From 24 to 30 September 2024, the 79th United Nations General Assembly was held in New York, attended by some 130 heads of state and government. During this General Assembly, the UN Summit of the Future took place in New York under the motto “Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow”. The reform plan negotiated there under the leadership of Germany and Namibia, known as the Pact for the Future, was subsequently adopted by the United Nations.
Efforts to Reform the International Architecture of Capitalist Modernity
In his speech, UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the Pact for the Future as ‘an important step in the reform of international cooperation’ and stressed: ‘We are here to save multilateralism from the abyss. I have invited you to this summit because the challenges of the 21st century demand 21st century solutions. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained that the Pact for the Future could serve as a compass for greater cooperation and partnership in the international community. In the Pact for the Future, UN member states committed themselves to reforming the UN Security Council. Action 39 states that they will “take into account the urgent need to make it more representative, inclusive, transparent, effective, democratic and accountable”. Specifically, the most powerful UN body should no longer reflect the post-war order of the victorious powers, but literally ‘the realities of the contemporary world’. In New York, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also called for swift reform: ‘It is becoming increasingly clear how dysfunctional the current structure of the Security Council is. That’s why reform must finally take place now. The African continent is mentioned as a priority in the Pact for the Future. The African Union is calling for two permanent seats on the Security Council, given that the continent is home to one billion people and that half of all Security Council meetings are related to Africa.
In this context, the Pact for the Future aims to reform the international order, which includes declarations of intent to reform the composition of the UN Security Council, demands for an adjustment of the international financial system in favour of the so-called Global South, the international financial architecture (i.e. the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), etc. The representatives of these international institutions themselves explain how inefficient they are in solving wars and crises. Referring to the genocide in Palestine and other wars, Guterres lamented a ‘world of impunity’. A growing number of governments are trampling on and undermining international law: ‘They can invade another country, devastate entire societies or completely disregard the welfare of their own people. And nothing will happen.
On the other side of the world, too, there is talk of a necessary change in the world order. A joint statement at the China-Africa summit in Beijing in early September promoted ‘genuine multilateralism’ and criticised the West. Western powers ‘interfere in the internal affairs of other states, violate their legitimate rights and interests, and thus hinder the development and progress of humanity against the opposition of the international community’. Not content with this statement and its criticism of the international architecture of capitalist modernity, China is building an entire framework of new international organisations against Western hegemony. These include the Belt and Road Initiative; the China-driven BRICS alliance, whose founding members include Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa alongside China; and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). There is also the Global Security Initiative and, at its heart, the Global Development Initiative (GDI).
Capitalism as a Crisis Regime
The discussions at the last UN General Assembly and the decision to adopt the Pact for the Future clearly show that not only the opponents of the system, but also the ‘rich club’, i.e. the representatives and forces of modern capitalism, are aware of the crisis of the existing system. Both sides are increasingly putting forward analyses and solutions to the crisis.
However, for the democratic forces and the activists of progressive, revolutionary and system-critical movements, it is clear that capitalist modernity itself is the main factor behind all the economic crises, problems, hunger, poverty and environmental disasters, social and political class divisions, power, extreme urbanisation and all the resulting diseases, ideological aberrations, moral impoverishment and decay. It is interesting to note that the struggle for freedom of the Kurdish society in Kurdistan, ignored by the UN, has not only put itself on the agenda of international politics with great effort, but has also managed to draw attention to alternatives. In this context, Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan emphasises that the system, which is in a state of global crisis, can only be maintained by a crisis regime in a state of emergency: “Capitalism itself, the main pillar of modernity, is the cause of crisis. Since it is based on the law of maximum profit and operates by ignoring the basic needs and ecology of society and the environment, it can never get out of the crisis. Overproduction and scarcity are always intertwined. The power, which is reshaped as a nation-state in modernity, escalates itself against the society to the extent of fascism, and transforms the system into a regime of constant civil and foreign war.”1
The empire of chaos under US hegemony is trying to manage the crisis of the system. The various centres within the world capitalist system are caught between restoration and reform. In his fourth volume of the Manifesto of Democratic Civilisation, Öcalan takes an in-depth look at the efforts of the various actors in this crisis.
Öcalan explains that the US is the current hegemonic power of capitalist modernity: “As the hegemonic power of the system, the USA will be able to show its ability to emerge from the structural crisis as self-restored. But this emergence will never reach its hegemonic power in the 20th century. The US will try to maintain its hegemony by sharing more power than before with more powers, especially the EU and Japan.”2 The US will therefore focus on defending its hegemony in this restoration phase.
