Nationality Beyond the Nation-State? The Search for Autonomy in Abdullah Öcalan and Otto Bauer

ABSTRACT

In today’s globalised era, the limitations of the nation-state model are increasingly apparent. This model often demands homogeneity, leading to identity conflicts and separatist demands by national minorities. However, national and cultural identities remain politically relevant, making post-national ambitions difficult to achieve. To address this problem, we compare the thoughts of Otto Bauer and Abdullah Öcalan, who both emphasise overcoming the limits of the nation-state without dismissing national and cultural identities. Öcalan’s ideas prioritise autonomy and multiplicity, while Bauer’s contribution is based on a deterritorialised notion of national identity. As we argue in this article, the two authors share interesting points of convergence that have been understudied in academia. What is more, this comparison provides valuable insights for understanding contemporary challenges and solutions to multinational societies and identity conflicts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Rojava means west and sunset in Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect, and refers to the Western Kurdistan, in North-East of Syria. As a consequence of the civil war, which erupted in 2011 in the Arab country, the Kurds established the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria, based on the principles of democratic confederalism.

2. The survey included only the nationality of the respondent’s nation-state, thus excluding pride in minority nationalities, which would likely have pushed the value further up.

3. In the original Turkish text, the words used to express ‘religious community’ are dinî cemaatin, literally meaning ‘religious congregation’. Nonetheless, we opted for keeping the official English translation made by the ‘International Initiative – Freedom for Öcalan’, despite an overuse of the term ‘community’ for all types of human groups may be misleading. We retain that the translators aimed at emphasising the role of community as a more bottom-up form of gathering and sense of belonging compared to the nation-state.

4. Until 1991, Kurds were reported in official statistics as ‘mountain Turks’ (Sagnic 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no funds.