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C O M P A R AT I V E T E R R I T O R I A L P O L I T I C S

Democratic Representation
in Plurinational States
The Kurds in Turkey

Edited by Ephraim Nimni

and Elçin Aktoprak
Comparative Territorial Politics

Series Editors
Michael Keating
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, UK

Arjan H. Schakel
Maastricht University
Maastricht, The Netherlands

Michaël Tatham
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway
Territorial politics is one of the most dynamic areas in contemporary
political science. Rescaling, new and re-emergent nationalisms, regional
devolution, government, federal reform and urban dynamics have
reshaped the architecture of government at sub-state and transnational
levels, with profound implications for public policy, political competition,
democracy and the nature of political community. Important policy fields
such as health, education, agriculture, environment and economic devel-
opment are managed at new spatial levels. Regions, stateless nations and
metropolitan areas have become political arenas, contested by old and
new political parties and interest groups. All of this is shaped by transna-
tional integration and the rise of supranational and international bodies
like the European Union, the North American Free Trade Area and the
World Trade Organization. The Comparative Territorial Politics series
brings together monographs, pivot studies, and edited collections that
further scholarship in the field of territorial politics and policy, decentral-
ization, federalism and regionalism. Territorial politics is ubiquitous and
the series is open towards topics, approaches and methods. The series
aims to be an outlet for innovative research grounded in political science,
political geography, law, international relations and sociology. Previous
publications cover topics such as public opinion, government formation,
elections, parties, federalism, and nationalism. Please do not hesitate to
contact one of the series editors in case you are interested in publishing
your book manuscript in the Comparative Territorial Politics series. Book
proposals can be sent to Ambra Finotello (Ambra.Finotello@palgrave.com).
We kindly ask you to include sample material with the book proposal,
preferably an introduction chapter explaining the rationale and the struc-
ture of the book as well as an empirical sample chapter.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14910
 Ephraim Nimni · Elçin Aktoprak
Editors

Democratic
Representation
in Plurinational States
The Kurds in Turkey
Editors
Ephraim Nimni Elçin Aktoprak
Centre for the Study of Ethnic Çankaya, Ankara, Turkey
Conflicts
Queen’s University Belfast
Belfast, UK

Comparative Territorial Politics

ISBN 978-3-030-01107-9 ISBN 978-3-030-01108-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01108-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957440

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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… to Academics for Peace
 Acknowledgements

Many people helped us in the development of this research project and

the production of this book. Primarily, British Council Newton Fund
who provided the generous funding that made possible the workshop
in Ankara. We are very grateful to them for their indispensable support.
Kami Asamani from the British Council in London provided us with
generous assistance in the development of the workshop. The British
Council in Turkey provided us with considerable help in the organiza-
tion of the workshop in Ankara. We are very grateful to Hande Diker
and Özlem Gökalp.
We are very grateful to Prof. Bill Bowring for his support for our
workshop and in the publication of the book. We would also like to
thank Prof. Rebecca Bryant, Prof. David J. Smith and Prof. Baskın Oran
for their support during the workshop process and to all participants for
creating a vibrant academic sphere.
We are also very grateful for the enthusiastic support of Timofei
Agarin, who was unable to come to the workshop in Ankara because
ways of the Home Office bureaucracy and we would like to thank
Uluhan Berk Öndül and Volkan Emeç for their assistance during the
workshop.
Queen’s University Belfast had the difficult task of managing the
funds for a workshop that took place in Turkey. We are very grateful to
administrative staff who handled this difficult task. Our special thanks
go to Deirdre O’Hare who managed the complicated financial invoices
that came from Turkey, and for managing the airfares of participants.

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

We are also very grateful for the support and considerable help provided
by Aine Egan and Teresa Cotton. Ronan Crossey from the Research
Office at Queen’s University liaised very efficiently and professionally
with the British Council and we are very grateful for his efforts.
Doctoral students at Queen’s University Belfast helped us diligently to
edit the articles from our non-English Speakers contributors. We are very
grateful to Laura Gillespie, Matthew Kirk Jamie McCollum, and Kayla
Rush.
We are very grateful to Ambra Finotello from Palgrave Macmillan for
her enthusiastic support at the start of the book proposal, and to Imogen
Gordon Clark and Katelyn Zingg for the continuous communication and
effective support at the various steps in the preparation of this book. We
also have a debt of gratitude to Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of
our book.
Finally, we are extremely grateful to our contributors some of whom
had to prepare their articles in very difficult circumstances because of
the current situation in Turkey. Without them our book would have not
been possible.
Ephraim Nimni wants to thank Elçin Aktoprak, for her enthusiastic
and dedicated work in the preparation of this book in very trying
circumstances.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Ephraim Nimni and Elçin Aktoprak

Part I Theoretical Discussions

2 Liberal Nation States and the Antinomies of Minority

Representation: The Impact on the Republic of Turkey 11
Ephraim Nimni

3 In Search of an Alternative Perspective on Minority

Rights and Minority Group Formation: Re-politicizing
Non-territorial Autonomy 41
Ahmet Murat Aytaç and Zafer Yılmaz

4 Addressing the Kurdish Self-Determination Conflict:

Democratic Autonomy and Authoritarianism in Turkey 59
Naif Bezwan

ix
x    Contents

Part II Autonomy Models in Europe

5 National Cultural Autonomy in Central and Eastern

Europe: Challenges and Possibilities 85
Federica Prina, David J. Smith and Judit Molnar Sansum

6 A Nation-State or a Multinational State? National

Conceptions, Minorities and Self-Determination
in Spain 113
Lucía Payero-López

Part III Autonomy Discussions in Turkey and the

Kurdish Issue

7 Between Authoritarianism and Peace: The Kurdish

Opening in Turkey (2013–2015) 137
Elçin Aktoprak

8 Kurdish Movement’s Democratic Autonomy

Proposals in Turkey 159
Cengiz Gunes and Çetin Gürer

9 The Judiciary in Autonomy Arrangements:

Lessons for the Kurdish Case 177
Derya Bayır

10 Rethinking Democracy and Autonomy Through

the Case of Kurdish Movement 211
Dilan Okçuoğlu

11 Militancy, Reconciliation, Motherhood: A History

of Kurdish Women’s Movements 229
Bahar Şimşek

Index 253
 Notes on Contributors

Dr. Elçin Aktoprak was an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political

Sciences, Ankara University till she was dismissed as per an emergency
decree in February 2017. She is the author of States and Their Nations:
Nationalism and Minority Issues in Western Europe (2010) and co-
editor of Nationalism in the Twenty First Century: Theory and Practice
(2016). Her research interests are theories of nationalism, minority issues
in Europe, the Kurdish question, conflict resolution and peace studies.
She published books and articles on these issues in leading national and
international journals.
Dr. Ahmet Murat Aytaç is the author of The Adventure of Family: The
Making of the Idea of Modern Family in Turkey (2007), Spirit of Masses:
Crowds in Political and Social Imagination (2012). He is one of the
co-editors of the book, entitled Nomadic Thinking: On the Shores of
Deleuze’s Thought (2014). He worked as an Assistant Professor at the
Faculty of Political Sciences, Ankara University till he was dismissed as
per an emergency decree in February 2017. His main research areas are
the philosophy of human rights, history of political thought and political
theory, and radical democracy. He has published many articles on these
issues in many leading international and national journals.
Dr. Derya Bayır is the author of the book Minorities and Nationalism
in Turkish Law. Her interests include international human rights and
minority rights, law and religion, the Turkish legal system and Ottoman
pluralism. She obtained her doctorate from the Law Department at

xi
xii    Notes on Contributors

Queen Mary. Her thesis was awarded a prize by the Contemporary

Turkish Studies Chair at the LSE. Derya has litigated many cases before
the European Court of Human Rights, including the prominent case
of Güveç v. Turkey. She was affiliated to GLOCUL as a visiting scholar
while holding a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research secular law
and religious diversity in Turkey.
Naif Bezwan (Ph.D., Universität Osnabrück) is currently based at
LSE. Having emigrated in 1991 from Turkey to Germany, he obtained
his undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in the latter country.
Dr. Bezwan then moved back to Turkey to serve as Assistant Professor
in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at
Mardin Artuklu University, a post from which he was recently dismissed
for political reasons as per an emergency decree. His research and teach-
ing interests include the political and administrative system of Turkey in
the context of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republican era,
the process of Turkey’s accession to the European Union, Turkey’s for-
eign policy, Turkey’s policy towards Kurds as well as Kurdish quest for
self-rule, and Kurdish political parties, modern history and society. Before
taking up his post at Mardin Artuklu University in January 2014, Bezwan
was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College London and at SOAS. He has
regularly featured in the press as an expert on Turkey’s Kurdish conflict,
its Middle East policy, Kurdish politics and intra-Kurdish relations.
Dr. Cengiz Gunes completed his Ph.D. at the Ideology and Discourse
Analysis Research Programme, the Department of Government,
University of Essex, UK. He is the author of The Kurdish National
Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance (London: Routledge,
2012) and co-editor of The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives
on Violence, Representation, and Reconciliation (London: Routledge,
2014). His main research interests are in the areas of peace and conflict
studies, the Kurds in the Middle East, the international relations of the
Middle East and Turkish politics. Currently, he works as an associate lec-
turer at the Open University, UK.
Dr. Çetin Gürer studied sociology and political science at the
University of Hamburg Germany. He received his doctorate in politi-
cal science in 2015 at the University of Ankara. Presently he is based in
Bremen, Germany, works at the Zentrum für Arbeit und Politik (zap),
University of Bremen. He published his book Democratic Autonomy as a
Heterotopia of Citizenship in 2015 by NotaBene Publisher in Ankara.
 Notes on Contributors    xiii

Dr. Ephraim Nimni taught at the Universities of Keele, New South

Wales in Sydney, and Queen’s University Belfast. Published widely
on minority rights, models of national self-determination that do not
require separate nation states, multiculturalism and the applicabil-
ity of the national cultural autonomy model to contemporary multina-
tion states and on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. He is a member of the
board of the journals Ethnopolitics and Politikon. He was a lecturer at
the Social Dialogue Partners seminar in Sarajevo, BiH and the M.A. in
Comparative Ethnic Conflict, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao.
His work has been cited in a presentation to the United Nations General
Assembly in New York on 22 March 2010.
Dr. Dilan Okçuoğlu recently finished her Ph.D. in the department of
political studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Her Ph.D. thesis is enti-
tled, ‘Territorial Control and Democratization: A Study of Kurds in
Turkey’. In this seminal work, she proposes a typology of territorial con-
trol drawing on her 12 months-long ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s
Kurdish borderlands from 2013 to 2014. After getting her undergradu-
ate degree from the department of economics at Bogazici University, she
completed her first M.A. degree in political science at Central European
University and the second one at Queen’s University. In addition to her
academic career, she also worked as a professional journalist in Istanbul.
Her academic interests span on a wide range of topics in the fields of
political theory and comparative politics, such as global justice, nation-
alism, secession and self-determination, politics of territory and borders,
conflict resolution and peace-making as well as multiple aspects of the
Kurdish question.
Dr. Lucía Payero-López is a Lecturer in Law at the School Padre
Ossó (University of Oviedo). She is also a Research Collaborator at the
Department of Philosophy of Law (University of Oviedo). Her research
interests lie in the fields of Legal Philosophy, Political Theory and
Constitutional Theory. She has published articles and book chapters on
issues relating to nationalism, self-determination of peoples, devolution
in Spain and the UK, federal theory, constitutionalism, transitional jus-
tice in Spain, citizenship and migration.
Dr. Federica Prina is a Lecturer at Central and East European Studies
(CEES), University of Glasgow. Between 2014 and 2017 she was a
Research Associate at CEES, working on a comparative research project
xiv    Notes on Contributors

on national cultural autonomy and minority rights Eastern Europe.

