The book was written as the outcome of a British Council sponsored workshop that took place in Ankara on May 2015 and was carried out with the cooperation of Ankara University Faculty of Political Sciences and Queen’s University Belfast. The workshop was a vibrant discussion between UK-based and Turkey -based scholars on the topic of minority representation in democratising plurinational states, with special emphasis on the Kurdish dilemmas facing Turkey. This book is the result of the fruitful exchange of ideas from the participants of the workshop and constitutes a stepping stone towards the development of workable modalities for the integration and participation of cultural and national minorities in the political architecture of contemporary states. The ideas developed here are not only significant for the process of democratisation of Turkey, an important country and a strategic bridge between Europe and the Middle East, which is an important part of the world that remains neglected on questions related to minority representation and cultural plurality. The ideas developed here also reflect on an issue that is of cardinal importance to plurinational democracies. As Michael Keating (2001: 1) argues in a seminal work in the field, the question plurinational democracy is an old and a new problem. It is an old problem because the traditional model of the nation state was unable to resolve it, and it is a new problem, for it has significantly delayed the expansion of democratic practices. At the centre of the new problem is the lack of fulfilment of demands for minority rights and democratic participation in democratising states, a problem that is also present since the inception of a world of nation states.
Cultural diversity is the norm in a world of nation states that claim to be mono-national, particularly in democratising societies. In fact, only a very small minority of states represented in the UN are completely monocultural and mono-national, in general and with very few exceptions small states and islands. This is, unfortunately, not widely recognised and partly the result of a terminological confusion between notions of nation and state, and the unwarranted conflation of these two terms. In view of the current dilemmas in Turkey and beyond, we ask: why this crucial normative problem has not been resolved? And related to this, why independence-seeking nationalism surge in democratising societies and why it often becomes a vital force? In the worse case scenario, these cases evolve into partitions that involve ethnic cleansing and horrendous genocides. Prima facie, there seems to be a recurrent problem in the political architecture of democratising states. This recurrent problem is how to organise developing multi-ethnic and multi-nation states so that majorities and minorities can coexist in the same polity and territorial space. We investigate from different perspectives what are the mechanisms needed to allow for minorities to effectively participate in the life of the state, bolstering community allegiance and mutual recognition, without suffering cultural alienation and without resorting to territorial secession. Here, a crucial direction in our research is to find ways of resolving these burdening problems and help foster the sentiment and the reality that minorities must be made to feel at home in states they share with others. Here, the rights, culture and identity of minority communities must be recognised and given a role in the political architecture of democratising states. This might require a reform of the modus operandi of nation states. Here, the Right of Self Determination of Peoples, enshrined in the UN charter and in the practice of international law, must be rescued from narrow interpretations that solely define this right as the right to constitute separate states. The right of national self-determination must be enlarged and expanded to consider as in the case of indigenous peoples and other scattered communities, modalities of self-governance that do not entail partitions and secessions. This will certainly be a useful mechanism to alleviate minority problems in Turkey . We furthermore consider that the solution to these problems is vital for the expansion and development of democratic practices, in theory and in practice and not only in Turkey but in a world afflicted with protracted ethnonational conflicts.
Indeed, the consolidation of democratic pluralism is not only important for the security of states, but it must be considered a crucial political, economic and strategic goal for developing democracies. Multicultural liberal democracies sincerely aim for equality and individual human rights, but they are often blind and lack procedures and mechanisms to accommodate culturally diverse minority communities. This problem is acute and dangerous in developing democracies. Territorial representation is only possible when minority communities inhabit a compact territorial space, yet in many cases, minority communities do not reside compactly, making any territorial representation impossible. These situations often cause problems for the functioning of democratic political systems and require modalities of non-territorial autonomy (NTA) .
This book examines in theory, in relevant case studies and through the work of legal practitioners, the challenges, and possible solutions offered by different models for the effective participation of minorities in public life, in accordance with the Lund Recommendations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) (Nimni 2010) with a specific reference to Turkey and the Kurdish issue, and, drawing on the experience on other recent attempts of minority accommodation in other developing parts of the world. We begin with this book an ongoing dialogue and investigation to examine critically various models of minority accommodation, focussing mainly on the Kurds and on other minorities that constitute 30% of nearly more than the population of the Republic of Turkey .
In a relatively short period, the dual processes of urbanisation and migration (both, internal and external), significantly altered the composition of many cities in Turkey. There are now culturally diverse populations residing closely to each other. This situation raises important and unprecedented questions about how to manage culturally diverse populations that live in close quarters. This problem is certainly not unique to Turkey. We discuss here modalities of NTA that allow for the implementation of collective rights in shared territorial spaces for ethnic and national minorities.
