Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey, from Protest to Resistance, London: Routledge, 2012, 256 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-415-68047-9).
Academic work in the political sciences on Kurdish identity and the Kurdish national movement generally revolves around two positions. The first takes identity and nation as pre-given and may be referred to as essentialist; in this approach, neither identity nor nation needs explanation, since they always have been there. The second takes objective conditions as a point of departure, and questions the existence and nature of Kurdish identity and nationhood because these conditions are not fully met. This, in brief, is the argument presented by Cengiz Gunes in his book on Kurdish identity and the Kurdish national movement in Turkey since the 1960s and forms the background against which the author positions himself. Rejecting the allegedly dominant essentialist and objectivist approach, Gunes argues for a constructivist position, claiming that identity and nation are contingent and developed through discourse.
In the constructivist approach, nation and identity have to be explained by the social processes in which they are produced. The modern idea of the nation carries connotations of a community shaped by common descent, culture, language, aspirations and history. This provides a particular form of collective identity in which people, despite their routine lack of physical contact, consider themselves bound together, because they share customs and internalised memories of a history that is lived in the present through such practices as commemoration and education. However, it is not sufficient just to say that nation and identity are socially constructed: it is necessary also to explain how this construction occurs. This is what The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey aspires to do: to explain the production of Kurdistan and Kurdish identity in relation to political discourses of various political actors, with an emphasis on the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, the PKK.
To analyse the social construction of Kurdish identity and nationhood, Gunes analyses political practices, defined as struggles that seek to challenge and transform the social and society in the name of an ideal or principle. Using discourse analysis, the book shows how the discursive construction of Kurdistan as an (international) colony produced important political effects. The author explains how political practices developed by a variety of political actors constituting the ‘Kurdish national movement’ de-naturalised the Kemalist discourse and how the movement created a new construction of the world, with Turkey as a colonial power, Kurdistan as an international colony, the Kurdish landlord as comprador, and so redefined the character of political struggle.
Gunes develops his argument in eight chapters. In the first two chapters, he discusses the treatment of Kurdish identity and Kurdish nationalism in academic discourses, explains his approach and methodological framework for the analysis of identity formation and political practices. In the next two chapters, Kurdish political activism in the 1960s and the emergence of a Kurdish socialist movement are discussed, with the fifth and sixth chapters focusing on the construction of discourses of national liberation and of Kurdish subjectivity. Gunes shows how the discourse of national liberation not only constructed antagonistic relations with Kemalism and the state, but also with the Kurdish feudal elite.
The author also differentiates between two political positions. One was advocated by the Socialist Party of Turkish Kurdistan (TKSP) and the Revolutionary Democratic Cultural Associations DDKD/KIP, which emphasised close cooperation between the socialist movement in Turkey and the Kurdish national liberation struggle. The other was adhered to by organisations such as the PKK, Rizgarî, Ala Rizgarî and Kawa, which stressed the need for separate organisation and equivalence. In the final two chapters, Gunes discusses the PKK’s turn to democracy, which he dates back to the early 1990s, and the way in which Kurdish demands became equated with democratic demands, and the transformation of the political struggle, from the development of the idea of democratic confederalism (institutionalised in the KCK), the democratic republic and democratic autonomy to electoral strategies at the local and national levels.
The concepts of chain of equivalence and chain of difference offer a fresh and interesting perspective on political practices and the success of the PKK. These concepts were developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) in relation to the expression of political demands and the creation of antagonisms. Social demands become equivalent when they are articulated with other demands. One can talk of chain of equivalence when various demands are seen as part of a totality. In the 1970s and 1980s, the discourse of the PKK demands for social justice and freedom were seen as part of the totality of national liberation. This totality is referred to as an “empty signifier”, meaning it represents the concrete demands symbolically. Moreover, the PKK’s discourse of national liberation came to symbolise cultural myths, like Newroz, and concrete practices, like the resistance in prisons, fierce political defence in court and guerrilla strategy. Later, radical democracy (or, as it is now referred to, democratic nation) became the “empty signifier” or totality, symbolising the struggle for freedom, peace and rights. Importantly, the discourses of national liberation and radical democracy came to signify a series of demands and coherent practices. Although the PKK organised the struggle for national liberation and later radical democracy separately from the left in Turkey, it was able to align itself with the left, in which the struggle for national liberation and the struggle for socialism emerged as the shared signifiers of a chain of equivalence of demands, with the representation of the struggle for socialism perhaps even becoming dependent that of the national liberation struggle in Kurdistan.
The political practice and discourse of the PKK is contrasted with the political strategy and discourse of the TKSP. The TKSP decided to cooperate with parties on the left in Turkey on the basis of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, yet in this setting (within this discourse) the TKSP was unable to articulate demands for Kurdish rights. Importantly, the parties on the left did not consider the Kurdish problem to be central, but rather one subordinate to the main struggle for socialism. While the parties on the left did not consider it necessary to put the Kurdish issue on the political agenda, the TKSP defended a coalition with the Turkish left. TKSP experienced difficulties in linking this coalition strategy with the left to the experiences and the politics of the everyday in its constituency, creating a vagueness and ambivalence. Gunes finds a striking example of this vagueness and ambivalence in the 1985 political program of the TKSP, which states that historical developments present a solution to the Kurdish issue in two forms: either the “Kurdish nation (….) starts its national liberation war” or a “revolutionary movement led by the working class of Turkey” would establish a democratic rule of the people and the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination (p. 93).
An important issue which is touched upon in the book is that of inter-party violence, a topic which has been under studied. It has become common place to ascribe tendencies to use violence against other Kurdish and leftist parties to the PKK; however, the use of violence by other parties was commonplace among the left generally in Turkey, and several militants and cadres of the PKK fell victim to this too. The author mentions the killing of Aydin Gül by the Maoist party Halkın Kurtuluşu (People’s Liberation) and Haki Karer by Stêrka Sor (and not Tekoşin).
To the merit of The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey is its attempt to understand how subjectivation takes place and political actors give meaning to the world and themselves. In this sense, the book is a sharp and welcome turn away from analyses in which the PKK, or for that matter any political party, is treated as an expression of something else. The author is also among the first to have observed the articulation of Kurdish demands into a discourse of radical democracy and the profound importance of this for a development of the political struggle for self-determination and rights. On a critical note, although considerable attention is given to the concepts of chain of equivalence and chain of difference, further elaboration would have been useful. The book focuses on the PKK and TKSP, and while an extension to parties like the DDKD/KIP, Kawa, Rizgarî and Ala Rizgarî, along with others such as Tekoşin would have further contributed to an understanding of Kurdish politics in the 1970s, this would be difficult to cover in a single work (and indeed, sounds more like a research program). Overall, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey is a well thought out and welcome contribution to the study and understanding of identity politics and political struggle and a much needed textbook for students in Kurdish Studies.