The republican ideal of freedom as non-domination and the Rojava experiment

Introduction

This article identifies a series of problems commonly associated with republican theory, and raises the question whether the ongoing socio-political experiment in Syrian Kurdistan, better known as Rojava, can provide an alternative resolution to these problems. These problems, I argue, are due to the attribution to the republican state as the political subject a central role in creating and maintaining the conditions for sustained liberty, understood as non-domination, for its citizens. While institutional protection may indeed be necessary to ensure the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination, in a world organized along national-territorial and market lines, this will effectively mean entrusting liberty to its major violators. As the following discussion seeks to demonstrate, the contemporary state is not the best candidate to deliver the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination due to its formal-abstract properties of being, or being imagined as, a national, territorial, legal-technical and non-market political entity. What is missing, I claim, is a strong Athenian element that has the potential to ensure the effective application of the principle of freedom as non-domination. The Rojava experiment in Syria, it is argued, is an attempt to overcome this problem arising from these formal-abstract properties of the contemporary state, both theoretically and practically through making the Athenian principle of participation the central mechanism of self-government. To develop this argument, in section I first I will expand upon what I see as the major issues marring neo-Roman republicanism, that is, the assumption regarding the contemporary state, problematizing its above-mentioned formal-abstract properties. Second, I will discuss possible ways in which the democratic confederalist project may theoretically and practically respond to these challenges, and whether and how the Rojava experiment with democratic confederalism creates opportunities for the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination through its participatory mechanisms. The theoretical upshot of this discussion is that while the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination is a worthy ideal to pursue due to its dynamic and comprehensive nature, its value is diminished because of the tendency among republicans to take for granted the contemporary national-territorial state and market autonomy. To fully uncover its potential, a strong Athenian element is required.

I Freedom as non-domination and the contemporary state

In his seminal account of the republican ideal of non-domination Philip Pettit (1997) presents a compelling defense of a neo-Roman republican state as the protector of freedom and non-domination. While this account attracted much criticism and appreciation in the later literature, ¹ what is of interest here is the role assumed by the contemporary state to create and maintain the conditions of non-domination for all. Rather than offering a full account of Pettit’s defense of the republican ideal, this article problematizes several key issues in his reasoning, all of which, I argue, emanate from an insistence to conflate the contemporary state with the idealized republican state that upholds freedom as non-domination. Before presenting these issues, however, an appreciation of Pettit’s formulation of freedom as non-domination is in order.

Building on a rich tradition of republicanism, Pettit offers an alternative notion of liberty that he claims goes beyond the liberal notion of liberty as non-interference. This alternative notion of liberty as a moral-philosophical ideal is freedom as non-domination. For Pettit, the ideal of freedom as non-domination goes beyond the liberal ideal in its ability, among other things, to problematize freedom not only negatively but also positively without suffering from the pitfalls of communitarianism. Freedom as non-domination, as distinct from freedom as non-interference, recognizes that social and political life may create conditions whereby different levels of capability and power limit choices available to those less advantaged, resulting in their domination by others and hence the violation of their freedom. At the extremely abstract level that the principle of freedom as non-domination is presented in Pettit’s work, it offers an almost perfect system that upholds and protects non-dominated choice for all, since the republican state is tasked not only with not arbitrarily interfering in the lives of citizens but also with preventing any such interference from taking place.

While it seems to make sense to attribute this role to the state in the abstract, that Pettit (1997: 48) has the ‘contemporary state’ in mind for this task complicates the matter at hand in several ways. First, the national form of the state generates the problem as to the demos of the republic, or more specifically the problem of its inclusivity or exclusivity. In the contemporary state, as aptly observed by Habermas (1998: 116), ‘who gains the power to define the boundaries of a political community is settled by historical chance and the actual course of events – normally by the arbitrary outcomes of wars or civil wars’. This practical and historical emergence of ‘political communities’ results in a level of homogeneity, which, in turn, underwrites their cohesion. Exclusive spatiality that is associated with this state-form is almost always established following wars, massacres and other means of homogenization. It is exactly this attachment to the homogenous identity nations provide that makes people to commit violent acts on behalf of the community. While Habermas (1996) proposes a form of ‘constitutional patriotism’ to replace this traditional attachment, there is no reason why we should readily accept that this is likely to take place, let alone that this is a viable principle of social and political cohesion. It is not clear how and why the contemporary state, historically based on violent subjection and coercion, will transform itself to a republican guarantor of freedom as non-domination. Furthermore, it is exactly this attachment to the homogenous identity nations provide that makes people commit violent acts on behalf of the political community (Appadurai, 1998).