Previous research was on the implementation of international standards
on cultural rights of national minorities in the Russian Federation. Her
publications include the book National Minorities in Putin’s Russia:
Diversity and Assimilation (Routledge, 2016), and various articles on
ethnic identity, minority participation, and cultural and linguistic rights
in the Eastern European context (in journals such as Ethnopolitics, the
Netherlands Human Rights Quarterly, and the Journal on Ethnopolitics
and Minority Issues in Europe). From 2011 to 2013 Prina was employed
by European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), where she coordinated
the research cluster ‘Culture and Diversity’. From 2012 to 2014 she was
the editor of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe,
and since 2015 she is one of the managing editors of the European
Yearbook of Minority Issues. She has also worked in human rights as a
practitioner, for the London-based NGO Article 19, as project man-
ager and researcher on freedom of expression and the media in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia (1997–2008). In 2009–2011 she was involved
in the joint Council of Europe/EU programme ‘Minorities in Russia:
Developing Culture, Language, Media and Civil Society’.
Dr. Judit Molnar Sansum currently works as Associate Data Analyst
for the UK Government. Between 2014 and 2017 she was as Research
Associate at Central and East European Studies (CEES), University
of Glasgow. She was one of the researchers for a UK Economic and
Social Research Council-funded project on minority rights and demo-
cratic political community in Eastern Europe; she focused on Hungary,
Romania and Serbia as case study countries. Previously Molnar Sansum
carried out research on the integration process of immigrants from
the post-Soviet states in the United States and UK, and she was also
involved in various projects on borderland studies. Some of her papers
on these issues are: ‘The Integration Process of Immigrants in Scotland,
UK and in Washington State, USA: Immigrants from Countries of the
Former Soviet Union, in M. Brie, I. Horga and S. Şipoş (eds.) Ethnicity,
Confession and Intercultural Dialogue at the European Union Eastern
Border (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); ‘A New Cross-border
Research Possibility in Four Countries (Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine,
Romania) Social Activities without Borders’, Central-European Regional
Policy and Human Geography, Year II No. 1 (co-authored with Piskóti,
Zs., Siskáné Szilasi, B., Szalontai, L. 2012); ‘Comparative Study of
 Notes on Contributors    xv

Cross-border Relations in Hungary’ in Bush, D. (ed.) Interkulturelle

Mediation in der Grenzregion (Peter Lang Publisher, 2006). From
1992 to 2014 she held an academic post at the University of Miskolc,
Hungary. She has also been the recipient of two Marie Curie EU
Fellowships, hosted by Queen’s University Belfast (2004–2005) and the
University of Glasgow (2008–2011) with the University of Washington
(2008–2010).
Bahar Şimşek is a Ph.D. candidate studying Kurdish cultural politics at
Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was a Research Assistant at
the Faculty of Communication, Ankara University till she was dismissed
as per an emergency decree in January 2017. She has an interdiscipli-
nary background in mathematics, cultural studies and politics. She is the
co-editor of a book on transformation of Kurdish movements’ political
discourse through Rojava’s emergence as a political agent in the Middle
East. Her research interests are theories of gender, ethnicity and cultural
politics.
David J. Smith is Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European
Studies, Co-Editor of Europe-Asia Studies and a former Head of the
Central and East European Studies (CEES) division at the University
of Glasgow. He has worked extensively on issues of ethnic diversity and
non-territorial self-government in the Baltic States, both past and pres-
ent, and in 2014–2018 led a large UK Economic and Social Research
Council-funded research project on non-territorial self-government in
Eastern Europe, which includes Russia, Hungary, Estonia, Romania and
Serbia as case study countries. Among his many books and articles on
ethnicity, nationalism, minority rights and processes of Europeanisation
in the region are: Ethnic Diversity and the Nation-State (Routledge,
2012); ‘Reframing the National Question in Eastern Europe:
A Quadratic Nexus?’, in Ethnopolitics (2002); Estonia: Independence
and European Integration (Routledge, 2001); Post-Cold War Identity
Politics (Frank Cass, 2003); and ‘Minority Rights, Multiculturalism and
EU Enlargement’, in the Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues
in Europe (2003). Smith is a member of the Advisory Board of the
European Centre for Minority Issues and has conducted policy briefing
work for the UK Government, the OSCE HCNM and the Council of
Europe Venice Commission on issues of minority politics in Central and
Eastern Europe. From 2012–2014 he was a Visiting Researcher at the
Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
xvi    Notes on Contributors

Dr. Zafer Yılmaz is a visiting scholar (Dr.) at the Faculty of Economics

and Social Sciences, Potsdam University. He is affiliated at both the
Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity and the
Chair of Sociology at the University of Potsdam. He works currently
on the rise of authoritarianism, transformation of the rule of law and
citizenship in Turkey. He has published a book on the concept of risk
and poverty alleviation policies of the World Bank and several papers
on new poverty management, family policies and new Islamic charity
mentality in Turkey. His latest publications include ‘The AKP and the
Spirit of the “New” Turkey: Imagined Victim, Reactionary Mood, and
Resentful Sovereign’, Turkish Studies (2015), and ‘“Strengthening the
Family” Policies in Turkey: Managing the Social Question and Armoring
Conservative-Neoliberal Populism’, Turkish Studies (2017).
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Ephraim Nimni and Elçin Aktoprak

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 empha-
sis 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

E. Nimni (*)
Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflicts, Queen’s University Belfast,
Belfast, UK
e-mail: e.nimni@qub.ac.uk
E. Aktoprak
Independent Researcher, Ankara, Turkey

© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Nimni and E. Aktoprak (eds.), Democratic Representation
in Plurinational States, Comparative Territorial Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01108-6_1
2 E. NIMNI AND E. AKTOPRAK

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 pluri-
national 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 mon-
ocultural 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 cru-
cial 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 gen-
ocides. Prima facie, there seems to be a recurrent problem in the politi-
cal architecture of democratising states. This recurrent problem is how to
organise developing multi-ethnic and multi-nation states so that majori-
ties 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 suf-
fering 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 oth-
ers. Here, the rights, culture and identity of minority communities must
be recognised and given a role in the political architecture of democratis-
ing 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

narrow interpretations that solely define this right as the right to con-
stitute 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 mech-
anism to alleviate minority problems in Turkey. We furthermore consider
that the solution to these problems is vital for the expansion and devel-
opment 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 cru-
cial political, economic and strategic goal for developing democracies.
Multicultural liberal democracies sincerely aim for equality and indi-
vidual human rights, but they are often blind and lack procedures and
mechanisms to accommodate culturally diverse minority communi-
ties. 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 com-
munities 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 dia-
logue 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 compo-
sition of many cities in Turkey. There are now culturally diverse popu-
lations residing closely to each other. This situation raises important
and unprecedented questions about how to manage culturally diverse
4 E. NIMNI AND E. AKTOPRAK

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 demo-
cratic 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 sev-
eral 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 devel-
oping Turkey as a plurinational state. As the opening chapter of this sec-
tion, 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 dis-
cusses the motives of contemporary secessionist movements in this con-
text. 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 solu-
tions 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
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

latest developments for laying a background for the book. He argues

that while the concept of ‘democratic confederalism’ acts as the key the-
oretical 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 mech-
anism 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 solv-
ing the Kurdish issue in Turkey. The first one written by Prina, Smith
and Sansum examining the law and practice of national cultural auton-
omy (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 auton-
omy 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 prac-
tice 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 pluri-
national 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 real-
ity for solving the Kurdish issue and examines the Kurdish Opening by
6 E. NIMNI AND E. AKTOPRAK

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 follow-
ing chapters on Kurdish autonomy discussions.
Gunes and Gürer continue by exploring how the Kurdish move-
ment 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 ter-
ritorial integrity by drawing on the key texts through which democratic
autonomy proposal has been articulated.
Bayır contributes to the autonomy discussions among Kurdish move-
ment by handling judiciary in autonomy arrangements. She looks at the
scope of the judicial autonomy demand of the Kurdish movement from
a historical perspective and then examines various models existing in the
world. Although there are many studies exploring the various models
for the administrative and legislative power sharing in countries having
autonomous arrangements, there are limited studies exploring the ter-
ritorial distribution of judicial power between central and local gov-
ernments. Therefore, the paper aims to examine the judicial systems of
the countries having regional autonomous arrangements. In so doing,
Bayır scrutinises judicial systems of Canada, Spain, Belgium and the UK
(including Northern Ireland and Scotland) with different and distinct
models, and their possible application in Turkey.
Okçuoğlu, by following the rationale of the book, takes m ­ inority
empowerment as a foundational principle of autonomy and focuses on
territorial autonomy discussions in relation with the Kurdish issue in
Turkey. She draws a theoretical distinction between instrumentalist and
intrinsic values of democracy and argues that the intrinsic view of democ-
racy is compatible with autonomy and collective self-­ determination
because the demands of freedom as non-domination for everyone
regardless of their ethnicity and group membership become a threshold
that a set of democratic institutions has to meet.
The autonomy discussions are intermingled with the emancipation of
women in the Kurdish movement and Şimşek offers a descriptive con-
tribution for this ongoing discussion with her chapter. By asserting the
continuity between two founder ideologies of the Turkish state, which
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

are namely Kemalist and neo-liberal Islamist ideologies, in terms of their

(Turkish) nationalist investment in the non-national (Kurdish) female
agency, she explores the three facets of the Kurdish women movement:
the presentation of Kurdish women fighters as the historical protectors
of Kurdish national culture in the form of ‘goddesses’; the women quota
promoting public understandings surrounding Kurdish women, and
the emergence of motherhood in the name of reconciliation; and the
­conditional-recognition which, as perceived by the West, demonstrates
the Kurdish women’s military forces’ secular promise towards the Middle
East as unbound by İslam, and maintaining their own agency.
We should mention that this book has been written and edited just
after the end of the Kurdish Opening in Turkey in 2015 and while con-
tributors are writing their chapters, six of them lost their positions at
the universities because of signing a peace petition on the Kurdish issue.
However, they have not given up their academic studies and their aim
to put a little stone for building peace. Recently, academic freedom is
limited and working on minority and human rights has become a kind
of an uphill fight once more in Turkey. Therefore, protecting academic
freedom has also become a key principle of this book under these newly
emerging conditions in Turkey after the summer of 2015. This work pre-
sents a variety of good and original arguments, and the ideas expressed
are clearly the ideas of the authors, and are a vivid testimony of the
expression of different creative ideas when academic freedom guides all
academic work. The editors endorse the view that academic freedom is
an essential condition for a vibrant and creative university environment.

