imperialism. Unable to radically break with nationalism and recognize the subordination of Kurds on the basis of their cultural identity, the left could not develop into a genuine force of opposition:

The radical left in Turkey, that is, was crucially defined (through Kemalism) by the same force (colonialism) it was fighting to be free from (i.e., the oppression of a dominant class empowered by/as a controlling state). How could the left advance a viable political position outside of Kemalism if [it] was unable to shake off what was an essentially colonialist ideology? (Jongerden and Akkaya 2012)

Mihri Belli, an important ideologue within the revolutionary left in the 1960s and 1970s, believed in a reconciliation of the revolutionary movement with Kemalist ideology through a coalition of workers and peasants and the left-leaning section of the military. It was thought that militant action could create a situation in which radical officers would seize power and form a leftist junta (Samim 1981: 70–71, Kaypakkaya 2014: 357). Muzaffer Erdost, an ideologue within the revolutionary left, flirted with Turkish nationalism, arguing that it was imperialism that was weakened by the development of nationalism, not socialism (Lipovsky 1992: 111–112). Others, too, within the leftist movement, such as Hikmet Kıvılcımlı,¹ thought of the “progressive military” as a natural partner. Hikmet Kıvılcımlı had tried desperately to contact the so-called “progressive” military junta that came to power in 1960, hoping to work together with them, attempts which were in vain (Ünal 1998). Yet most of the left looked with suspicion and disinterest to the resistance of the Kurds (Jongerden 2017).

While the left had thought progressive officers in the army could play a role in the process toward revolutionary change,² it also insisted on the submission of a cultural identity to class identity. In practice, this implied a submission of Kurdish identity to Turkish identity and a denial of the daily experience of humiliation and suffering of millions of Kurds in Turkey. The insistence on class unity by most of the revolutionary left implied a blatant denial of the humiliation and dehumanization that Kurds in Turkey lived through and a turning a blind eye to the concerted efforts of the state to destroy their cultural identity. Those active in the network th...