Another closely associated problem is that of territoriality of the contemporary state. Besides exacerbating the problem of the national form of the state, territoriality poses the problem of the international order that is crucially organized along territorial lines. Any state-oriented theory of freedom is vulnerable to strong and justified criticism regarding a lack of theorization of the multiplicity of states and the challenges this poses for a republican state. Multiplicity of states, while not necessarily a source of international anarchy, is generative of uneven distribution of resources, political and economic alike, contributing thereby to the creation or continuation of domination. Pettit (2010) is willing to expand the principle of non-domination to international politics in a way that is reminiscent of Rawls’ (1999) treatise on The Law of Peoples. Although the republican law of peoples constitutes an advance over Rawls’ much-criticized version in that the principle of freedom as non-domination is better suited to protect human freedom both domestically and internationally than the liberal principle of non-interference, by taking ‘states as they are’ (Pettit, 2010), it ultimately ends up with providing justification for the existing structures of domination by ‘representative’ or republican states considering that these states are at the top of global hierarchies and responsible for many patterns of domination (see Castles, 2005).

A third problem arises from the legal-technical role associated with the republican state. The republican state, as the guarantor and protector of freedom as non-domination, is stripped of its political properties and reduced to an almost apolitical and impartial legal-institutional complex. This may be due to the normative nature of the republican approach; in this traditional sense, political philosophy is after the good life and therefore essentially normative. Politics, however, is as conflictual as it is normative. While in an ideal world a legal-technical protector of freedom as non-domination is imaginable, ‘the contemporary state’ or the state as it is, as Pettit (1997, 2010) puts it, is far from being a beacon of the principle of freedom as non-domination. If anything, actual states or ‘states as they are’, ‘representative’ and ‘repressive’ alike, are among the major violators of such an ideal. The state, lacking political content, assumes the unlikely shape of a content-less form.

The form of the state does not present itself as a problem only in its legal-technical manifestation in neo-Roman republicanism; the manner in which it is institutionally separated from market forces constitutes a second way that domination takes place and a state acts as a mechanism of justification for domination by market forces. Stuart White (2011) convincingly argues that a capitalist political economy strips individuals of their individual liberties through unequal distribution of wealth whereby the less well-off cannot exercise rights they formally have. Yet ‘rights can be “enjoyed” only by being exercised’ (Habermas, 2011: 29). So do freedoms. The so-called free market mechanism creates very strong patterns of domination that the contemporary state is unwilling or unable to address. This unwillingness is partly due to the sharing of political and economic power between the state and the market under capitalism (Wood, 1981). The formal and institutional separation of the economic and the political in capitalist states results in an economically empowered capitalist class and a politically empowered state that has a monopoly over means of violence and coercion as well as law-making. This is not to say, however, that states and markets are really separated or can at all be separated; rather, it creates an arrangement whereby the contemporary state devolves economic power upon capitalists (ibid.). The inability of the state to address domination by market forces, in turn, is caused by its limited capability to confront capital. No state can plausibly undermine this privatized social power of the investor-capitalist without undermining itself as the sole legitimate wielder of coercive power at the same time through capital flight or capital strike (S. White, 2011). While many proposed different regimes of welfare and some even went as far as to recommend a basic civic income ² to undo the participation problem of the impoverished sections of population, republican tradition tended to de-politicize issues of a socio-economic nature. Especially the historically unique period between 1945 to 1965 that saw the rise of welfare regimes in a small locality of the world, namely western Europe and North America, determined the limits of republican thinking. This is crystallized in the works of Habermas (1984), who famously argued that the administrative and economic spheres have increasingly been colonizing the lifeworld. It was he, however, along with many others who helped to de-politicize economy and attribute to it a distinct rationality by severing it theoretically from politics. Economy itself is political and should be repoliticized theoretically and practically, and subjected to democratic control if the republican ideals of participation and equality are to take hold.