References
Keating, M. (2001). Plurinational Democracy, Stateless Nations in a Post-
Sovereignty Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nimni, E. (2010). Cultural Minority Self-Governance. In M. Weller & K. Nobbs
(Eds.), Political Participation of Minorities: A Commentary on International
Standards and Practice (pp. 634–660). New York: Oxford University Press.
 PART I

Theoretical Discussions
 CHAPTER 2

Liberal Nation States and the Antinomies

of Minority Representation: The Impact
on the Republic of Turkey

Ephraim Nimni

The Perplexing Recurrence of Ethnic Conflict

This chapter aims to explore how a democratic deficit in the process
of minority representation in transitions to liberal democracy tends to
exacerbate, and in some cases, generate ethnonational conflicts. This
may sound counter-intuitive, so a detailed argument must be presented
and evaluated. The ethnonational conflicts in the dismembering Soviet
Union, particularly in the Caucasus (Bayramov and Nolan 2018), and
the catastrophic dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia (Denich
1994), are cases in question, as well as the construction of the Republic
of Turkey as a nation state from the ruins of the multi-ethnic Ottoman
Empire (Cizre 2001: 229). Equally, the transition to democracy in
post-Franco’s Spain led to ethnonational conflicts not fully resolved
(Saxton 2004: 42; Colomer 2017; Moreno 2007). Regime changes,

E. Nimni (*)
Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflicts, Queen’s University Belfast,
Belfast, UK
e-mail: e.nimni@qub.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2018 11

E. Nimni and E. Aktoprak (eds.), Democratic Representation
in Plurinational States, Comparative Territorial Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01108-6_2
12 E. NIMNI

even in transitions to representative democracy are conflictive processes,

as ethnonational groups attempt to defend their rights or assert their
authority (Zurcher 2007: x, 2). These concrete cases are not discussed
here. Instead, what will be discussed here are the often overlooked and
rarely discussed reasons of why nation state liberal representative democ-
racy in the process of nation-building exacerbates ethnic conflicts.
Ethnonational conflicts are conflicts that occur between ethnic or
national communities in the context of the same territorial space, usually
a nation state. These should be understood as problems of recognition,
representation and self-rule of cultural communities, and are often moti-
vated by inequalities between groups (Cederman and Wucherpfennig
2017: 21). Ethnonational conflict management refers to models and pol-
icies that produce mechanisms of incorporation and representation. The
aim is to get conflicting parties to develop mutually acceptable mecha-
nisms of recognition and representation, so that they can negotiate griev-
ances through mutually agreed democratic procedures in the framework
of a pluriethnic or plurinational polis (O’Neill 2007: 429).
While not all ethnonational conflicts are violent and bloody, the
majority of them unfortunately are, and these violent conflicts occur with
depressing regularity in every continent. In almost every case, they dis-
rupt the functioning of the political system. Many researchers explain
them in detail by analysing local circumstances and factors, but few ask
an important question: Why are these conflicts so recurrent? When the
conflicts are violent and deadly they persist for long periods of time.
More ominously, conflicting factions construct contradictory, rigid and
incompatible world views (Rouhama and Bar-Tal 1998: 761–763). Some
researchers argue that ethnic conflicts are multidimensional, there is no
single theory that is robust enough to explain the origin and dynamics
of ethnic conflict (Williams 2015: 147). Others like Blagojevic (2009)
argued ethnic conflict emerge when several factors converge: major
structural crisis; presence of historical memories of inter-ethnic griev-
ances; ethnic intolerance; manipulation of inter-ethnic competition over
resources and rights. Yet the question remains, why this myriad of fac-
tors and antagonisms express themselves mostly in ethnonational strife?
Furthermore, what triggers ethnonational conflicts in different circum-
stances, in vastly different parts of the world, in vastly different cultures
and societies, rich and poor? In a dissenting view, Brubaker and Laitin
(1998) say that there is an unwarranted political and scholarly tendency
to conflate these conflicts into ethnonational conflicts while in fact they
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 13

are something else. They plea for their disaggregation. Yet, the question
remains unanswered, if these are conflicts with different components
and causes, why they continuously manifest themselves in ethnonational
manners? Why are they so difficult to resolve? The recurrence of the eth-
nic factor is left here out of the equation and this absence needs to be
addressed.
There are few persuasive answers to this puzzling question. Here per-
haps we need to go beyond specific and local circumstances, to consider
some of the key institutional and governmental provisions that character-
ise modernity, including the transition to democracy. Surely representative
democracy and the democratic nation state were not designed to create
conflict. On the contrary, they were designed to allow for popular rep-
resentation liberty and self-determination (Habermas 1996). Yet, despite
this, it will be argued here that democratic modernisations could act as
involuntary triggers and catalysts for protracted ethnonational conflicts. In
a puzzling and paradoxical way, since the French Revolution, liberal repre-
sentative democracy acts as an impulse for national homogeneity and the
persistence of centralised administrative forms of governance. In transitions
to democracy, as the one that occurred in twilight of the Ottoman Empire
and the advent of the Republic of Turkey, Kemalists perceived the ethnic
heterogeneity of the population as a threat to the political integrity of the
nascent national state. Unfortunately, this is still the case in the Republic of
Turkey. Kuyucu expresses this clearly:

There existed, therefore, a major contradiction in the founding principles

of the Turkish state and Turkish nationalism; an accommodating civic
criteria of belonging at the legal level existed side by side with a rigidly
defined, monopolistic and exclusive ethnic basis for the nation. (2005:
370)

In democratic transitions, leaders formed in the old ways play an impor-

tant role in consolidating new centralised bureaucracies and political
institutions, creating what Albertus and Menaldo (2018: 47) call “elite
biased democracies”.
In liberal democracies, the question of democratic representation
becomes of pivotal importance. The notion of democratic ­representation
is taken for granted as emancipatory and it is perceived to be not only
self-explanatory, but a cardinal point of departure for democratic politics.
In theory, citizens are expected to be the “kingmakers” and conceptually
14 E. NIMNI

induce governments to implement the policies they want (Powell 2004:

91). But in plurinational and multicultural societies, how homogenous are
citizens? Are they equal and homologous as perceived by liberal democ-
racy? More ominously, is there in the vision of equality and homogeneity
of citizens, a hidden dominance of the cultural majority? After all, major-
itarian democracy is obviously the rule of the majority (Hammar 2016).
Save in very few exceptions, democratic representation operates in
nation states. Democratic representation is often narrowly understood to
mean forms electoral mechanisms through which citizens transfer man-
dates to elected officials and hold them accountable to carry them out.
As we shall see, this form of institutional democracy suffers from a dem-
ocratic deficit (O’Donnell 2017: 79). This is because the liberal modality
privileges individuals and constructs citizenship as a homogenising and
homologous categorisation. Prima facie nevertheless, it seems coun-
ter-intuitive to say that liberal and democratic modalities of governance
generate conflictive relations. But unfortunately, this is often the case as
we shall see below.

One Person One Vote and the Paradox

of Representing Minorities

The liberal democratic nation state has valuable features. Citizens in lib-
eral democracies appear to be satisfied with the system while those in
authoritarian systems often desire to live under it. Freedom of Expression
is a cardinal principle. Never before in the history of humanity was a
form of governance met with such approval across vastly diverse soci-
eties. Notions of civic national identities and liberal democracy have
grown hand in hand with the nation state in the genesis of what Edward
Said (1978: 4–5) calls the “Occident”, the idea that makes possible the
existence of the “Orient” in Western mythology. Here the “Orient” and
the “Occident” are perceived as different opposite poles, and to succeed
“Oriental” societies must embrace Western values. Here, nationhood
and nation-building become the repositories of the project of modernity,
in ways that invite emulation outside the “Occident”. This becomes clear
in the Kemalist emulation of the French Revolution, as Kemalists aimed
to create a “modern” nation and a nation state and to relegate prac-
tices they considered “backward” to the “litterbin of history” (Parla and
Davison 2004: 123). For example, the Kemalist notion of secularism, or
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 15

laiklik, was inspired in the Jacobin laïcité, and the Orientalist notion that
Islam is a source of backwardness. A second dimension of Kemalism is
its unitary understanding of national identity. Here again, the notion is
borrowed from French Jacobinism. The experience of the collapse of the
multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire trigged deep suspicion of claims for state-
hood from ethnic minorities, and following the Jacobin inspiration, the
aim was to assimilate them as fast as possible with citizenship as com-
pensation. The national glue was a militant secular Turkish nationalism,
which ascribed its characteristics to all citizens irrespective of origin, with
one exception: non-Muslims.
There is here a very intriguing paradox. Kemalist and other secular
parties, continue to use the term Gayrimüslimler (non-Muslims) to refer
to some ethnic minorities. Why should militant secularists use a religious
term to describe national minorities? (Aktoprak 2010) Some commen-
tators argue that this is the result of prejudice against minorities and in
the case of Jews, antisemitism. This simplistic explanation is incorrect.
The issue is more complex, has little to do with prejudice and more to
do with a reaction to secession-oriented minority ethnonationalism. This
was coupled with the majority ethnonational demand for homogeneity,
following the logic of the modern nation state. The issue can only be
addressed schematically here.
The term Gayrimüslimler originates from the Ottoman Millet System,
a theocratic autonomy system based on the Islamic teaching that the
“people of the book” (‫ أهل الكتاب‬′Ahl al-Kitāb) mainly Christians and
Jews are granted freedom of worship; and generally not forced to con-
vert to Islam and must pay a special tax for their exemption from mili-
tary service. In the Ottoman Empire, the different sultans had also the
title of Caliph (Arabic: ‫ خلَيفة‬khalīfah) the religious successor of the
Prophet, the supreme Islamic authority. The Ottoman Millet System
was the Ottoman interpretation of the above and over different periods
with changes and nuances, the system provided considerable autonomy
in most domains of life for the theocratically defined minorities, allow-
ing not only freedom of worship, but also wide-ranging autonomous
practices including their own separate legal system. In this, the Ottoman
Empire was in practice a theocratic confederal plurinational state. This
led the distinguished British multiculturalist Professor Bhikhu Parekh
in his magnum opus (2000: 205), to argue that the millet system “had
a remarkable record of religious tolerance that put Western Europe to
16 E. NIMNI

shame”. I have discussed the millet system elsewhere (Nimni 2015:

