6 September

Note

For a century, the Kurdish question has usually been asked in one direction: How should the Kurds adapt to the states that enclosed them?

Turkey. Iraq. Iran. Syria.

But what if that question already contains the error?

Mazlum Abdi’s recent claim that Kurds in Syria are becoming, for the first time, “founding partners” of the Syrian state made me wonder whether the real choice is no longer between preserving Rojava and submitting to Damascus.

Perhaps the more consequential question is whether Syria itself can change.

States are not facts of nature. They are human institutions—conjectures about how people should live together. They can fail. They can learn. They can be redesigned.

My new essay applies my Choices Protocol to this moment and asks a question that may matter far beyond Syria:

What if the best political choice is not one of the choices currently on the table?

Sometimes the task is not to choose better.

It is to create a choice that does not yet exist.

Mazlum Abdi’s recent interview with İrfan Aktan contains a sentence that deserves much more attention than it has received:

“One hundred years later, for the first time Kurds are taking part in the construction of the Syrian state.”

He goes further. Kurds in Syria, he says, are entering that state “with our own identity.”

That is a very large conjecture.

It may eventually prove historically important.

It may also prove wrong.

The interesting question is not whether we should applaud it or condemn it now. The more useful question is whether we are asking the right question at all.

The conventional debate presents Kurds in Syria with a familiar menu.

Preserve Rojava and its autonomous institutions.

Or integrate into Damascus.

Maintain an independent armed structure.

Or dissolve it into the Syrian state.

Defend the achievements of the past fifteen years.

Or accept that the political environment has changed and negotiate what can still be preserved.

Resistance or surrender.

Autonomy or centralization.

Victory or defeat.

But what if this menu is itself the error?

What if the real choice facing Kurds in Syria is not between Rojava as it existed and Syria as it existed?

What if Syria itself is the variable?

That is where the problem becomes much more interesting.

The Choice We Are Given

Abdi is remarkably explicit about what has changed.

The exceptional political circumstances that allowed Kurdish-led institutions to operate with extraordinary autonomy over the previous fifteen years no longer exist in the same form. The Syrian regime has changed. International forces have withdrawn or reduced their role. The wider world supports Syria’s territorial integrity. The autonomous administration no longer controls economic and external affairs as it once did. Abdi says plainly that “everything is not as it was,” while rejecting the opposite claim that “everything has been lost.”

That is an important admission.

It rejects two comforting stories.

The first says:

Nothing fundamental has changed. Kurdish achievements remain intact.

They do not.

The second says:

Everything has been surrendered. The Kurdish project has ended.

Abdi rejects that too.

He points instead to a transition. Kurdish security personnel remain active in Kurdish areas. Kurdish representatives are entering state institutions with their identity acknowledged. Kurdish language rights have advanced compared with the Ba‘athist period. The state now formally acknowledges Kurdish existence in ways previous Syrian governments did not.

But none of this by itself proves the “founding partner” conjecture.

Recognition is not co-authorship.

Representation is not necessarily power.

Participation is not necessarily agency.

And presence inside an institution does not establish the ability to correct that institution.

That distinction matters enormously.

The Choices Protocol

A difficult political situation becomes more difficult when we treat the choices currently visible as though they exhaust what is possible.

That is the first mistake the Choices Protocol asks us to resist.

Before choosing among options, audit the choice-space.

Who defined the problem?

Who generated the menu?

Which assumptions are hidden inside it?

Which possibilities are absent because the institutions or knowledge required to create them do not yet exist?

Applied to Syria, the usual frame looks like this:

Option A

Preserve as much of the autonomous Kurdish political and military architecture as possible.

Option B

Integrate those institutions into the Syrian state and negotiate protections from within.

Both are intelligible.

Neither should automatically be accepted as the outer boundary of political imagination.

Because both contain the same hidden premise:

Syria is the fixed object. Kurdish institutions are the variable that must adapt to it.

That premise is rarely stated.

It simply sits beneath the conversation.

But why should it?

The Ba‘athist state collapsed.

The political order is being reconstructed.

A new constitution has not yet been drafted. Abdi says that, as of the interview, even the constitutional preparation committee had not yet been formed. He argues that Kurdish representatives must participate in that process and that the agreements affecting Kurdish rights should ultimately be incorporated into the constitution.

If Syria itself is still being constituted, then the question cannot merely be:

How should the Kurds fit into Syria?

A more consequential question becomes possible:

What kind of Syria could Kurds, Arabs, Druze, Alawites, Christians, Assyrians and others build together that none of them has yet inhabited?

That is a different problem.

And different problems create different possibilities.

Founding Partner Is a Mechanism, Not a Compliment

“Founding partner” sounds impressive.

But political language is cheap unless it can be translated into institutional mechanisms.

If Kurds in Syria are genuinely becoming co-founders of a new Syria, we should be able to identify what that means in practice.

Can Kurdish representatives participate meaningfully in writing the constitution?

Are Kurdish linguistic and cultural rights constitutional rights or administrative permissions?

Can those rights be removed by a future government?

What authority remains local?

What authority belongs to Damascus?

How are disputes between local and central institutions resolved?

Who interprets the constitutional settlement?

Who controls the security forces?

