Between Cultural Rights and Political Status: The Nation's Spirit and the Trap of Assimilation

Rastinews — On February 27, 2025, a text described as the product of a new phase in talks between the Turkish state and PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan entered public debate. Commentators read it less as a political document than as a sociological manifesto for a culturalist solution. Öcalan states plainly that classical models — the nation-state, federation, or administrative autonomy under a central state — are not the most fitting answers for a historic social sociology. In their place, he proposes integration within a democratic republic alongside Turkey. The view has triggered fresh debate among Kurdish public opinion.

Some Kurds criticized the view, calling it a method that opens the door to dissolving the core elements of Kurdish identity — language, history, tradition. Others, weighing the tragic situation in Rojava and the political climate in Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan), chose silence — what Kurds call staying "in the bull's ear." But the tragic scene in Rojava, which had sat before Kurdish eyes like a corpse awaiting burial, has now moved past mourning. Since then, everyone knows silence is no longer a solution. Internal debate must happen, in every form, and it must confront one question: in the 21st century, are cultural rights inside an integration without guaranteed political status a cure for a nation that has groaned under assimilation policies for a hundred years — or are they a trap?

To find the right way into this question, we first need clarity on the root of the term "people-nation." The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder revolutionized the idea in the 19th century with the concept of "Volksgeist" — the Spirit of the People. For Herder, a nation is a living being whose spirit lies hidden in its language, songs, stories, and folklore. A people that loses its language and culture, he argued, has lost its heart — it is condemned to death. Culture, he held, is one of three founding pillars — alongside language and homeland — on which a nation's identity rests. His ideas became, in past centuries, the foundation for building the world's nation-states; today, Öcalan's thinking seeks to preserve that spirit within a democratic republic instead. Herder's ideas eventually reached such prominence among the world's peoples that they opened the way to national ideals. Seen in this light, Herder's theory stands before us as a historical outcome in the formation of identities and nation-states. But can that spirit hold its ground inside integration with Turkey, without a status of its own?

Even before philosophers and folklorists had named it as theory, Kurds had stood on their feet for centuries by the strength of that same spirit, the Volksgeist. Without a formal state for centuries, Kurds preserved their ontological existence through their culture and language, and resisted disappearance. As Heidegger put it, language is the house of being — and Kurds have lived in that house, unchanged. Oral literature, dengbêj singing, and stories tracing back to the Medes and Mesopotamian mythology became the sturdiest bulwarks against assimilation. But we must recognize this truth: in the 19th century, these same natural, ontological elements became, through Herder's theory, the engine of every nation-state. The Brothers Grimm gathered thousands of folk tales and songs in Germany to help forge German unity. William B. Yeats revived Celtic folklore in Ireland to lay the groundwork for independence. Vuk Karadžić collected Serbian folk tales and songs and built the modern Serbian language. In other words, modern theory made culture both an essential element in building political status, and made political status a precondition for culture's survival.

Folklorist R. Dorson sheds further light on our path, drawing attention to the line between authentic folklore and its counterfeit — "fakelore" — which bears directly on the question we posed at the outset. Consider: when a state grants cultural rights but withholds recognition of a community's political identity, that culture is severed from its roots of resistance. Culture placed under state control turns into ornament, into decoration, into "fakelore." If Kurdish art and language survive only in festivals, ceremonies, or on state radio and television, they no longer serve national development. Instead, they become an inert tool — a soft, slow assimilation carried out under the name of integration.

Viewed through Dorson's lens, a political strategy tied solely to the February 27 text points us down the road of "fakelore," not authentic folklore. If this proposal for integration without self-status carries no legal guarantee, the state knowingly opens the door to a decorative culture. Cut culture and literature off from the roots of daily life and turn them into museum pieces, and you have, in effect, ended that culture. In place of bans and coercion, it opens a path to soft assimilation that slowly hollows out the social and national spirit.

In the 21st century, states appear no longer intent on banning language by force. As they have done for years on their own television channels — turning it into ornament, a social motif — they instead want to strip the language of any real effect. A language that is not the language of education, justice, and commerce is, under the banner of cultural rights, condemned to the status of a folkloric hobby. And a culture reduced to a hobby is, as is well known, doomed to vanish within a few generations. To see how this becomes a trap of assimilation, one need only look at our own history: the 40,000 Kurdish porters in Istanbul in 1908 offer a historical lesson. Though they spoke Kurdish, they had no legal, organized identity within the state system — and so they were swept away and lost in the wave of assimilationist modernization, just like the Laz, Circassian, Assyrian, and other peoples.

History offers many such cases. In the 19th century, many peoples within the Austro-Hungarian Empire were deceived by culturalism. They had the right to speak their own languages, but power and status remained in the hands of the German elite. As a result, those peoples dissolved into the dominant culture — until they understood that protecting culture without political status was impossible. Only once they demanded independence and political status could they secure their national existence.

Rojava, fourteen years on, is the starkest example. It became the symbol of a will built through blood and resistance. Now that this will faces grave dangers, Kurds have no choice but to rethink agreements and strategies anew.

Regrettably, Kurdish politics in recent years has been stuck between day-to-day diplomacy and safeguarding national existence. Kurdish politics too often treats cultural rights as a technical matter, or merely a requirement of democracy. But history's lesson has always stood before us: without a defense grounded in status, assimilation continues its systematic course.

If the realities of the 21st century go unread, and Kurdish politics proceeds on romantic declarations of brotherhood among peoples alone, Kurds will suffocate in the trap of soft assimilation. Today, deep doubts have grown among the people over the policy being pursued in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan). To move past this crisis, Kurdish politics must set aside narrow ideological interests in favor of a lasting legal status, and place the reality of the "spirit of the people" at the foundation of a strategic settlement.

Historical social sociology shows that culture is not ornament — it is the foundation of existence. Kurds are not a minority who want only the right to sing songs and dance. Cultural rights without legal guarantee, and without recognition of the people's will within this "democratic integration," only prolong the ground for assimilation. For Kurdish culture to avoid becoming an antique of state history, culture must be joined with a politics that carries guarantees. A genuine cultural victory in the 21st century cannot rest on the right to speak alone — it must be tied to the right to decide one's own fate within a democratic system. A culture without guarantee, without status, may look beautiful in film sequences, but under the shadow of the dominant culture of states, it is condemned to collapse.