72–74) and the discussion cannot be entered here.
With the end of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition in the
Republic of Turkey of a secular Jacobin system of individual citizen
rights, the millet system apparently ended. Yet Sandal (2013: 643)
claims that The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 re-established the “millet”
system of the Ottoman Empire by giving non-Muslim populations a
“minority” status. It is not clear it was the millet system, for the latter
had several other characteristics besides recognition. Unlike the millet
system, The Lausanne Treaty simply recognised non-Muslims as minor-
ities. This privilege was not conferred to other Muslim minorities and
the reason is simple: in their desire to consolidate the Turkish nation
state homogenisation, they denied national status to the Kurds and
other national minorities. In Lausanne, the delegation from Turkey got
the approval that only non-Muslims are to be recognised as minorities
(Oran 2007: 35).
For this reason, the practice to refer to non-Turkish minorities as
Gayrimüslimler was strangely continued. There is a contextual expla-
nation for this. Except for Jews who in general and for historic reasons
felt loyal to the Ottoman System that gave them refuge after the Spanish
persecutions (Zionism developed much later and had little impact in
Turkey), many members of the “non-Muslim” millets develop strong
ethnonationalist secessionist movements. The largest and most impor-
tant millet, the “Rum Millet” (millet-i Rûm) was predominately Eastern
Orthodox Christian, whose history, traditions and theology are rooted
Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire (Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν
Ῥωμαίων) conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. During the nineteen
century under the influence of ethnonationalist ideas, a group of secu-
lar members of the Rum Millet developed the “Great Idea” (Greek:
Μεγάλη Ιδέα: Megali Idea) an irredentist ethnonational movement that
expressed the goal of establishing a Greek Nation State in all areas inhab-
ited by ethnic Greeks mainly in the Ottoman Empire. Not all Diaspora
Greeks supported this irredentist idea, and many were happy with their
Diaspora Greek identity (Greek: ρωμιοσύνη: romiosini). In many of
these areas, Greeks were a minority of the population, if at all. This led
to a succession of mass killings and conflicts, culminating in the hor-
rendous forceful exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey
in 1923. 1.6 million people were forcefully moved from their homes to
achieve the mainly Greek and Turkish nationalist goal of an ethnically
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 17

homogenous population in their nation states. The pain suffering and

nostalgia of this forced expulsion remains until today. This is commem-
orated by the beautifully moving song of Mikis Theodorakis Kaimos
(Καημός).1 Thus fear of secessionist irredentist ethnonational move-
ments lead Kemalists and secular Turkish nationalists to the securitisation
of these minorities under the old religious term Gayrimüslimler. Until
1958 non-Muslims were not allowed to work in the public sector, a bla-
tant contradiction for a secular regime (Azak 2010: 13).
In building the liberal democratic nation state, a unitary understand-
ing of national identity was developed through a centralised and assim-
ilationist education. Refusal to conform was and is still, interpreted as
secessionism (Onar 2007: 273). This is the legacy that brought about
the current leadership in Turkey. Özpek and Yaşar (2018: 200–202),
follow this argument by explaining that in contemporary Turkey, the
ruling AKP party capitalised on the anti-elitist sentiment generated by
the monist-secularist approach of Kemalism. It used the tension between
Kemalist secularism and democracy while keeping its monistic national-
ism hostile to minorities. They successfully deployed a combination of
populism and Islamism to mobilise those alienated and left behind by
Kemalism and intensify an anti-elitist sentiment of the popular sectors.
But here the Kurdish movement is the stone in the shoe of the rul-
ing party. As victims of the monistic state and the quintessential group
left behind by Kemalism and the present government, they demand a
democratic plurinational state, unitary, but representing all. Outside
Turkey, the Rojava project in Syria, cautiously exemplifies this model
(Dirik 2018).
It will wrong to understand the above as exclusively determined by
Turkish circumstances. This is part of pattern of nation-building, and
should be understood as a by-product of the institutional and political
arrangements in the process of modernity and of building secular and
liberal democratic nation states. These arrangements will be discussed
below.
What is striking here is that in whatever way it is construed, the
idea of national identity contains a particularistic element which is at
odds with assertions of modern universality cherished by liberal mod-
ernists and indeed Kemalists. The convergence in the nation state
between a specific cultural-national tradition, with a sense of history,
with a Universalist liberal world view which aims to realise universal
18 E. NIMNI

individual values, remains one of the unexplained oddities of modernity

(Schwarzmantel 2003: 28).
In the academic literature as well as in political practice there is a
recurrent tendency to conflate nation and state, considering the world as
a conglomerate of perennial nation states without bearing in mind that
they are historically constructed and that the overwhelming majority of
states are multi-ethnic and plurinational. Indeed, the prevalent form of
political organisation across the world is the nation state, yet it is cru-
cially important to remember that a nation is not a state. A generation
ago, Walker Connor (1978) in a famous and extensively quoted article
conclusively showed this. Yet, the error is continuously repeated. The
state is a governmental and administrative apparatus and the nation a cul-
tural community—self-defined or otherwise—similar but not identical to
an ethnic group. A cautious estimate puts the number of nations in this
world to well above 3000 while with the admission of South Sudan in
July 2011, there are 193 states represented in the UN. In 1993 fewer
than 20 states where ethnically homogeneous in the sense that cultural
minorities account for less than 5% of the population (Brown 1993: 6;
Fearon 2003: 204), Today thanks to patterns of unprecedented migra-
tion there are even less culturally homogeneous states, mostly a few small
islands states. There are very few exceptions among large states, Korea
and to some extent Poland after the genocide of Jews and the expul-
sion of Germans. Nation states in the strict sense of the term are only
a handful, and “titular nations”2 are only a small fraction of all nations
(Breuilly 2015: 32). It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that the
term “nation state”—understood as one (cultural) nation in one state—is
inaccurate for the vast majority of states represented in the UN.
There are countless debates and discussions on what is nation.
However, across intellectual and ideological divides and debates, it
emerges that a nation is a type of cultural artefact (Smith 1999; Gellner
1983; Connor 1993) and as such different from a state, which is a terri-
torial institution of governance. The nation is then a type of cultural and
political community whose characteristics are disputed.
The symbiotic creature called the nation state resulted from series of
parochial events in late medieval Europe and this is associated with the
rise of the European system of states. International relations theorists call
it “The Westphalian System” (Teschke 2002). This is the emergence in
Europe of well-defined states which recognise each other’s control over
territory (sovereignty). The nation became the powerful cultural glue
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 19

that kept these states unified, giving legitimation to the state in eyes of
the majority nation. When these majority nations did not exist, the state
constructed them by coercion and fiat (White 2007: 66; Wimmer and
Feinstein 2010: 785). As Ayşe Kadioğlu explains, this pattern was repli-
cated in the construction of the Republic of Turkey:

The Republican state which fostered a Jacobin mentality, led to the crea-
tion of an official, monolithic, absolute Turkish identity either by suppress-
ing or by ignoring the multiple identities that came to be imprisoned in
the periphery. (1996: 191–192)

The definition of a nation state as a state of the (titular) nation is at odds

with the numbers above. Nation states often give the impression they are
homogeneous and have no mechanisms to represent minorities, trapping
cultural minorities into uncertainty and even alienation. As explained a
generation ago by Walker Connor (1972), what Kadioğlu describes is
unfortunately, a common pattern in the process of nation-building in
different parts of the world.
A crucial question is: why democracies have difficulties in representing
ethnic minorities? In order to understand this, it is necessary to examine
the centralist-atomist model of governance.

The Limits of Liberal Democracies, the Central Atomist

Characteristic of Liberalism
The term liberal democracy has different and contrasting meanings, and
for this reason, no consensual definition is possible. However, perhaps
with some risk of oversimplification, a basic common denominator could
be extracted from contrasting definitions. Liberal democracy is a polit-
ical system based on egalitarian rule and political liberties (Bollen and
Paxton 2000: 59). Here “democracy” is narrowly understood as a gov-
ernment that is accountable to the electorate, and in that each citizen has
a say on how the government is elected in periodical elections. Citizens
are entitled and protected in expressing views. While accepting that sim-
plifications often occur in the expression of political discourses (Farrelly
2014: 16), this common denominator raises questions and some impor-
tant contradictions which are at the heart of its democratic deficit dis-
cussed here. The most basic of them is that liberalism in its many shapes
and forms is individualistically oriented and democracy is a collective
20 E. NIMNI

phenomenon. This potential contradiction creates for liberals a number

of dilemmas, in which those normally at the more conservative side of
liberalism emphasise individuality while those in the opposing faction
emphasise democratic values and pluralism.
Otto Bauer (2000: 232), following Karl Renner (1918/2015), argues
that the liberal democratic state is an imperfect democracy because it is
organised according to the “centralist-atomist” principle. In the genesis
of the modern nation state, he argues, one of its most important char-
acteristics, its centralisation of power, was in fact initially developed by
absolutism. This centralisation completed in a democratic mode, through
the abolition of guilds, estates and other segmental organisations. This
had the effect of reducing recognised political actors to their smallest
parts, Bauer call these “atoms”, i.e. to single individual citizens.
For Karl Renner, a constitutional jurist, the legal representative order
knows only two units. On the one hand, state sovereignty and on the
other hand the sovereignty of the individual citizen. Constitutionally,
in nation state liberal democracies, there are two recognised sovereign
politico-juridical entities, the atomised citizen and the collective totality.
This logic is also applicable to federal territorial states with some adjust-
ments to cater for the division of competences between the central state
and the provinces. In both cases, the juridical political entities are atom-
ised individuals and the sovereign will of the undivided collective. This
organisational characteristic eliminates all intermediate communitarian
locations from the arena of representative politics. While there can be
no doubt (in Bauer’s mind also) that in some important cases this leads
to the expansion of democracy through the irrevocable abolition of sec-
tarian political privilege, in the form of castes, feudal guilds, landlords,
etc. It simultaneously impoverished the quality of the nascent democracy.
This is because it also abolished and made impossible mechanisms of rep-
resentation of different, territorially scattered national and ethnic minori-
ties which are left at the mercy of governmental bureaucracies and worse,
of the tyranny of the majority. Minority parties by virtue of being numer-
ical minorities cannot win in a system of one person one vote. Without
some form of collective representation, they are left at the mercy of
majorities, a less than adequate form of democracy (Nimni 2015).
What this means is that the citizens are seen through the equality prin-
ciple that characterises liberalism, as equal and homologous, to provide
equality of opportunity for all. However, that equality is undermined by
the de facto position of the dominant ethnonational majority as it has its
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 21

cultural identity and needs recognised as the titular nation of the nation
state. In Liberal democracies, this is seen as the “natural” and “com-
mon-sensical” way of behaving. Religious and ethnic minorities do not
have this recognition nor the ability to have community-based electoral
representatives to put forward their views, aspirations and demands.
Unfortunately, a sectorial collective representation is antithetical to the
liberal idea of one person one vote (Nimni 1999). If these minority com-
munities insist on exercising their collective community rights, the only
way open to them is secession. To have the collective rights they yearn
for, they are compelled build a separate liberal nation state, something
that is often impossible because of population overlap in the territory
of the state. There have been, however, some recent discussions on the
value of collective rights for the incorporation of minorities in the area of
legal theory of human rights (Jovanović 2012). These new developments
have not yet impacted the central principles of Western liberal democracy.
In the present state of affairs, liberal democracy in the best scenario,
invites minorities to assimilate to the majority with democracy as com-
pensation, something that often national minorities are not prepared to
accept.
The above is a recipe for serious an intractable conflict for there are
far more nations than nation states are territorially possible in the con-
temporary world. This point was enigmatically made Ernest Gellner, the
great advocate of the idea that the aim of nationalism is to build nation
states:

<To> put it in the simplest possible terms: there is a very large number
of potential nations on earth. Our planet also contains room for a certain
number of independent or autonomous political units. On any reasonable
calculation the former number (of potential nations) is probably much,
much larger than that of possible viable states. If this argument or calcula-
tion is correct, not all nationalisms can be satisfied, at any rate at the same
time. The satisfaction of some spells the frustration of others.

