The role of the so-called Stateless Nations is overshadowed by any Italian media, whether on television or in print. With a few rare exceptions for some networks on the internet, the topic is obscure to most.
The thorny argument only comes to the surface when the news is actually too big to be contained within the miserable basin of radio and television and paper information: the overflow, in essence, brings out ad hoc services on, for example independence Scottish, the demonstration against military servitude in Sardinia, the significant increase of non-Italian-speaking – and secessionist – formations in South Tyrol.
Basically, when you can’t help but keep quiet, then the service can also stay there but, in any case, priority is given to the political news and the background, a category in which the newspapers of the Peninsula abound: no news is produced. or debates that spring from news, but behind the scenes, as if every reader is able to understand every little detail and still of the main scene, so to speak.
That of the Nations-without-State and, therefore, one of those themes for which it is worth going to the bottom and reading something and, although I do not want to dwell on it, it climbs into speeches that a post on a blog could not support, otherwise it would lead to one of those articles so long that no one would dare to read to the end, I take the main example in this sense, Kobane.
In Kobane, the Islamic State fought against a population within a territory that, concretely, is not recognized: Rojava, or the three parts that make it up, namely the canton of Afrin, Jazira and Kobane.
The Kurds normally consider Rojava one of the four parts that make up what Kurdistan is, that is, an ideal territory that also includes some parts of south-east Turkey (Northern Kurdistan), in northern Iraq (southern Kurdistan) , and Western Iran (Eastern Kurdistan); Kobane goes to make up western Kurdistan, that is, western Kurdistan.
The territory of Rojava, however, is not recognized as autonomous by the Syrian government and Kobane and in the hands of the YPG / YPJ militias since 2012.
In 2014 the city was attacked and besieged by IS (Islamic State) and the nation-without-state par excellence was surrounded and left alone with its own forces, while Erdogan’s Turkey was guilty silent on the matter.
To avoid overflowing again in space-time locations, I try to get to the heart of the matter: the role of the nation-without-state in question was – let the punishment be forgiven – that of having stopped the troops of the Islamic State with only its own Strength.
Rojava, and the cantons that constitute it, have acted as a democratic safeguard in defense of their very existence.
A very existence that the international community and the governments of the Middle East have not recognized.
Basically, by cutting the concept with the ax to the benefit – however – of the reader: the Islamic State has been stopped by an entity that has not only not been recognized as autonomous, not only is not familiar with the logic of capital and of the free market, but also the agglutinator of political and party forces considered clandestine (and pro-terrorist) by NATO, Turkey, the USA and the European Union, such as the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party).
The affirmation of the nations-without-state is, therefore, the first step for the reconsideration of the nationalist structure brought in the post-war twentieth century; the question becomes decisive, and by no means secondary, when the examples of self-determination become significant the more cases are enumerated: Palestine, Kurdistan, Greenland, Faroer Islands, Aland Islands, Scotland, Sardinia, the Basque Country and so on.
The State that most protected the so-called ‘regional autonomies’, valuing them as autonomous integral parts of a whole, was the Soviet Union, as Rogers Brubakers wrote in “Nationalisms in contemporary Europe:” conceived in theory, or organized in practice, as a nation-state […] It did not define in terms of nationality the state or citizenship as a single whole, but component parts of the state and citizenship ».
A sort of ethnoterritorial federalism, as Brubakers himself described it, which he referred to in the 1936 constitution of the USSR: “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a federal state, formed on the basis of the voluntary union, with equal rights, of following Soviet Socialist Republics “[…]” Each federated republic has its own Constitution, which takes into account the peculiarities of the republic and is drawn up in full compliance with the Constitution of the USSR “finally” Each federated republic retains the right of free secession from USSR “.
In 1977 the preamble, regarding the relationship between Moscow and the rest of the Soviet Socialist Republics, was thus reformulated and aimed at the advantage of Brezhnevian Russia, turning self-determination to itself, while retaining the right of “free secession”: “L ‘USSR is a unitary federal plurinational state, formed on the basis of the principle of socialist federalism, as a result of the free self-determination of nations and the voluntary union, with equal rights, of the Soviet Socialist Republics […] Each federated republic retains the right to free secession from the USSR “.