All these issues that crop up from a tendency to view the contemporary state as the protector and guarantor of freedom as non-domination, eclipse the potential of this extremely promising notion of freedom. They erode the conceptual advances made over the liberal conception of freedom, when a normative ideal that can generate a ‘reflective equilibrium’ is sacrificed to a practical justification of ‘states as they are’. I argue, in contrast, for the reasons stated above, that ‘states as they are’ are among major sources of domination in the contemporary world. Contrary to what Pettit claims, ‘contestability’ does not constitute a strong check over the state when powerful patterns of non-domination are in place. To fully exploit the potential of the notion of freedom as non-domination, we need an alternative social and political, and crucially international, organization with a strong Athenian element rather than a via media between a world state and particularist national states. My claim is that Pettit unnecessarily equates all Athenian positions with populism, which, in turn, is taken to represent a form of majoritarianism. If the state, or any political-organizational form for that matter, is to be effectively checked, the final court of appeal has to be the people, not as an imagined organic entity, but as human persons as individuals and groups of individuals as they are the ones who are to determine what is domination and what is not, rather than the state, as well as how to enter into relations to constitute groups.

This participatory notion of non-domination requires an extremely dynamic perspective that can move beyond the theoretical and practical straitjacket that the contemporary state as the guarantor of freedom as non-domination imposes. I maintain that the notion of democratic confederalism that inspired the Syrian Kurdish attempt in the context of the civil war in Syria, rather than the contemporary state, offers a better candidate for the concrete content of a principle of freedom as non-domination.

II Democratic confederalism and freedom as non-domination

The democratic confederalist project of the Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or PYD (the Democratic Union Party), in Syria is inspired by the work of libertarian municipalist Murray Bookchin who distinguished between Athenian or Hellenic and Roman models and argued that the Roman model is statist and centrist and therefore tends to end up with a form of elite or class rule (D. White, 2008; Bookchin, 1995). For Bookchin, since republican government is representative, it has a tendency to create an exclusive political space for a political elite, whose members turn into professional politicians and experts (D. White, 2008: 159), in the process disowning their role as representatives and engaging in an isolated and de-socialized elite politics, thereby undermining the democratic quality of the republic. This is even more so in contemporary representative states (Biehl and Bookchin, 1998: 4). Rather than a ‘passive dependence on an elite State’ (ibid.: 85), Bookchin cherishes the direct democratic engagement of citizens in politics. Despite this tendency of the republican state to slide into a form of oligarchy or class rule, it is not set in stone (Bookchin, 1995) and it can involve more democratic-participatory properties. While this statist and centrist political form became the dominant form of modern states, after the fall of the Hellenic polis and the Roman republic, the Athenian model remained an undercurrent that surfaced at times of great upheaval such as the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution. It is no wonder, then, that the Athenian aspiration found a fertile ground in Rojava amid the civil war, when the local public had no choice but to take the matter into its own hands.

After this brief incursion into a recent theoretical and practical re-emergence of this Athenian element, this section seeks to raise the question whether this Athenian element in the form of democratic confederalism can rectify the issues I associated with Pettit’s neo-Roman republicanism. Rather than a full exposition of the theory of democratic confederalism, and its practice in Rojava, this section discusses how and to what extent democratic confederalism can address these issues and potentially contribute to the principle of freedom as non-domination.

Democratic confederalism rests on an awareness of the historical emergence of the national state and of its coercive and repressive historical roots as well as of its tendency to abstract or carve out a demos for itself from within a multiplicity of religious, ethnic, cultural and/or sectarian communities and homogenize it. Unlike the contemporary state, democratic confederalism, while attentive to this difference, seeks to empower local, libertarian and crucially communalist modes of association that secure direct participation of citizens in policy-making. These small political units, in turn, enter into confederative relations with one another, through assemblies at every level of social complexity (Biehl and Bookchin, 1998: 101–10). The democratic confederalist project therefore is based on a twofold mechanism of social cohesion: the immediacy of direct communal association and a Hellenic and partly Kantian autonomy. While direct communal association secures attachment to the immediate community and through it to the confederation, Kantian autonomy is observable in the making of policies that govern social life by citizens for themselves. Attachment, in this model, originates neither from a feeling of belonging to an ethnicity or religion nor from an abstract commitment to a constitutional patriotism that presupposes ‘philosopher citizens’. Nor is it a static attachment that is directed to the state. This attachment, rather, is to the immediate community and to the larger confederation of communities.

As Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK or Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party], familiarized himself with the work of Bookchin, he and his party gradually turned to the idea of democratic confederalism, abandoning the notion of establishing an independent Kurdish national state. According to Öcalan, it was the nation-state itself, with a statist and nationalist homogeneity-seeking orientation, that caused for so long the oppression of Kurds (Jongerden, 2015). Then, the primary lesson that the Rojavans, led by the PYD (PKK’s sister organization in Syria), derived from this was that they should not seek homogeneity in a national-territorial state, or the ‘Leviathan … the monster’ (Biehl, 2015), which as a model failed, and demonstrably so (Jongerden, 2015). Instead, they sought a bottom-up system of self-administration whereby the direction of the flow of power is from the local municipally organized councils toward a larger democratic confederation of libertarian municipalities with local councils directly controlling policy-making. Such organization of politics is to provide it with concrete social content and reduces the likelihood of potential relations of domination, thereby contributing to advancing the cause of freedom as non-domination. Furthermore, neither the theory nor the practice of democratic confederalism seeks homogeneity as far as the cantons, the autonomous administrative units in Rojava, and their formal administrative structures are concerned. Different ethnic and religious groups such as Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arabs, Kurds and Chechens are represented, and quotas serve to ensure this representation at every level. Women are also represented not only through quotas but also through active participation in the military struggle against the IS, in the councils and assemblies as well as other structures of administration. This is also testimony to the practical nature of inclusivity in Rojava; rather than enforcing individuality on the members of the larger community, it starts from existent identities and senses of belonging without closing the door for their future reorientation.

Second, democratic confederalism presents both a theoretical and a practical resolution of problems that arise from the territorial organization of the international order. The theoretical resolution to territoriality involves the possibility of expanding confederations of locally organized political units across territorial borders to gradually replace the fixed territoriality of national states with a dynamic inter-societal political model based on democratic confederalism. Practically, the democratic confederalist model can work within the context of territorial national states and does not pose an immediate and active challenge to the political authority of the national-territorial state. The aim is to reform political patterns and institutions through building direct democratic alternatives to them at the local level, enabling in the long run the flow of actual political power from local to larger units of administration. The three cantons of the Rojava Autonomous Administration seek to establish such a confederation although they do not present a territorial contiguity. Having established a series of institutions in each canton, the PYD does not set the objective of independence as a future project. At the end of the Syrian civil war, they envision a democratic autonomous entity within a Syrian democratic republic. This is again a direct borrowing from Abdullah Öcalan, who gave up the claim for a united Kurdish homeland in the form of a Kurdish national state and envisioned democratic autonomy for Kurds in Turkey within a democratic republic. The autonomous character of these cantons among themselves and from the Syrian regime blocks intrusion by ‘professional politicians’ and those who are not directly affected by the local decisions to be made by individual cantons, reducing the likelihood of domination.

Third, the democratic confederalist project does not see political organization as an impartial entity devoid of social content. It recognizes that existing states as the professional domain of elite and class rule are representative not of people, but of those who historically happen to control their institutions. It also recognizes the conflictual aspect of politics and sees actual parties to concrete conflicts and controversies as the real agents of their political resolution through direct mechanisms of democratic participation. This way it politicizes matters that are usually taken to be apolitical. That is why, both Bookchin was and the Rojavans are aware of the possibility of democratic processes resulting in domination; rather than their proposing a legal-technical institutional mechanism, however, checks and balances are established through democratic means as well whereby the decisions of a municipality can be checked and contested by others in the confederation if it is considered to generate domination (Biehl and Bookchin, 1998: 108). ³ The Rojava Autonomous Administration, through a flurry of institution-building, sought to create assemblies that are meant to democratize decision-making in institutions that are usually expert domains. Rather than taking law and even military affairs as technical and exclusive expert domains, they politicize them, that is, make them public again. Law in this sense aims at delivering communal justice and societal peace (Ross, 2015).