This argument is further and immeasurably strengthened by the fact

that very many of the potential nations of this world live, or until recently
have lived, not in compact territorial units but intermixed with each other
in complex patterns. It follows that a territorial political unit can only
become ethnically homogeneous, in such cases, if it either kills, or expels,
or assimilates all non-nationals. (1983: 2)
22 E. NIMNI

A delimited sovereign territory is essential for the creation of every

nation state, but the overwhelming majority of minority nations and
indigenous peoples, reside in territories that overlap the territories of
others. This creates a “zero-sum” relation, a situation in which each par-
ticipant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the
other participants. Mandelbaum (2016: 3) further argues that nation
states came to homogenise their population and consolidate their iden-
tity not only through minority assimilation, but through what he calls
“pathological” strategies, such as expulsions, genocide and ethnic
cleansing. For these reasons and given that nation states are territo-
rial sovereigns that are not willing to share their sovereignty with oth-
ers, secessions are in most of the cases intractable and bloody conflicts.
Likewise, titular nations are generally not willing to concede to the
demands of minority nations because of the unwarranted fear that these
concessions will dismember their state. In view of this fear, these types of
conflicts are repeated in different parts of the world and in different cir-
cumstances, including the Republic of Turkey. The system of one person
one vote and the vision of equality of individual rights of homologous
citizens find it difficult to accept differential rights for minorities. Nation
states are not usually willing to concede to demands for collective rights
for minority communities because of their unjustified fear that their state
will be dismembered. In fact, the opposite is correct. The incorpora-
tion of national minorities as equal partners is the best antidote to state
dismemberment.
In a perplexing and paradoxical way, this argument disarms Gellner’s
own initial argument that nationalism is a political principle which holds
that the national and the political unit should be congruent (Gellner
1983: 1) for either his version of nationalism fails, or we have genocides
and ethnic cleansings in an industrial scale. Clearly, it is imperative to find
another way.
This situation has another worrying dimension. This situation makes
a large number of states in practice plurinational while they self-define
as nation states, and their plurinationality is not recognised by the struc-
ture of the state or the legal system. This creates an inherent instabil-
ity, for there are non-actionable legal mechanisms to represent national
minorities. The case of Spain comes to mind (see Payero-López in this
book). But the problem is also present in the Republic of Turkey. The
status of Kurds has been a problem since the creation of it. The Kemalist
government rejected the existence of Kurds as a separate ethnonational
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 23

community and enforced a policy of assimilation (Saatci 2002: 557).

As in Spain, the securitisation of the Kurdish minority has not resolved
the problem of recognition, but on the contrary exacerbated it (Martin
2018: 1). The modality of coercively assimilating cultural minorities does
not work, but to the contrary aggravates the menace of session. In an
ironic way, the policies of securitising minorities and coercively assimilate
them has the opposite effect, as these repressive policies act as recruit-
ing agents for secessionist movements. Experience shows repeatedly that
coerced assimilation leads national minorities into demanding the right
to secede.

Is National Self-Determination a Feasible Solution?

National Self-Determination (NSD) is a long-standing international
principle, recognised in the UN charter, in international law, and
enshrined in the UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), 14
December 1960, and supported and sustained in liberal democratic the-
ories. This is the principle that nations have the right to freely choose
their sovereignty and international political status with no external com-
pulsion or external interference. One of the central problems of the use
of the concept in international law and in the various documents of the
United Nations is that nationhood and territorial sovereignty are here
indistinguishably linked. Futhermore, in these documents, nation and
nationhood are related to the titular nation only. To make matters even
more controversial and complicated, a key element of the concept of
self-determination in international law is that it is intertwined with sov-
ereignty. This linkage defines sovereignty as a mechanism of exclusive
jurisdiction. This is to mean that decisions made by a sovereign entity
are final and cannot be challenged by others. Titular nations are a consti-
tutive element of the configuration of states in the age of Modernity. It
need not be so, and it was not so before modernity. Under the so-called
Westphalian Logic, the linkage between nation and state became con-
stitutive and normatively hegemonic, to the point that it became coun-
ter-intuitive to think otherwise. This all-encompassing hegemonic
understanding of NSD is thus applied to states and to cultural commu-
nities that can build a sovereign state that does not clash with a world
system of sovereign states (Sylvester 1999: 10–11). Nevertheless, an
important critical stream in International Relations has challenged the
notion of the sovereign nation state under the rubric of the critique of
24 E. NIMNI

the “Westphalian myth”. This is the understanding of nation states as

fixed, bounded and sovereign. This stream has deconstructed the spa-
tial assumptions inherent in this depiction of the nation state (Ortmann
2018: 406), but in spite of this, the model of the sovereign nation state,
remains influential. From the emergence of nation states, sovereignty
could not be understood without a territorial location. As Beurskens and
Miggelbrink clearly explain:

The close relationship between modern sovereignty and territory is ren-

dered in a triple way: as ‘the notion of equal sovereignty of states’, as
‘internal competence for domestic jurisdiction’ and as ‘territorial preser-
vation of existing boundaries’. State sovereignty, thus, resonates both with
‘internal’ socio-political order and with ‘external’ socio-political order.
(2017: 750)

The authors above suggest it might be the case that sovereignty and state
territory “might be a couple in divorce” (Beurskens and Miggelbrink
2017: 750). Hopefully, they are right, but the triplet above still exercises
considerable influence in the process of nation-building in the Republic
of Turkey, and in international politics in general, and has a decisive
impact in mainstream theories of self-determination.
The above is certainly not the only way to understand NSD, because
as we shall see the term is polysemic and multifaceted. But the above
interpretation is both the most common and equally the most danger-
ous. The process of nation-building securitises minorities that cannot be
assimilated to the titular nation. The issue is conspicuously present in
Turkey through the securitisation of the Kurdish minority. The Kurdish
question symbolises the incompleteness of the project of nation-building
and statehood in the post-Ottoman Empire (Canefe 2008: 391).
The pattern above is by no means a recent development, but one that
goes back to earliest modern expressions of Republican egalitarianism,
and is in more than one way, a constitutive failure of the modern nation
state. Consider the statement of the French Revolutionary and radical
Jacobin Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac on 27 January 1794:

The language of a free people must be one and the same for all. (…)
Federalism and superstition speak low Breton, emigration and hatred
of the Republic speak German, the counterrevolution speaks Italian and
fanaticism speaks Basque. Lets break these instruments damage and error
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 25

(…) Among the ancient idioms, Welsh<sic> (Cymraeg), Gascon, Celtic,

Visigoths, Phoenicians or oriental nuances that make communications in
various countries and citizens forming the territory of the Republic. We
observed (and reports of representatives meet on this point with those of
various agents sent into the departments), that the idiom called low-Bre-
ton, Basque idiom, the German and Italian languages have perpetuated
the reign of fanaticism and superstition, ensured the domination of priests,
nobles and practitioners, prevented the entry of the revolution into nine
important departments and could help the enemies of France. (My own
translation from French)

Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, Rapport du Comité de salut public sur les

idiomes (Report of the Committee of Public Health on Languages) - 8
pluviôse an II: 27 January 1794. http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/franco-
phonie/barere-rapport.htm

Here you have an example of securitisation of minorities, long before

the term was coined by the Copenhagen School (Knudsen 2001: 358).
Securitisation is not a contemporary innovation, but a by-product of
the historical conflation of nations, popular sovereignty and territorial
states. In whatever way one defines national-popular sovereignty; it is a
concept dependent upon the definition of cultural-territorial boundaries,
which inexorably creates outsiders and cultural insiders. Jacobinism was
a strong influence on Kemalism, and it is not a surprise that the nascent
Republic of Turkey wholeheartedly embraced minority securitisation.
This argument is not a peculiarity of French Republicanism, far from
it. It was also advocated by the founding father of Anglo-liberalism. John
Stuart Mill who argued that:

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different

nationalities … Among people without fellow-feeling, especially if they
speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the
working of representative government cannot exist. (1998: 428)

The ideas above had a strong impact not only in the nascent Republic of
Turkey. Kurgan (2018) argues that AKP’s implementation of securitisa-
tion policies is a key in explaining its electoral successes, and example on
how authoritarian governments manage to gather public support.
Likewise, in a very well researched and thought provoking article,
Duco Heijs (2018) compares the “demographic engineering” of the
26 E. NIMNI

Soviet Union with the Republic of Turkey. The article starts with an
epigraph of the famous poem Kızıl Elma (red apple) by Ziya Gökalp.3
The central argument is that in both cases the Soviet Union and the
nascent Republic of Turkey, engaged in a process of “demographic
engineering” to secure the homogeneity of both states. Not sure if the
argument works well in the case of the Soviet Union, as it defined itself
from the start as a plurinational state, even if as Heijs correctly argues,
ethnic persecutions and worse took place under Stalin. However, the dis-
cussion of the dawn of the Republic of Turkey is interesting and reveal-
ing to us. Heijs explains:

In Turkey, a comprehensive approach to assimilate the Kurdish popula-

tion was formulated in the so-called Şark Islahat Planı (Eastern Regions
Reform Plan). Moreover, several Inspectorate-Generals were established as
regional governments in areas that had witnessed some form of Kurdish
resistance. The Inspectorate-Generals were meant to incorporate these
regions in the Turkish nation through implementing policies realizing
Turkification. In order to achieve the strengthening of national conscious-
ness among the Anatolian population in general, the Kemalists launched a
comprehensive program aimed at the replacement of Islam as the basis of
Turkish identity with a so-called scientific theory of Turkish peoplehood.
(2018: 70)

