From Denial to Revolution: Experiences of National Liberation in the World

“I would like to leave behind the conviction that if we maintain a certain dose of prudence and organization we will deserve victory. (…) You can’t bring about fundamental change without a certain dose of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformism, from the courage to turn our backs on old formulas, from the courage to invent the future. It took yesterday’s crazy things for us to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those crazy ones. (…) We must dare to invent the future.” Thomas Sankara

The national question has been and remains today one of the central elements of many revolutionary struggles around the world. At the same time, it is one of the issues that generate the most debate, since nationalism has been one of the elements used by the different nation-states and the bourgeoisie to impose, and make hegemonic, their political proposal on different societies.

With multiple ways of understanding it according to the contexts of struggle, the nation has been defined politically by the different revolutionary movements in the world on ethnic, cultural, class, anti-imperialist and decolonial and even religious aspects, framing them in the historical construction of relations of oppression and exploitation. In addition, these proposals have not been static, but have been in development over time. However, today, with all the tools employed by nation-states and the capitalist system, the hegemonic conception of the nation is reduced to cultural traits, exalting and emptying them of any revolutionary potential for the liberation of peoples.

Therefore, the objective of this article is to make a comparison of the political approaches on the national fact of different revolutionary movements around the world, as well as their strategies to overcome oppression, both today and in its historical development. Due to the great diversity of movements and contexts, an in-depth analysis would require research and a space that is not that of this article, where we want to present only a brushstroke of what has been and continues to be a crucial issue of the different political proposals, also in the Catalan Countries. In order to make this diversity visible, elements of the proposal of the Indianist movement in Bolivia, the Kurdish liberation movement, the Pan-Africanist proposal of Sankara in Burkina Faso, Bolivarian Venezuela and Irish republicanism are presented.

What is the nation?

“At a time when it is so common that progressive intellectuals are cosmopolitan (especially in Europe?) and insist on the almost pathological character of nationalism, its foundation in fear and hatred of others, and its affinities with racism, it will be worth remembering that nations inspire love, and often a deeply selfless love.”
Benedict Anderson

Anderson said that the nation is a socially constructed community, that is, imagined by people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Throughout history and the globe, we can see how the construction of nations, as social categories that they are, have been developed in different ways attending to the diversity of contexts from which they arise. From this understanding, we start from a historical materialist vision: the national question is neither essential nor mechanical, it is a social and political fact.

The fact that the nation is a social construct, however, does not take away from the material foundations that become preconditions for its development. Therefore, and especially with the desire for the nation to have a capacity for political transformation, we cannot “imagine” it only as an individual issue, but as something totally linked to the reality of the processes of the territory where it unfolds.

In this sense, we must start by making explicit that the national approaches of the different movements we will approach are born from the recognition of their conditions of oppression. Whether due to colonial plundering relations, exploitation by other social groups, cultural and religious processes of assimilation, or, in many cases, by these and other processes that appear in an intertwined and complementary way, shaping their form of exploitation and oppression. In all cases, their identity as oppressed is transformed into an identity of struggle and resistance. However, the Kurdish, Venezuelan people, the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala or the Irish or Burkinabean people, do not base their national idea in the same way.

The Kurdish freedom movement defines its national identity based on an ethnic perspective, although the political project they advocate is not limited to a single nation. After the paradigm shift proposed by Abdullah Öcalan at the beginning of the 2000s, the proposal of the “democratic nation” was assumed, a nation of nations, where the coexistence of different peoples is valued equally, with all their ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. This goal is also present in Irish republicanism. They argue that national liberation is indispensable for the survival of the Irish people; At the same time, they propose a Republic with civil and religious liberties, far from the homogenization defended by the British Empire through processes of extermination or assimilation.

These approaches are different from the Bolivian Indianist proposal, which speaks of the Indian nation as a plurinational reality, which includes within it the group of Indian peoples (Aymaras, Quechuas, Mapuche…) that are articulated according to a collective identity based on their condition as colonized peoples. Fausto Reinaga, who developed the analyses that would lead to the beginning of the Indianist movement, said:

“The Indian is not a social class, it is a race, a nation, a history, a culture. The Indian is an oppressed and enslaved people. The Indian should not integrate or assimilate with anyone. The Indian must be liberated. And the liberation of the Indian will be the work of the Indian himself.”

In these cases, the different revolutionary proposals do not respond to national identities located within the borders of the nation-states where they are located, as it’s done in Burkina Faso or Venezuela. In both cases, the revolutionary projects appear years after the independence processes that gave rise to the current nation-states, having formally overcome the French and Spanish colonization; Those are proposed as movements for the liberation of peoples in the face of imperialist and colonial relations that continue to this day. For Burkina Faso, Sankara’s revolutionary project constructed the Burkinabè identity as a national identity that subverted the colonial order. An example of this is the change of name of the Republic of Upper Volta, a colonial name, to Burkina Faso, a neologism built from terms of local languages and meaning “the homeland of the upstanding people”. This new identity, which is conceived as a national identity built ad hoc, wants to retake the African pride in Africa and claim an attitude of combat to recover and build one’s own country. While serving to unite the different ethnicities in a common political project, it is linked to an even larger project, Pan-Africanism. Without getting behind a Pan-Africanist approach there is no option, from its point of view, to overcome colonial relations on the continent.