This process also raises crucial questions for the process of democratic governance and the avoidance of conflict. There is no doubt that a majority of protracted and bloody conflicts in different parts of the world are related to this problem. We need urgent answers of how to represent dispersed minorities that share territories with others. This problem is not only relevant to Turkey , but it is repeated with unfortunate regularity in many other parts of the world. In the chapters below, we analyse several relevant examples from which we can draw lessons for the situation in Turkey . How to recognise minorities as communities and allow them to partake in democratic governance? A detailed analysis of the issues and the search for novel answers is central to the scope and aims of our of this work and the project beyond it. We search for novel modalities of minority representation and that allow for pluralism and the recognition of minority rights that do not dismember existing states.
The first section of the book gathers theoretical discussions on NTA engaging with the conditions of Turkey and the Kurdish issue for developing Turkey as a plurinational state. As the opening chapter of this section, Nimni aims to map the contradictions of minority representation in liberal democracies. He examines how the principle of ‘one person one vote’ creates a paradoxical inconsistency when attempting to empower ethnic or national minorities by giving examples from Turkey and discusses the motives of contemporary secessionist movements in this context. He evaluates the new mechanisms of minority representation and how could these help in building Turkey as a plurinational state.
Aytaç and Yılmaz continue with the NTA discussion by filling the gap of individual freedom notion. With this aim, they highlight the counters of a more emancipatory and egalitarian conception of NTA and propose the reformulation of collective rights on the grounds of empowerment of individual freedom and the political activation of minority groups. In that context, the chapter provides analysis of traditional and local solutions like the millet system in order to shed light on the limits of and insights into NTA for solving the problems of modern societies.
Bezwan’s chapter builds a bridge between theoretical discussion and the Kurdish issue by placing the autonomy demands of Kurdish movement in a conflict resolution framework and summarising the latest developments for laying a background for the book. He argues that while the concept of ‘democratic confederalism ’ acts as the key theoretical framework for the resolution of the Kurdish conflict, democratic autonomy functions as its modus operandi. The latter presents itself as a non-secessionist understanding of self-determination and thus as a mechanism for conflict transformation, which aims to achieve the democratic reconstruction of Turkey by establishing self-governing bodies in the Kurdish region and throughout the country.
The second section of the book includes two recent cases from Europe which are relevant in developing a framework for the solving the Kurdish issue in Turkey . The first one written by Prina, Smith and Sansum examining the law and practice of national cultural autonomy (NCA ) from the perspective of participation of national minorities in four countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Estonia, the Russian Federation, Hungary and Serbia. It considers both levels of autonomy of NCA institutions, and their co-decision-making competences with government structures. On the basis of qualitative data from the authors’ fieldwork, the chapter shows that, while NCA has had only a marginal role in furthering democratic pluralism in the region, its practice provides insights on the internal nuances and complexity of NCA institutions.
The second case from Europe is Spain, a state with a plurality of nations in its midst which only recognises the existence of one of them in the Constitution: the Spanish nation. Payero-López takes a critical stance towards this and suggests some mechanisms for enhancing the political representation of peripheral nations in the state institutions. She pays particular attention to Catalonia, where a process of ‘disconnection’ with the Spanish state is currently taking place and suggests that Spain should be conceived of as a multi-nation state with a variety of demoi for solving the national question.
The third section accommodates the Kurdish issue in Turkey from different dynamics of the problem in relation with the NTA and plurinational state. Aktoprak begins with handling the latest Kurdish Opening under the rising authoritarianism in Turkey . She briefly describes the Kurdish policy of the AKP , analyse the first phase of the Kurdish Opening (2009–2010) but mainly focuses on the second phase (2013–2015). She argues that Galtung’s TRANSCEND method is crucial for discussions on creating plurinational state as a new reality for solving the Kurdish issue and examines the Kurdish Opening by following the violence types described by Galtung: structural, cultural and direct violences. Her analysis is decisive for the prospective conflict resolution debates in Turkey and for laying a background for the following chapters on Kurdish autonomy discussions.
Gunes and Gürer continue by exploring how the Kurdish movement has been conceptualising the accommodation of Kurdish political demands for autonomy and self-rule in Turkey around the ‘democratic autonomy ’ proposal from the early 2000s. They briefly but deeply describe how this proposal is based on a critique and rejection of the nation-state model and seeks to accommodate the rights of Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities without challenging Turkey’s territorial integrity by drawing on the key texts through which democratic autonomy proposal has been articulat...