While these policies existed before the AKP period in office, the AKP
redefined Turkishness to incorporate the Islamic dimension repressed
by the Kemalists, incorporating in this way an important sector that was
alienated by Kemalism. Yet, the securitisation of the Kurdish minor-
ity remained intact. While the circumstances and actors that created
the Republic of Turkey are important to consider, the securitisation of
minorities is not a specific problem of the Republic of Turkey, but a con-
stitutive deficiency of the prevailing model of “nation-building” in tran-
sitions to democracy. This argument is certainly not new. A generation
ago, Walker Connor (1972) alerted to this with an article with the sug-
gestive title “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?”. Yet, this alert was
unheeded.
The argument was advanced in an important work by Michael Mann,
The Dark Side of Democracy (2005). Here Mann argues that murderous
ethnic cleansing is an aspect of the age of democracy and not because
of wicked or immoral leaders. The central argument is that multi-­ethnic
settings can create situations when “rule by the people” is defined in
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 27

ethnonational terms, conflating ethnos with demos. A danger zone is

reached in transitions to democracy, when rival ethnic groups claim the
same territory for a democratic monistic nation state, or when the nation-
alist leadership of a nation state aims to create a unity between the citi-
zens of a state and a dominant ethnonational group. Mann further argues
that the danger of ethnic cleansing is reached when the state exercising
sovereignty over a contested territory, has been factionalised or radicalised
by an unstable political environment (Mann 2005: 7). The discussion of
Turkish nationalism follows this line of argumentation. He presents the
“Young Turks” as attractive radical reformers, but that their label was not
initially appropriate since most adherents considered themselves more
Ottoman than Turkish. Mann further argues that their liberalism had
several defects in his words: a tension between individual and communal
rights. Their perception of communal rights was not consociational but
confederal. This means that the local autonomy was never translated into
the superior organs of the state (Mann 2005: 119–120). Yet, as Mann
admits, these criticisms were general criticisms of liberalism in relation to
minorities and not a specific critique of the Young Turks. The crucial issue
that shifted their position was in the context of the decaying Ottoman
Empire, strong centralised states were considered essential for geopolitical
defence (Mann 2005: 120). This last point moved Turkish nationalism to
a position intolerant of cultural pluralism and minority rights.
It is necessary to qualify Mann’s generalisation of the process he so
eloquently and incisively describes with one important consideration.
Ethnic cleansing is not the dark side of democracy, for democracy is a
polysemic term and has forms that roundly escape this cruel imposi-
tion—Democracy must not be exclusively conflated with popular sover-
eignty and liberal democratic representative democracy in nation states.
Democracy has different and contradictory meanings, and it is wrong to
pin it down to liberal representative democracy, precisely because of its
deficiencies. What Mann refers to is the dark side of the sovereign, popu-
lar liberal democratic nation state, unable to recognise forms of commu-
nity representation, and the likely by-product of the exercise of national
(territorial) self-determination in areas of mixed populations. In these
cases, when two or more national communities reside in the same terri-
torial space, when it is not possible to territorially disentangle one from
the other, the individually oriented form of liberalism precludes forms of
collective representation of minorities in what Mann calls consociational
arrangements.
28 E. NIMNI

Territorial sovereignty is the prerogative of a titular nation in liberal

democratic nation states, the titular nation is a culturally defined dem-
ocratic polity whose sovereignty then sits uncomfortably with universal
claims of democracy and liberalism. Consider that liberal democracies
are predicated on the principle of formal equality between citizens. Then
this principle is subverted by the linguistic and cultural privileges of the
titular nation. Minorities of different kind and sorts are often invited to
assimilate to the ways of the titular nation with equality as compensation.
This is invitation is often couched in the language of modernisation,
integration and Affirmative Action. In many cases, this procedure inten-
sifies ethno-cultural injustices and generates alienation, for in the eyes
of many members of minority communities, the procedure violates the
egalitarian ethos of liberal democracy that the state purports to defend.
The standard minority accusation is we are only equals if we partake in the
cultural behaviour of the majority. Consider for example Paul Stratham
powerful intervention in relation to the debate about asylum seekers. He
claims that the issue of asylum:

…<o>pens up a particular contradiction within liberal nation states: it puts

the universal principle that they should respect and protect human rights
by offering asylum to aliens fleeing persecution in direct competition with
the principle that they should primarily serve the interests of the national
community of people from whom sovereignty derives--a group with a
self-image of common descent and ethnicity enshrined in a shared nation-
hood. (2003: 165)

In conclusion, the doctrines of popular nation state sovereignty and

international law definition of NSD are monistic and suffer from dem-
ocratic deficit, and there is a serious question mark as to whether they
are pluralistic or inclusive (Cassese 1995). As argued earlier, the securiti-
sation of minorities was present since the creation of the unitary nation
state and from the early days of the French Revolution. The key problem
is ingrained in the conflation of ethnos with demos in the monist archi-
tecture of an exemplary nation state. The practice of popular nation state
sovereignty runs the serious risk of fusing the dominant ethnos with sov-
ereign demos, and this is dangerous for the vast majority of plurinational
and pluriethnic states that populate this world. It is therefore urgent to
examine again the pattern of exercising popular sovereignty is through
the regime of one nation in one state. This is the best way to avoid the
bloody wars of secession that have plagued transitions to democracy.
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 29

This not only a conceptual debate, but a concrete issue that seri-
ously affects the Republic of Turkey. The expansion of democracy must
include mechanisms of representation at the state level of national and
ethnic minorities. This is not simply a return to the Ottoman model,
which was undemocratic, but the expansion of democracy to incorporate
in a single state the autonomy and representation of national minorities.
If these features existed in the Ottoman model, they should be made to
be democratic.
There are a number of models than be useful in this task, and they will
be briefly examined in the final part of this paper.

Alternative Models for Plurinational Democracies:

Ottoman Brothers (and Sisters!)
One idea is native to the Ottoman Empire: Ottomanism. The term must
be treated carefully, for it has been used and abused to mean different
and contrasting causes, including conservative approaches to religion
and the imposition of religious principles. This is not what it is meant
here. To be sure, there are several different branches of this move-
ment and countless interpretations, some in contradiction with others
(Ergul 2012). What is discussed here is the model that originated from
the “Civic Young Ottomans”, a group that aimed to democratise the
Ottoman Empire by incorporating liberal practices. Some branches of
the Young Ottomans wanted to keep Islamic practices, while other were
secular. The latter developed the ideas that Michelle Campos (2010)
called “civic or secular Ottomanism”. Campos (2010: 2) cites a speech
in Ottoman Turkish in 1909 of Shlomo Yelin, a young Jewish Ottoman
lawyer to a gathering of nobles in Beirut:

In the Ottoman Empire the different peoples are equal, and it is not law-
ful to divide according to race; the Turkish, Arab, Armenian, and Jewish
elements have mixed one with the other, and all of them are connected,
moulded into one shape for the holy vatan <homeland>. Each part of the
nation took upon itself the name of “Ottoman” as a source of pride and
honourable mark. The responsibility to our holy vatan must be our sole
aim…. (2010: 2)

This model attempted to overcome the tensions between the different

religious groups and ethnicities, avoid secession, and unite them through
30 E. NIMNI

the recognition of their identity and community rights to form an

­allegiance to Ottoman State (Çiçek 2010). Their goal was the accept-
ance and recognition of all separate religions and ethnicities in the
Empire with equal rights. They differentiated themselves from the
“Young Turks”, a group that emerged some years later in one important
point. The Young Ottomans wanted to preserve The Ottoman Empire,
converting it into plurinational and multireligious democratic state.
For the Young Turks, after the impact of many secessions, it was a sec-
ular Turkish sense of nationhood that was glue that will keep the state
together (Çolak 2006).
The late nineteen century and the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury saw the surge of unprecedented ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans,
Caucasus and the Eastern Ottoman Empire. The secessionist movements
that followed created the conditions for the more ethnic nationalism of
the Young Turks, and the end of the Ottomanist dream of a plurina-
tional state. Hostility to minorities resulted from the experience of pain-
ful secessions. Nearly a 100 years later, in view of the recurrent problem
of exclusion and national minority representation in Turkey, we are more
aware of the curse of ethnic nationalism, and it might be the time to
rethink these plurinational inclusive models again.

Recent Developments Transformation of Democratic

Theory—From Demos to Demoi
As a result of the democratic shortcomings in the practice of lib-
eral democracy, important arguments and objections are beginning
to emerge questioning if the nation state can be the exclusive locus of
democratic activity. In what I have described elsewhere as a Kuhnian
Paradigm shift (Nimni 2010), the emerging approaches are address-
ing neglected issues, such as whether it is possible to realise democ-
racy beyond the skeleton of the nation state and in particular, if NSD
should only mean the creation of separate states. James Bohman (2005:
297–298) argues that a form of plural democracy requires deeper trans-
formations of democracy away from the structure of the nation state.
Democracy must function across rather than simply beyond borders.
Importantly, the renewed democratic theory must not demolish cultural
differences, as in republican models of the nation state. Democracy must
now become a democracy of the demoi, a plural and diverse conglom-
erate of democratic communities and constituencies within the state.
 2 LIBERAL NATION STATES AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MINORITY … 31

This is a change from a unified constituency to a plurality of diverse

constituencies, from “a people” to “peoples” (Bohman 2007: 13).
This is the expansion of the democracy to the recognition of the col-
lective rights and collective personae through communities or demoi.
Democracy must be seen as a plurality of demos (demoi) within a fed-
eral arrangement instead of a state inspired conception of single demos
(Requejo 2004: 26). This argument, has been taken up by European
Union theorists. Here they advocate a reconceptualisation of the
European Union away from the analogies of the nation state.
Cheneval and Schimmelfennig (2013) to avoid analogies from the
nation state use instead the term “demoicracy”, a polity of multiple demoi
as appropriate for the European Union. Here, The European Union
must start from the premise that it is an organisation with many demoi
and not a nation state, in other words, a demoicracy. Yet, the EU dem-
oicracy cannot be composed exclusively by states-people as its collective
constituents, for as argued before, every state, has ethnic and national
minorities whose identity is different from the titular nation. Kalypso
Nicolaïdis (2013) follows a similar line of argument. She defines “demoi-
cracy” as “a Union of peoples, understood both as states and as citizens,
who govern together but not as one”, and like Cheneval, she argues that
the concept is best understood distinct from both “national” and “supra-
national” versions of single demos polities (Nicolaïdis 2013).
This discussion is important for the transformation of monistic states
into plurinational republics, resolve their democratic deficit by expand-
ing democracy to include mechanisms of representation and collective
rights for ethnonational communities. This argument, facing back to
the Ottomanist ideas discussed above, open the way for the Republic of
Turkey to become a plurinational state, incorporating its national minori-
ties and preventing in this way the danger of secession.

