CENTRAL NEWS
For more than thirty years the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been struggling for the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people. Our struggle, our fight for liberation turned the Kurdish question into an international issue which affected the entire Middle East and brought a solution of the Kurdish question within reach.
When the PKK was formed in the 1970s the international ideological and political climate was characterized by the bipolar world of the Cold War and the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist camps. The PKK was inspired at that time by the rise of colonialization movements all over the world.
In this context, we tried to find our own way in agreement with the particular situation in our homeland. The PKK never regarded the Kurdish question as a mere problem of ethnicity or nationhood. Rather, we believed, it was the project of liberating the society and democratizing it. These aims increasingly determined our actions since the 1990s.
We also recognized a causal link between the Kurdish question and the global domination of the modern capitalist system. Without questioning and challenging this link a solution would not be possible. Otherwise, we would only become involved in new dependencies.
So far, with a view to issues of ethnicity and nationhood like the Kurdish question, which have their roots deep in history and at the foundations of society, there seemed to be only one viable solution: the creation of a nationstate, which was the paradigm of the capitalist modernity at that time.
Towards Stateless Democracy
We did not believe, however, that any readymade political blueprints would be able to sustainably improve the situation of the people in the Middle East. Had it not been nationalism and nationstates which had created so many problems in the Middle East? Let us, therefore, take a closer look at the historical background of this paradigm and see whether we can map a solution that avoids the trap of nationalism and fits the situation of the Middle East better.
The nation-state – basics
With the sedentarization of people, they began to form an idea of the area that they were living in, its extension and its boundaries, which were mostly determined by nature and features of the landscape. Clans and tribes that had settled in a certain area and lived there for a long period of time developed the notions of a common identity of the homeland.
The boundaries between what the tribes saw as their homelands were not yet borders. Commerce, culture or language were not restricted by the boundaries. Territorial borders remained flexible for a long time. Feudal structures prevailed almost everywhere and now and then dynastic monarchies or great multiethnic empires rose with continuously changing borders and many different languages and religious communities like the Roman Empire, the AustroHungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire. They survived long periods of time and many political changes because their feudal basis enabled them to distribute power flexibly over a wide range of smaller secondary power centres.
Nationstate And Power
With the appearance of the nationstate trade, commerce and finance pushed for political participation and subsequently added their power to the traditional state structures. The development of the nationstate at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two hundred years ago went hand in hand with the unregulated accumulation of capital on the one hand and the unhindered exploitation of the fastgrowing population on the other hand.
The new bourgeoisie which rose from this revolution wanted to take part in the political decisions and state structures. Capitalism, their new economic system, thus became an inherent component of the new nationstate. The nationstate needed the bourgeoisie and the power of the capital in order to replace the old feudal order and its ideology which rested on tribal structures and inherited rights by a new national ideology which united all tribes and clans under the roof of the nation.
In this way, capitalism and nationstate became so closely linked to each other that neither could be imagined to exist without the other.
As a consequence of this, exploitation was not only sanctioned by the state but even encouraged and facilitated. But above all the nationstate must be thought as the maximum form of power. None of the other types of the state has such a capacity of power.
One of the main reasons for this is that the upper part of the middleclass has been linked to the process of monopolization in an evermore increasing manner. The nationstate itself is the most developed complete monopoly. It is the most developed unity of monopolies such as trade, industrial, finance and power.
One should also think of ideological monopoly as an indivisible part of the power monopoly.
The State And Its Religious Roots
The religious roots of the state have already been discussed in detail (A. Ocalan, The Roots of Civilisation, London, 2007). Many contemporary political concepts and notions have their origin in religious or theological concepts or structures.
In fact, a closer look reveals that religion and divine imagination brought about the first social identities in history. They formed the ideological glue of many tribes and other prestate communities and defined their existence as communities. Later, after state structures had already developed, the traditional links between the state, power and society began to weaken.
The sacred and divine ideas and practices which had been present at the origin of the community increasingly lost their meaning for the common identity and were, instead, transferred onto power structures like monarchs or dictators. The state and its power were derived from divine will and law and its ruler became king by the grace of God. They represented divine power on earth.