In relation to the states of the European Union, however, Öcalan explains: “EU countries will continue to maintain their weight as the owners of the capitalist transformation in the Central Civilisation System. They will continue to be a strategic ally of the United States. However, the main restoration and even the reformation has to be done by the EU countries. The forces that will most reform capitalism, nation-statism and industrialism will emerge in these countries. Because the five-hundred-year history of modernity has been lived through in this group of countries. (…) The EU, as the power that knows and hears the most in the whole communication world, knows very well that it cannot maintain its modernity as before without these reforms.”3 Öcalan therefore states that the USA will probably emerge from the systemic crisis through restoration and the EU through reform. The discussions on the UN Pact for the Future can be better understood and categorised in this context.
In his writings, Abdullah Öcalan also goes into more detail about the role of China, which, as mentioned above, also speaks of the need for change in the world order and is promoting the establishment of new international institutions: “China, which has one of the ancient civilisation centres of East Asia, is trying to experience a unique capitalism, nation-state and industrialism with its liberal and real socialist synthesis. It cannot be expected to provide a very different formation from European-centred modernity. On the contrary, it will try to become competent in the most reactionary kind of what we can call its Germanic form (Prussian). As thought, it cannot be expected to replace the USA as a new hegemonic power centre. It can be expected to experience a limited capitalist reform called liberalisation gradually. Nation-statism and industrialism will continue to live on firmly. Otherwise, it cannot sustain capitalist development. A democratic-socialist transformation may enter the agenda as a possibility. This possibility should be anticipated more when the structural crisis of capitalism deepens.”4
However, although the nation-state system is currently experiencing serious problems and its cracks are widening by the day, it is still the strongest system both regionally and globally: “Nation-states, numbering over two hundred, are represented by regional unions (particularly the European Union, NAFTA, which consists of the US, Canada, and Mexico, APEC in Southeast Asia) and by the United Nations globally. The democratic civilization system is represented by loose and formless forums like the World Social Forum and by non-state and non-power unions of laborers and peoples that are inadequate.”5
Decolonisation in Africa and the “Worldmaking after Empire” effort
In the context of the UN’s Pact for the Future, one of the issues at stake was the question of better participation opportunities for the countries of the Global South, especially Africa. A closer look at the period of global decolonisation processes in the mid-twentieth century shows us the former revolutionary efforts to transform the international order from the African continent, but also their limits.
On 6 March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, appeared before the nation to proclaim the independence of the Gold Coast, which would henceforth be called ‘Ghana’ in homage to the old West African empire. In his speech, Nkrumah declared that 1957 marked the birth of a new Africa, ‘ready to fight its own battles and prove that the black man is ultimately capable of taking care of his own affairs’. In his eyes, the country’s decade-long struggle for independence was but one battle in the larger struggle for African emancipation. Our independence is meaningless if it is not accompanied by the complete liberation of the African continent,’ Nkrumah famously said. But this link between Ghanaian independence and African emancipation not only looked forward to the creation of new states, but also saw national independence as a first step towards the formation of a pan-African federation and a transformation of the international order. Today we know that the nation-state as a form of political organisation is incapable of realising the ideals of a democratic, egalitarian and anti-imperial future.
In her book ‘Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination’, Ethiopian-American political scientist Adom Getachew takes an in-depth look at global decolonisation efforts and the political thinking of the intellectual avant-garde of black English-speaking anti-colonial critics such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore and Eric Williams in the three decades following the end of the Second World War. It advances the important thesis that decolonisation was a project of world transformation, aimed at establishing a non-dominant and egalitarian international order. Contrary to the common practice of understanding decolonisation as a moment in the formation of nation-states, in which anti-colonial aspirations for self-determination culminated in the rejection of foreign rule and the founding of nation-states, she understands anti-colonial nationalism as ‘worldmaking’.
This is because the central actors in this study have recast the idea of self-determination in a way that takes it beyond its usual association with the nation – by establishing that the realisation of this ideal relies on legal, political and economic institutions in the international sphere that can ensure non-domination. Central to this view is a comprehensive concept of empire that locates foreign domination within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy. From this perspective, empire was a form of domination that transcended the bilateral relations between coloniser and colonised. A similarly global anti-colonial counterpart was therefore needed to eradicate the hierarchy that made this domination possible in the first place. The anti-colonial nationalists of the time therefore sought to overcome the legal and material manifestations of unequal integration and pave the way for a post-imperial world by pursuing three different projects: the institutionalisation of a right to self-determination at the United Nations, the formation of regional federations and the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO).
