I realized I had been a victim of capitalist modernity. Realizing that to fight for nation states was to fight for capitalism, a big transformation in my political philosophy took place. When you said nation there absolutely had to be a state! If Kurds were a nation they certainly needed a state! However as social conditions intensified, as I understood that nations themselves were the most meaningless reality, shaped under the influence of capitalism, and as I understood that the nation-state model was an iron cage for societies, I realized that freedom and community were more important concepts. Because real socialism hadn’t overcome the nation state model and saw it as a basic necessity for modernity, we weren’t able to think of another form of nationalism, for example democratic nationalism.

It essentially had the quality of an unchanging dogma. For a long time this concept was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist principle for me. In particular, overcoming the model of the nation-state was very important for me. In isolation I grasped the alternative modernity concept, that national structures can have many different models, that generally social structures are fictional ones created by human hands, and that nature is malleable. My realization that I was a positivist dogmatic was certainly connected to my isolation. So how does Ocalan explain his more recent change of heart? Here’s how he put it, according to a recent article by Eyüp Can in the Turkish daily Radikal: Many Turks have interpreted this as nothing more than a desperate willingness to appease the government that held him captive in the hopes of clemency.

Since his arrest in 1999, Ocalan has repeatedly claimed that he is no longer seeking a new state for Turkey’s Kurds, but merely increased autonomy and cultural rights. The resulting relationship between a Kurdish terrorist leader and a renowned social scientist is certainly one of the strangest-and potentially most hopeful-stories to come out of Turkey this year.Īs the Turkish government conducts increasingly serious conversations with Ocalan aimed at ending Turkey’s forty-year struggle with Kurdish separatists, journalists have pointed to Ocalan’s intellectual conversion as evidence that negotiations can work. Ocalan is the revered and despised leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Anderson is the scholar whose book Imagined Communities is famous for introducing the idea that nations are social constructions rather than real entities. How Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities inspired PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s intellectual conversion.

Benedict anderson