Today, most modern states call themselves secular, claiming that the old bonds between religion and state have been severed and that religion is no longer a part of the state. This is arguably only half the truth. Even if religious institutions or representatives of the clergy do no longer participate in political and social decision making they still do influence these decisions to an extent just as they are influenced themselves by political or social ideas and developments. Therefore, secularism, or laicism as it is called in Turkey, still contains religious elements.
The separation of state and religion is the result of a political decision. It did not come naturally. This is why even today power and state seem to be something given, godgiven we might even say. Notions like secular state or secular power remain ambiguous.
The nationstate has also allocated a number of attributes which serve to replace older religiously rooted attributes like the nation, fatherland, national flag, national anthem, and many others. Particularly notions like the unity of state and nation serve to transcend the material political structures and are, as such, reminiscent of the prestateunity with God. They have been put in the place of the divine.
When in former times a tribe subjugated another tribe its members had to worship the gods of the victors. We may arguably call this process a process of colonization, even assimilation. The nationstate is a centralized state with quasidivine attributes that have completely disarmed society and monopolizes the use of force.
Bureaucracy And The Nation State
Since the nationstate transcends its material basis, the citizens, it assumes an existence beyond its political institutions. It needs additional institutions of its own to protect its ideological basis as well as legal, economic and religious structures. The resulting everexpanding civil and military bureaucracy is expensive and serves only the preservation of the transcendent state itself, which in turn elevates the bureaucracy above the people.
During the European modernity, the state had all means at its disposal to expand its bureaucracy into all strata of the society. There it grew like cancer infecting all lifelines of society.
Bureaucracy and nationstate cannot exist without each other. If the nationstate is the backbone of the capitalist modernity it certainly is the cage of the natural society. Its bureaucracy secures the smooth functioning of the system, secures the basis of the production of goods, and secures the profits for the relevant economic actors in both the realsocialist and the businessfriendly nationstate. The nationstate domesticates the society in the name of capitalism and alienates the community from its natural foundations. Any analysis meant to localize and solve social problems need to take a close look at these links.
Nation State And Homogeneity
The nationstate in its original form aimed at the monopolization of all social processes. Diversity and plurality had to be fought, an approach that led into assimilation and genocide. It does not only exploit the ideas and the labour potential of society and colonize the heads of the people in the name of capitalism. It also assimilates all kinds of spiritual and intellectual ideas and cultures in order to preserve its own existence. It aims at creating a single national culture, a single national identity, and a single unified religious community. Thus it also enforces homogeneous citizenship.
The notion of ‘citizen’ has been created as a result of the quest for such a homogeneity. The citizenship of modernity defines nothing but the transition made from private slavery to state slavery. Capitalism can not attain profit in the absence of such modern slave armies.
The homogenous national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project”. These goals are generally accomplished by the use of force or by financial incentives and have often resulted in the physical annihilation of minorities, cultures, or languages or in forced assimilation.
The history of the last two centuries is full of examples illustrating the violent attempts at creating a nation that corresponds to the imaginary reality of a true nationstate.
Nation State And Society
It is often said that the nationstate is concerned with the fate of the common people. This is not true. Rather, it is the national governor of the worldwide capitalist system, a vassal of the capitalist modernity which is more deeply entangled in the dominant structures of the capital than we usually tend to assume: It is a colony of the capital.
Regardless of how nationalist the nationstate may present itself, it serves to the same extent the capitalist processes of exploitation. There is no other explanation for the horrible redistribution wars of the capitalist modernity.
Thus the nationstate is not with the common people – it is an enemy of the peoples.
Relations between other nationstates and international monopolies are coordinated by the diplomats of the nationstate. Without recognition by other nationstates, none of them could survive. The reason can be found in the logic of the worldwide capitalist system. Nationstates which leave the phalanx of the capitalist system will be overtaken by the same fate that the Saddam regime in Iraq experienced or it will be brought to its knees by means of economic embargoes.