Just three years after Ghana’s independence, 17 other African states joined the United Nations. This marked the peak of decolonisation at the time. As a result, 1960 was dubbed the ‘African Year’. In that year, the African bloc successfully led efforts at the UN to pass General Assembly Resolution 1514, entitled ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’. This declaration described foreign rule as a violation of human rights, reaffirmed the right to self-determination and called for an immediate end to all forms of colonial rule.
The year 1960, which marked a radical break in the history of modern international society, is usually integrated into a standard conception of decolonisation, according to which the transition from empire to nation-state and the expansion of international society to include new states was a seamless and inevitable development. This image of decolonisation is based on the view that anti-colonial nationalists borrowed the language of self-determination from the liberal internationalist tradition of US President Woodrow Wilson in order to secure independence from foreign rule. In adopting this rhetoric of liberal self-determination, the nationalists of the colonised world ended up imitating the pre-existing institutional forms of the nation-state.
Adom Getachew points out, however, that understanding anti-colonial nationalism as worldmaking torpedoes the central premises of this standard conception or narrative. First, such an approach understands the concept of empire to go beyond mere foreign domination by making it clear that -and how- black anti-colonial critics also theorised empire as the structure of an international racial hierarchy. Echoing W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous diagnosis that “the problem of the twentieth century is that of the colour line, of segregation by colour”, the protagonists of this period thus focused their critical attention on the legacy of racial hierarchy and slavery that persisted in the emergence of modern international society. Their vision of a post-imperial world order therefore motivated them to create international institutions that could guarantee the conditions of non-domination. The thesis that national independence depended on international institutions was one of the key insights of the anti-colonial concept of self-determination.
This international project, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), launched in 1964 as part of the first World Trade Conference and formulated in a Charter and Declaration a decade later, was the most ambitious plan of the African national liberation movements for an anti-colonial world organisation. The NIEO world organisation project was initiated after the failure of the regional federations. This was because the post-colonial states, most of which were primarily commodity producers, were experiencing a significant deterioration in their trading conditions, which threatened their economic development and demonstrated once again that post-colonial nation-building was still susceptible to external influences. The NIEO sought to address a wide range of global economic issues, including the ownership of natural resources on land and in the sea, the relationship of multinational corporations to state authority, and the shipping and distribution of trade goods. At its core, however, it was about addressing the unequal terms of trade between developing and industrialised countries.
At their peak, national liberation struggles thus sought to protect themselves within the global system by creating a kind of “new postcolonial nation-state internationalism”. However, in the name of self-preservation, these new nation-states soon began to impose authoritarian rule on the societies they ‘liberated’ or to use violence against other differences within their own states. These anti-colonial movements accepted the colonial borders they had inherited and insisted on territorial integrity. This led to numerous (inter-state) conflicts, such as the Katanga crisis during the Congo crisis of 1960-1963 and the Biafra war of 1967-70. The right of nations to self-determination fizzled out after these great historical ambitions could not be sustained and implemented.
This historical legacy shows us that a nation-state solution is incapable of determining the fate of peoples and protecting them from integration into the global capitalist system. The focus on the nation-state as the central form of political organisation marked the beginning of the decline of post-colonial self-determination and is one of the central ideological and political reasons for the collapse of the ambitious anti-colonial worldmaking. There are two other reasons for this failure. First, the interpretation of the right of peoples to self-determination as equivalent to the creation of nation-states. The second is the increasing irrelevance or marginalisation of international institutions such as the United Nations. The stage of the UN and its General Assembly is now more of a place where the heads of state of countries like Turkey and Israel can openly announce their genocidal policies against the Kurdish and Palestinian people and explain them with maps – without having to fear the slightest consequences or even sanctions.
Learning From Defeat
In this context, the starting point of the strategic change, or “paradigm shift”, of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its pioneer Öcalan is the realisation that none of the anti-capitalist, anti-colonial forces of the 20th century has won. They all suffered defeats in very different ways. Capitalism and liberalism “first assimilated the German social democrats, then the real socialist systems, including Russia and China, and finally the systems of national liberation. All three currents have suffered a clear defeat at the hands of liberalism, and unfortunately they have not yet made a clear self-criticism of it.6 In this sense, the paradigm shift also emerged as a learning process from the experiences of national liberation movements that were absorbed by capitalist modernity. The origin of all the errors lies in the acceptance of the centralist nation-state as the fundamental framework for the working class in particular and society in general. The anti-systemic forces and the protagonists of the African national liberation movements were unable to develop a holistic and structural critique of capitalist modernity or to create an alternative system. This is because they based their revolutionary politics on the nation-state, which, along with industrialism and capitalism, is a central pillar of capitalist modernity. As soon as they became nation-states and made progress in some branches of industry, their anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism gave way to extreme modernism. In the long term, therefore, the real socialist and liberation nationalist experiments were merely fresh blood for capitalist modernity.