Modalities of Non-territorial Autonomy

in Plurinational States

Because of internal displacements, the Kurds in Turkey are now a dis-

persed community in Turkey and many Kurds and other minorities reside
in areas where they are not majorities (Gunes 2012). Territorial auton-
omy will not be a complete solution, so it is also necessary to consider
modalities of non-territorial autonomy.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
el llanto
que quasi tiene mi ánimo
deshecho?
Sólo á Syreno cuento sin
provecho
mi triste desventura,
que della tanto cura
como el furioso viento en
mar insano
las lágrimas que en vano
derrama el congojado
marinero,
pues cuanto más le ruega,
más es fiero.

No ha sido fino amor, Syreno

mío,
el que por estos campos me
mostrabas,
pues un descuido mío ansí
le ofende.
¿Acuérdaste, traidor, lo que
jurabas
sentado en este bosque y
junto al río?
¿pues tu dureza agora qué
pretende?
¿No bastará que el simple
olvido emiende
con un amor sobrado,
y tal, que si al passado
olvido no aventaja de gran
parte
(pues más no puedo
amarte,
ni con mayor ardor
satisfacerte)
 por remedio tomar quiero la
muerte?

Mas viva yo en tal pena, pues

la siento
por ti, que haces menor toda
tristura,
aunque más dañe el ánima
mezquina.
Porque tener presente tu
figura
da gusto aventajado al
pensamiento
de quien por ti penando en ti
imagina.
Mas tú á mi ruego ardiente un
poco inclina
el corazón altivo,
pues ves que en penas vivo
con un solo deseo
sostenida,
de oir de ti en mi vida
siquiera un no en aquello
que más quiero.
¿Mas qué se ha de esperar
de hombre tan fiero?

¿Cómo agradesces, dime, los

favores
de aquel tiempo passado
que tenías
mas blando el corazón, duro
Syreno,
cuando, traidor, por causa
mía hacías
morir de pura envidia mil
pastores.
 ¡Ay, tiempo de alegría! ¡Ay,
tiempo bueno!
Será testigo el valle y prado
ameno,
á do de blancas rosas
y flores olorosas
guirnalda á tu cabeza
componía,
do á veces añadía
por sólo contentarte algún
cabello:
que muero de dolor
pensando en ello.
Agora andas essento
aborresciendo
la que por ti en tal pena se
consume:
pues guarte de las mañas
de Cupido.
Que el corazón soberbio, que
presume
del bravo amor estarse
defendiendo,
cuanto más armas hace, es
más vencido.
Yo ruego que tan preso y tan
herido
estés como me veo.
Mas siempre á mi deseo
no desear el bien le es buen
aviso,
pues cuantas cosas quiso,
por más que tierra y cielos
importuna,
se las negó el Amor y la
Fortuna.
Canción, en algún pino ó dura
 encina
no quise señalarte,
mas antes entregarte
al sordo campo y al
mudable viento:
porque de mi tormento
se pierda la noticia y la
memoria,
pues ya perdida está mi vida
y gloria.

La delicada voz y gentil gracia de

la hermosa Diana hacía muy clara
ventaja á las habilidades de su
tiempo: pero más espanto daba
ver las agudezas con que
matizaba sus cantares, porque
eran tales, que parescían salidas
de la avisada corte. Mas esto no
ha de maravillar tanto los
hombres que lo tengan por
impossible: pues está claro que
es bastante el Amor para hacer
hablar á los más simples pastores
avisos más encumbrados,
mayormente si halla aparejo de
entendimiento vivo é ingenio
despierto, que en las pastoriles
cabañas nunca faltan. Pues
estando ya la enamorada pastora
al fin de su canción, al tiempo que
el claro sol ya comenzaba á dorar
las cumbres de los más altos
collados, el desamado Marcelio,
de la pastoril posada despedido
para venir al lugar que con Diana
tenía concertado, descendió la
cuesta á cuyo pie ella sentada
estaba. Vióle ella de lejos, y calló
su voz, porque no entendiesse la
causa de su mal. Cuando
Marcelio llegó donde Diana le
esperaba, le dijo: Hermosa
pastora, el claro día de hoy, que
con la luz de tu gesto amaneció
más resplandeciente, sea tan
alegre para ti como fuera triste
para mí si no le hubiesse de
passar en tu compañía. Corrido
estoy en verdad de ver que mi
tardanza haya sido causa que
recibiesses pesadumbre con
esperarme; pero no será este el
primer yerro que le has de
perdonar á mi descuido, en tanto
que tratarás conmigo. Sobrado
sería el perdón, dijo Diana, donde
el yerro falta: la culpa no la tiene
tu descuido, sino mi cuidado,
pues me hizo levantar antes de
hora y venir acá, donde hasta
agora he passado el tiempo, á
veces cantando y á veces
imaginando, y en fin entendiendo
en los tratos que á un angustiado
espíritu pertenescen. Mas no
hace tiempo de deternos aquí,
que aunque el camino hasta el
templo de Diana es poco, el
deseo que tenemos de llegar allá
es mucho. Y allende de esto me
paresce que conviene, en tanto
que el sol envía más mitigados
los rayos y no son tan fuertes sus
ardores, adelantar el camino, para
después, á la hora de la siesta, en
algún lugar fresco y sombrío tener
buen rato de sossiego. Dicho
esto, tomaron entrambos el
camino, travesando aquel
espesso bosque, y por alivio del
camino cantaban deste modo:

MARCELIO
Mudable y fiero Amor, que mi
ventura
pusiste en la alta cumbre,
do no llega mortal
merescimiento.
Mostraste bien tu natural
costumbre,
quitando mi tristura,
para doblarla y dar mayor
tormento.
Dejaras descontento
el corazón: que menos daño
fuera
vivir en pena fiera
que recebir un gozo no
pensado,
con tan penosas lástimas
borrado.

DIANA
No te debe espantar que de tal
suerte
el niño poderoso
tras un deleite envíe dos mil
penas.
Que á nadie prometió firme
reposo,
sino terrible muerte,
llantos, congojas, lágrimas,
cadenas.
En Libya las arenas,
ni en el hermoso Abril las
tierras flores
no igualan los dolores
con que rompe el Amor un
blando pecho,
y aun no queda con ello
satisfecho.

MARCELIO
Antes del amoroso
pensamiento
ya tuve conoscidas
las mañas con que Amor
captiva y mata.
Mas él no sólo aflige nuestras
vidas,
mas el conoscimiento
de los vivos juicios arrebata.
Y el alma ansí maltrata,
que tarde y mal y por
incierta vía
allega una alegría,
y por dos mil caminos los
pesares
sobre el perdido cargan á
millares.

DIANA
 Si son tan manifiestos los
engaños
con que el Amor nos
prende,
¿por qué á ser presa el
alma se presenta?
Si el blando corazón no se
defiende
de los terribles daños,
¿por qué después se queja
y se lamenta?
Razón es que consienta
y sufra los dolores de
Cupido
aquel que ha consentido
al corazón la flecha y la
cadena:
que el mal no puede darnos
sino pena.

Esta canción y otras cantaron, al

cabo de las cuales estuvieron ya
fuera del bosque, y comenzaron á
caminar por un florido y deleitoso
prado. Entonces dijo Diana estas
palabras: Cosas son maravillosas
las que la industria de los
hombres en las pobladas
ciudades ha inventado, pero más
espauto dan las que la naturaleza
en los solitarios campos ha
producido. ¿A quién no admira la
frescura deste sombroso bosque?
¿quién no se espanta de la
lindeza de este espacioso prado?
Pues ver los matices de las
libreadas flores, y oir el concierto
de las cantadoras aves, es cosa
de tanto contento que no iguala
con ello de gran parte la pompa y
abundancia de la más celebrada
corte. Ciertamente, dijo
Marcelio, en esta alegre soledad
hay gran aparejo de
contentamiento, mayormente para
los libres, pues les es licito gozar
á su voluntad de tan admirables
dulzuras y entretenimientos. Y
tengo por muy cierto que si el
Amor, que agora, morando en
estos desiertos, me es tan
enemigo, me diera en la villa
donde yo estaba la mitad del
dolor que agora siento, mi vida no
osara esperado, pues no pudiera
con semejantes deleites amansar
la braveza del tormento. A esto no
respondió Diana palabra, sino
que, puesta la blanca mano
delante sus ojos, sosteniendo con
ella la dorada cabeza, estuvo
gran rato pensosa, dando de
cuando en cuando muy
angustiados suspiros, y á cabo de
gran pieza dijo ansí: ¡Ay de mí,
pastora desdichada! ¿qué
remedio será bastante á consolar
mi mal, si los que quitan á los
otros gran parte del tormento
acarrean más ardiente dolor? No
tengo ya sufrimiento para encubrir
mi pena, Marcelio; mas ya que la
fuerza del dolor me constriñe á
publicarla, una cosa le agradezco,
que me fuerza á decirla en tiempo
y en parte en que tú solo estés
presente, pues por tus generosas
costumbres y por la experiencia
que tienes de semejante mal, no
tendrás por sobrada mi locura,
principalmente sabiendo la causa
della. Yo estoy maltratada del mal
que te atormenta, y no olvidada
como tú de un pastor llamado
Syreno, del cual que en otro
tiempo fuí querida. Mas la
Fortuna, que pervierte los
humanos intentos, quiso que,
obedesciendo más á mi padre
que á mi voluntad, dejasse de
casarme con él, y á mi pesar me
hiciesse esclava de un marido
que, cuando otro mal no tuviera
con él sino el que causan sus
continuos é importunados celos,
bastaba para matarme. Mas yo
me tuviera por contenta de sufrir
las sospechas de Delio con que
viera la preferencia de Syreno, el
cual creo que por no verme,
tomando de mi forzado
casamiento ocasión para
olvidarme, se apartó de nuestra
aldea, y está, según he sabido, en
el templo de Diana, donde
nosotros imos. De aquí puedes
imaginar cuál puedo estar,
fatigada de los celos del marido y
atormentada con la ausencia del
amado. Dijo entonces Marcelio:
Graciosa pastora, lastimado
quedo de saber tu dolor y corrido
de no haberle hasta agora sabido.
Nunca yo me vea con el deseado
contento sino querría verle tanto
en tu alma como en la mía. Mas,
pues sabes cuán generales son
las flechas del Amor, y cuán poca
cuenta tienen con los más fuertes,
libres y más honestos corazones,
no tengas afrenta de publicar sus
llagas, pues no quedará por ellas
tu nombre denostado, sino en
mucho más tenido. Lo que á mí
me consuela es saber que el
tormento que de los celos del
marido recibías, el cual suele dar
á veces mayor pena que la
ausencia de la cosa amada, te
dejará algún rato descansar, en
tanto que Delio, siguiendo la
fugitiva pastora, estará apartado
de tu compañía. Goza, pues, del
tiempo y acasión que te concede
la fortuna, y alégrate, que no será
poco alivio para ti passar la
ausencia de Syreno libre de la
importunidad del celoso marido.
No tengo yo, dijo Diana, por tan
dañosos los celos, que si como
son de Delio fueran de Syreno, no
los sufriera con sólo imaginar que
tenían fundamento en amor.
Porque cierto está que quien ama
huelga de ser amado, y ha de
tener los celos de la cosa amada
por muy buenos, pues son claras
señales de amor, nascen dél y
siempre van con él acompañados.
De mí á lo menos te puedo decir
que nunca me tuve por tan
enamorada como cuando me vi
celosa, y nunca me vi celosa sino
estando enamorada. A lo cual
replicó Marcelio: Nunca pensé
que la pastoril llaneza fuesse
bastante á formar tan avisadas
razones como las tuyas en
cuestión tan dificultosa como es
ésta. Y de aquí vengo á condenar
por yerro muy reprobado decir,
como muchos afirman, que en
solas las ciudades y cortes está la
viveza de los ingenios, pues la
hallé también entre las
espessuras de los bosques, y en
las rústicas é inartificiosas
cabañas. Pero con todo, quiero
contradecir á tu parescer, con el
cual heciste los celos tan ciertos
mensajeros y compañeros del
amor, como si no pudiesse estar
en parte donde ellos no estén.
Porque puesto que hay pocos
enamorados que no sean
celosos, no por eso se ha de decir
que el enamorado que no lo fuere
no sea más perfecto y verdadero
amador. Antes muestra en ello el
valor, fuerza y quilate de su
deseo, pues está limpio y sin la
escoria de frenéticas sospechas.
Tal estaba yo en el tiempo
venturoso, y me preciaba tanto
dello, que con mis versos lo iba
publicando, y una vez entre las
otras, que mostró Alcida
maravillarse de verme enamorado
y libre de celos, le escribí sobre
ello este