In the Venezuelan case, their identity as Venezuelans is also linked to social liberation. Within the nation ethnic and cultural diversity is also recognized and protected, and it is also attached to a larger project; The Venezuelan homeland belongs to the great Bolivarian homeland. This idea is inspired by the figure of Simón de Bolívar, symbol of the struggle against Spanish colonization, with the proposal to build his own project, freed from colonialism and imperialism, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Bolivarian national identity is an identity centered on anti-imperialist struggle and the construction of socialism; Those who make business of selling the territory and its resources are conceived as “anti-patriots”.

The approach of the Kurdish movement should be highlighted here, since it is a proposal for the whole world. It is not limited to the historical borders of the territory of Kurdistan or to any other specific territory – be it a state; continental, as is Pan-Africanism; or another, as is the case with the Indianist proposal. It starts from the recognition of the different national and chauvinist oppressions of all kinds (for ethnic, religious, sex/gender reasons), in order to put democratic measures that prevent the reproduction of these dynamics on any scale. The fundamental principle of the proposal is democratic autonomy; that is, the right to self-organization and democratic social participation as a group (as Yazidis, as women, as young people, as Arabs, etc.), and the right to self-defense to prevent logic of domination by other groups from occurring.

The confrontation of the oppressive state: different possible ways

The ways of confrontation against the state or oppressor states are also different for different movements, just as there are different strategies for the same nation, others that have changed over time, and others that are complementary. They are not, therefore, exclusive or fixed strategies. All movements combine different elements and overcome them with the practical development of their approaches.

The initial formulation on the armed struggle, whether through rural or urban guerrillas, as is the case of guerrillas in Kurdistan and the IRA in the north of Ireland, or through coups d’état, as in the case of Venezuela or Burkina Faso, has given way to other strategies over time. With the paradigm shift at the beginning of the century, the Kurdish movement posits guerrillas as a force of self-defense of the people so that they can build their autonomy outside the state. The Kurdish movement leave behind both the Maoist strategy of the protracted peoples war, and the aspiration of building a socialist Kurdish state, and works on the building up of Democratic Confederalism as a system of popular self-government that gradually empties the meaning of the occupying state structures, while developing an alternative system based on its three pillars of direct democracy, women’s liberation and ecology.

In the northen Ireland, armed strategy required the IRA to be articulated as an umbrella for other organizations (youth, neighbourhood, women, the party, etc.). In the mid-80s, the prioritization of an electoral strategy caused an organizational change that placed the party, Sinn Féin, in this role. This change, not only organizational, modified from the policy of alliances to the goals, which were reduced at the end of the apartheid situation and the military conflict. In the case of Ireland, as had already happened in the south, the new alliances meant the acceptance of the model of capitalist social organisation; A society where class and sex/gender – not religion – will determine access to the most basic rights and spaces of power. Currently, there are factions of republicanism that continue to defend and practice armed strategy, without the ability to articulate themselves in a mass organization.

The electoral strategy was also proposed in Venezuela after trying unsuccessfully to seize power through the army. In the 1998 elections, Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency and began a process of great social transformations. The electoral route was also the initial approach of the Indianistas in Bolivia, who opted to contest the government apparatus. However, after the entry of Evo Morales into the government, the approval of the constitution of the plurinational state and the changes promoted, it has been seen that the transformations are not so evident and that inequalities continue. This has led part of the movement to begin to rethink this strategy and look for alternatives beyond the state.

In all movements, with more or less centrality in the strategy of confrontation with oppressor states, it is committed to the construction of a popular movement that acts as a counterpower or as a space for the accumulation of forces. In Venezuela, the system of communes is posited by the Bolivarian project as the strongest expression of self-organization and popular power, the epicenter of revolutionary development. This was also the case with the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution in Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987. For some time, however, the contradictions between the communes and state leaders have been part of the Venezuelan political landscape. Beside this, the hegemony of the Bolivarian project is expressed in a popular movement that legitimizes, promotes and defends the maintenance of political and military power by the PSUV against the imperialist liberal right. In the north of Ireland, there is still a movement line that tries to build different social relations outside of institutional politics, but which has neither a defined strategy of seizing power nor a unity in the goals as movement.

One last element that has been part of the debates and developments of the different political movements, and which is intimately related to the question of power and the national question, is the question of the state. Thus, one of the main demands of many stateless nations has been the construction of its own state. However, we have also seen how a tool of the nation-states has been the annihilation of nations within them, the homogenization and assimilation that we know so much in our territory and that still resonates with their “one, great and free”. (1) The alternative proposals of plurinational states or the development of national liberation projects opposed to the project of nation-state, are also part of the range of possibilities offered by the will to overcome the oppression of any nation – and of any oppressed person – in the world. It is surely a question from which we can continue to learn from the revolutionary experiences of other peoples around the world. The construction of a world of free nations, in a free coexistence with each other, will be a prime objective in the war scenario imposed on us by capitalism in the coming years. Being aware of the limitations of this article, we hope that it will serve to increase the interest in knowing more deeply the aforementioned movements, as well as any other revolutionary movement. Perhaps in the face of the power of nation-states and the rise of the far right, achieving this world of free peoples seems crazy, but to paraphrase Sankara, it was needed yesterday’s craziness for us to act with extreme clarity today. We have to want to be those crazy. We must dare to invent the future.