World Democratic Confederalism as a Compass for the Worldmaking of the People
In this sense, Öcalan emphasises that the problems caused by capitalist modernity have always been addressed with nation-state and nationalist thinking and paradigms. The nation-state has always been presented as the main actor in solving these problems and promoted as the only model. However, in order to understand the nation-state properly, it is necessary to analyse its position in the hegemonic system and its links with capitalism and industrialism. And this analysis makes it clear that the nation-state is a pillar of capitalist modernity.
The central aspect of Öcalan’s new paradigm and the concept of the democratic nation therefore concerns the reinterpretation of the right of peoples to self-determination: “The inadequate analysis of the question of state by socialist ideology only obscures the problem further. However, in ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, the vision of a state for every nation was fundamental in aggravating the issue even more. (…) The right of self-determination of the people includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people.”7 Öcalan makes it clear that the only way to realise the right of peoples to self-determination is not through the establishment of a nation-state, but that the democratic-confederal approach can be a new form of exercising this right: “The KCK (Koma Civakên Kurdistan – Kurdistan Communities Union) should be evaluated as a radical transformation in the solution to the national question as it represents the non-statist democratic interpretation of the right of nations to self-determination for the Kurdish question. (…) Democratic confederalism in Kurdistan is also an anti-nationalist movement. It aims at realising the right of self-defence of peoples by the advancement of democracy in all parts of Kurdistan without questioning existing political borders. Its goal is not the foundation of a Kurdish nation-state. The movement intends to establish federal structures in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq that are open to all Kurds and at the same time form an umbrella confederation for all four parts of Kurdistan.”8
Against the backdrop of the current structural crisis of capitalist modernity and the reform and restoration efforts of the systemic forces, the solution perspective of democratic confederalism also includes an internationalist perspective. In view of the discussions of the representatives of capitalist modernity about the UN Future Pact, the question arises as to the vision of the forces of democratic modernity for the (re)shaping of the world. The fact is that the various alliances of democratic modernity are extremely inadequate at the global level.
To overcome this, Öcalan proposes the development of World Democratic Confederalism, i.e. local and regional democratic confederations with their political parties and instruments of civil society: “The global union of democratic nations, the World Confederation of Democratic Nations, would be an alternative to the United Nations. Continental areas and broad cultural spaces could form their own Confederation of Democratic Nations at the local level.”9 And Öcalan continues: “Democratic confederalism favors a World Democratic Confederal Union of national societies, as opposed to the union of nation-states under the control of super-hegemonic power in the United Nations. For a safer, more peaceful, more ecological, more just, and more productive world, we need a quantitatively and qualitatively strengthened union of much broader communities based on the criteria of democratic politics in a World Democratic Confederation.”.10
To build this global alternative, Öcalan therefore envisages the establishment of a “global democracy congress of the peoples that is not fixated on states”11, in which the local democratic, cultural, feminist currents and the new progressive left against globalism can come together on various platforms. While the UN Future Pact functions as a compass for the forces of capitalist modernity, World Democratic Confederalism represents the compass and its own agenda for the democratic worldmaking of the peoples.
1Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Fourth Volume): Democratic Civilisation Solution – Crisis of Civilisation in the Middle East
2Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Fourth Volume): Democratic Civilisation Solution – Crisis of Civilisation in the Middle East
3Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Fourth Volume): Democratic Civilisation Solution – Crisis of Civilisation in the Middle East
4Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Fourth Volume): Democratic Civilisation Solution – Crisis of Civilisation in the Middle East
5Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Third Volume):The Sociology of Freedom
6Manifest der demokratischen Zivilisation (Zweiter Band): Die kapitalistische Zivilisation – Unmaskierte Götter und nackte Könige
7Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Nation and Democratic Confederalism (International Initiative Edition)
8Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Nation and Democratic Confederalism (International Initiative Edition)
9Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Third Volume):The Sociology of Freedom
10Manifest of Democratic Civilisation (Third Volume):The Sociology of Freedom
11Abdullah Öcalan – Beyond State, Power, and Violence