Soneto.
Dicen que Amor juró que no
estaria
sin los mortales celos un
momento,
y la Belleza nunca hacer
assiento,
do no tenga Soberbia en
compañía.
Dos furias son, que el bravo
infierno envía,
bastantes á enturbiar todo
contento:
la una el bien de amor
vuelve en tormento,
la otra de piedad la alma
desvía.
Perjuro fué el Amor y la
Hermosura
en mí y en vos, haciendo
venturosa
y singular la suerte de mi
estado.
Porque después que vi
vuestra figura,
ni vos fuistes altiva, siendo
hermosa,
ni yo celoso, siendo
enamorado.
Fué tal el contento que tuvo mi
Alcida cuando le dije este soneto,
entendiendo por él la fineza de mi
voluntad, que mil veces se le
cantaba, sabiendo que con ello le
era muy agradable. Y
verdaderamente, pastora, tengo
por muy grande engaño, que un
monstruo tan horrendo como los
celos se tenga por cosa buena,
con decir que son señales de
amor y que no están sino en el
corazón enamorado. Porque á
essa cuenta podremos decir que
la calentura es buena, pues es
señal de vida y nunca está sino
en el cuerpo vivo. Pero lo uno y lo
otro son manifiestos errores, pues
no dan menor pesadumbre los
celos que la fiebre. Porque son
pestilencia de las almas, frenesía
de los pensamientos, rabia que
los cuerpos debilita, ira que el
espíritu consume, temor que los
ánimos acobarda y furia que las
voluntades enloquesce. Mas para
que juzgues ser los celos cosa
abominable, imagina la causa
dellos, y hallarás que no es otra
sino un apocado temor de lo que
no es ni será, un vil menosprecio
del propio merescimiento y una
sospecha mortal, que pone en
duda la fe y la bondad de la cosa
querida. No pueden, pastora, con
palabras encarescerse las penas
de los celos, porque son tales,
que sobrepujan de gran parte los
tormentos que acompañan el
amor. Porque en fin, todos, sino
él, pueden y suelen parar en
admirables dulzuras y contentos,
que ansí como la fatigosa sed en
el tiempo caloroso hace parescer
más sabrosas las frescas aguas,
y el trabajo y sobresalto de la
guerra hace que tengamos en
mucho el sossiego de la paz, ansí
los dolores de Cupido sirven para
mayor placer en la hora que se
rescibe un pequeño favor, y
cuando quiera que se goze de un
simple contentamiento. Mas estos
rabiosos celos esparcen tal
veneno en los corazones, que
corrompe y gasta cuantos deleites
se le llegan. A este propósito, me
acuerdo que yo oí contar un día á
un excelente músico en Lisbona
delante del Rey de Portugal un
soneto que decía ansi:

Quando la brava ausencia un

alma hiere,
se ceba, imaginando el
pensamiento,
que el bien, que está más
lejos, más contento
el corazón hará cuando
viniere.
Remedio hay al dolor de quien
tuviere
en esperanza puesto el
fundamento;
 que al fin tiene algún premio
del tormento,
o al menos en su amor
contento muere.
Mil penas con un gozo se
descuentan,
y mil reproches ásperos se
vengan
con sólo ver la angélica
hermosura.
Mas cuando celos la ánima
atormentan,
aunque después mil bienes
sobrevengan,
se tornan rabia, pena y
amargura.

¡Oh, cuán verdadero parescer!

¡Oh, cuán cierta opinión es ésta!
Porque á la verdad, esta
pestilencia de los celos no deja en
el alma parte sana donde pueda
recogerse una alegría. No hay en
amor contento, cuando no hay
esperanza, y no la habrá, en tanto
que los celos están de por medio.
No hay placer que dellos esté
seguro, no hay deleite que con
ellos no se gaste y no hay dolor
que con ellos no nos fatigue. Y
llega á tanto la rabia y furor de los
venenosos celos, que el corazón,
donde ellos están, recibe
pesadumbre en escuchar
alabanzas de la cosa amada, y no
querría que las perfecciones que
él estima fuessen de nadie vistas
ni conocidas, haciendo en ello
gran perjuicio al valor de la
gentileza que le tiene captivo. Y
no sólo el celoso vive en este
dolor, mas á la que bien quiere le
da tan continua y trabajosa pena,
que no le diera tanta, si fuera su
capital enemigo. Porque claro
está que un marido celoso como
el tuyo, antes querria que su
mujer fuesse la mas fea y
abominable del mundo, que no
que fuesse vista ni alabada por
los hombres, aunque sean
honestos y moderados. ¿Qué
fatiga es para la mujer ver su
honestidad agraviada con una
vana sospecha? ¿qué pena le es
estar sin razón en los más
secretos rincones encerrada?
¿qué dolor ser ordinariamente
con palabras pesadas, y aun á
veces con obras combatida? Si
ella está alegre, el marido la tiene
por deshonesta; si está triste,
imagina que se enoja de verle; si
está pensando, la tiene por
sospechosa; si le mira, paresce
que le engaña; si no le mira,
piensa que le aborresce; si le
hace caricias, piensa que las
finge; si está grave y honesta,
cree que le desecha; si rie, la
tiene por desenvuelta; si suspira,
la tiene por mala, y en fin, en
cuántas cosas se meten estos
celos, las convierten en dolor,
aunque de suyo sean agradables.
Por donde está muy claro que no
tiene el mundo pena que iguale
con esta, ni salieron del infierno
Harpías que más ensucien y
corrompan los sabrosos manjares
del alma enamorada. Pues no
tengas en poco, Diana, tener
ausente el celoso Delio, que no
importa poco para passar más
ligeramente las penas del Amor. A
esto Diana respondió: Yo vengo á
conoscer que esta passión, que
has tan al vivo dibujado, es
disforme y espantosa, y que no
meresce estar en los amorosos
ánimos, y creo que esta pena era
la que Delio tenía. Mas quiero que
sepas que semejante dolencia no
pretendí yo defenderla, ni jamás
estuvo en mí: pues nunca tuve
pesar del valor de Syreno, ni fuí
atormentada de semejantes
passiones y locuras, como las
que tú me has contado, mas sólo
tuve miedo de ser por otra
desechada. Y no me engañó de
mucho este recelo, pues he
probado tan á costa mía el olvido
de Syreno. Esse miedo, dijo
Marcelio, no tiene nombre de
celos, antes es ordinario en los
buenos amadores. Porque
averiguado está que lo que yo
amo, lo estimo y tengo por bueno
y merescedor de tal amor, y
siendo ello tal, he de tener miedo
que otro no conozca su bondad y
merescimiento, y no lo ame como
yo. Y ansí el amador está metido
en medio del temor y la
esperanza. Lo que el uno le
niega, la otra se lo promete;
cuando el uno le acobarda, la otra
le esfuerza; y en fin las llagas que
hace el temor se curan con la
esperanza, durando esta reñida
pelea hasta que la una parte de
las dos queda vencida, y si
acontesce vencer el temor á la
esperanza, queda el amador
celoso, y si la esperanza vence al
temor, queda alegre y bien
afortunado. Mas yo en el tiempo
de mi ventura tuve siempre una
esperanza tan fuerte, que no sólo
el temor no la venció, pero nunca
osó acometella, y ansi recibía con
ella tan grandes gustos, que á
trueque dellos no me pesaba
recebir los continuos dolores; y fuí
tan agradescida á la que mi
esperanza en tanta firmeza
sostenía, que no había pena que
viniesse de su mano que no la
tuviesse por alegría. Sus
reproches tenía por favores, sus
desdenes por caricias y sus
airadas respuestas por corteses
prometimientos.
Estas y otras razones passaron
Diana y Marcelio prosiguiendo su
camino. Acabado de travessar
aquel prado en muy dulce
conversación, y subiendo una
pequeña cuesta, entraron por un
ameno bosquecillo, donde los
espessos alisos hacían muy
apacible sombrío. Allí sintieron
una suave voz que de una dulce
lira acompañada resonaba con
extraña melodía, y parándose á
escuchar, conocieron que era voz
de una pastora que cantaba ansí:

Soneto.
Cuantas estrellas tieue el alto
cielo
fueron en ordenar mi
desventura,
y en la tierra no hay prado ni
verdura
que pueda en mi dolor
darme consuelo.
Amor subjecto al miedo, en
puro hielo
convierte el alma triste ¡ay,
pena dura!
que á quien fué tan contraria
la ventura,
vivir no puede un hora sin
recelo.
La culpa de mi pena es justo
darte
á ti, Montano, á ti mis quejas
digo,
alma cruel, do no hay
piedad alguna.
Porque si tú estuvieras de mi