Finally, the democratic confederalist project is seeking a democratized and de-technicized economy that is open to direct democratic control by those who are affected by it. Democratization of the economy provides a series of remedies to capitalist domination in its many forms. To begin with, it seeks to do away with the formal institutional and ideological separation of the political and the economic, undermining the impersonal mechanisms of domination that come with unequal access to means of social reproduction and uneven distribution of wealth. Second, democratically determined needs of the community rather than profit motivation inform the economic decisions of the polity. Third, the social-ecological perspective of the democratic confederalist project encourages local production to protect the social metabolism, that is, the relation of human beings to one another and to nature, placing these relations on a more sustainable basis. This is not to say that municipalities are solely based on autarchic economies; rather, the project envisions a relationship of interdependence of municipalities each to the others within a democratic confederation. In brief, the democratic confederalist project seeks to establish democratic control over the production and reproduction of life through a repoliticization of economy based on interdependent self-sufficiency and cooperatives as well as a redistributive mechanism in case this does not immediately generate desired results.

Conclusion

This article has suggested that the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination is served better by a democratic confederalist model rather than contemporary states as they are. One might claim that this is no less abstract than the republican ideal in the context of western European and North American societies and that the practical implications of it might generate far worse results than we experience with the time-tested model of the contemporary national-territorial state. This is the crux of the problem: the time-tested model has long showed its limits in breaking patterns of domination and has become the major violator of freedom as non-domination. It is true that under relatively more democratic states, a degree of non-domination is secured; yet, if the republican ideal wants to move beyond existing institutions of freedom, it has to come to terms with these limits of the contemporary state and recognize the need for a more participatory and expansive notion of freedom and democracy. While the Rojava experiment will probably not solve many of the intractable problems of democratic rule, it has the potential to demonstrate, once again, the virtues of direct democratic government if it can rise up to the massive challenge ahead.

At any rate, the questions of how these principles are going to be implemented and whether they will result in the advancement of freedom as non-domination are open and indeterminate ones. Bookchin was, and the Kurdish political movement in Turkey as well as the Rojava Autonomous Administration are, acutely aware of the possible contextual variations and the practical nature of these institutional frameworks. It is therefore in practice that the exact shape these might take will be determined. First of all, the existential geo-political challenges hinder the full development of its potential, while at the same time serving as a factor of cohesion and cooperation in the region. The Rojavans are under the constant threat of renewed assaults by the Islamic State and unfriendly statements by top Turkish government officials. Furthermore, despite strong international public support, they might suffer from the collateral damage as a result of great power rivalry in Syria. From Russia and Iran to the USA, the UK and France a series of states are involved in military operations in the region. The real danger, however, is the militarization of a whole population in this context, which may well result in an environment that is not conducive to the flourishing of these democratic mechanisms. Territorial non-contiguity of the cantons, on the other hand, undermines the effective working of confederation-wide democratic mechanisms; the very same fact, however, combined with the mixed ethnic and religious composition of the region compels these cantons to pursue a fine balance between these different communities (Schmidinger, 2015: 133). Similarly, while territorial non-contiguity prevents a more effective coordination of Rojava’s economy, it also pushes the cantons toward further localization of production.

Another real danger is the availability of rich oil reserves in the region which have the potential to lure the Rojavans to the short-term attractions of oil rents in an attempt to fund military and infrastructure investments. More often than not, dependence on oil rents results in a rentier economy, which may easily generate socio-economic forms of domination.

To conclude, the Rojava experiment may indeed offer several correctives to the republican reliance on the contemporary state to institutionalize freedom as non-domination with its participatory mechanisms. Whether it will be successful will depend on a variety of factors, some of which are not even subject to Rojava’s control or will. Rather than dismissing it as theoretically irrelevant or practically utopian, republicans ought to offer any help they can in the hope that they deliver their promises. The real challenge for the future will be to accumulate enough experience in direct democracy so that the post-conflict period sees the experiment flourish into a promising model for the rest of the Middle East.