What happens if Kurdish representatives and the central government fundamentally disagree?

What protection exists against a future return to centralization?

Can Kurdish citizens organize politically without having to rely on a single armed or party structure?

Does integration enlarge political agency or merely relocate authority?

Those are not details.

They are the content of the phrase founding partner.

If Damascus possesses the unilateral power to define, revise or withdraw the Kurdish settlement, then the Kurds are not co-authors of the state.

They are participants in an arrangement controlled by someone else.

There is a fundamental distinction between:

You are permitted to participate in our state

and

You participated in creating the rules by which our common state governs all of us.

The first is inclusion.

The second is constitutional agency.

Abdi is claiming the second.

History should judge the claim by the institutions that emerge, not by the rhetoric surrounding the transition.

What Must Not Be Destroyed

Here the Preservation Principle becomes crucial:

Do not destroy the means of error correction.

This principle applies equally to Kurdish institutions and to the Syrian state.

The institutions developed in Rojava should not become sacred merely because Kurds built them under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

Some may have failed.

Some may have concentrated authority excessively.

Some may need reform or replacement.

A political community cannot demand the right to criticize Damascus while treating every institution created under Kurdish control as untouchable.

But the opposite error is equally dangerous.

If existing Kurdish institutions currently preserve local knowledge, language rights, security capacity, participation, women’s representation, administrative experience or routes through which citizens can influence their own affairs, then dissolving those institutions before equivalent or superior mechanisms exist elsewhere may destroy knowledge that took fifteen years to create.

Integration therefore cannot rationally mean:

dismantle first, trust later.

The relevant test is functional.

What valuable problem was each institution solving?

What mechanism will solve that problem after integration?

Is the replacement mechanism stronger?

More criticizable?

More accountable?

More secure?

More reversible?

If not, “integration” may simply transfer authority upward while describing the transfer as national unity.

The Backspace Test

There is a very simple way to test the emerging arrangement.

Ask:

Where does the error go?

Suppose Damascus makes a policy that damages Kurdish education.

Where can it be challenged?

Suppose local Kurdish administrators make a serious mistake.

Who can replace them?

Suppose a constitutional interpretation narrows Kurdish rights.

Who adjudicates?

Suppose central security forces abuse local authority.

Who investigates?

Suppose Kurdish representatives themselves become corrupt or unaccountable.

Can Kurdish citizens remove them without threatening the entire settlement?

Suppose the original integration agreement turns out to contain an unforeseen defect five years from now.

Can the agreement be revised peacefully?

That is the political Backspace Key.

Without it, neither Syrian unity nor Kurdish autonomy is genuinely safe.

A political arrangement is not valuable because its architects insist it is final.

It is valuable because future generations can correct it when knowledge improves.

Abdi’s Most Interesting Admission

One of the strongest parts of the interview comes near the end.

Abdi looks back at the fifteen-year struggle and does something political leaders often resist.

He acknowledges imperfection.

There were shortcomings, he says.

Yet he does not conclude from those shortcomings that the entire struggle was mistaken. He argues that the war against ISIS was necessary, that Kurdish communities faced existential danger, that important institutions and experience were accumulated, and that the next stage should build from that knowledge rather than begin from zero.

That distinction matters.

The only alternatives are not:

Everything we did was right.

or

Everything we did was wrong.

A rational political culture should be able to say:

Some institutions succeeded.

Some failed.

Some achievements should be preserved.

Some assumptions should be discarded.

Some sacrifices were unavoidable.

Some costs might have been avoided.

Some knowledge must be carried forward.

Some explanations have reached the end of their useful life.

That is how political learning works.

It is also why the present transition should not be framed as the abandonment of the previous fifteen years.

A more intelligent question is:

What knowledge did those fifteen years create that the next political architecture must preserve?

That question is much harder than asking who won.

The Third Choice

This leads to the possibility that neither of the inherited options is adequate.

The future may not be:

A sovereign mini-state inside Syria.

Nor:

A return to the centralized Syrian state.

The third choice may be an institutional form that neither side currently possesses the knowledge to describe fully.

A Syria in which territorial integrity survives, but political uniformity does not.

A Syria in which common sovereignty coexists with meaningful local government.

A Syria in which Kurdish language rights are not concessions.

A Syria in which local security knowledge can be preserved without producing competing sovereign armies.

A Syria in which different regions can experiment administratively while constitutional rights remain national.

A Syria in which minorities do not depend on the goodwill of the majority.

A Syria in which no community needs an external patron merely to prevent its disappearance.

A Syria in which disagreement with Damascus is politics rather than treason.

That may sound idealistic.

But notice the alternative.

The inherited Syrian model already failed catastrophically.

Why should rationality require returning to an institutional structure that helped generate the original disaster?

Syria Is Not Nature

This is where the Kurdish question again encounters the problem of the map.

“Syria” often enters political discussion as though it were a fixed fact of nature.

The country exists.

Therefore its internal architecture is assumed to possess a kind of prior legitimacy.

But the territorial existence of Syria does not settle the question of how Syria should be governed.

A state can preserve its external boundaries while radically changing the distribution of authority within them.

Germany is Germany under federalism.

Switzerland is Switzerland despite extraordinary cantonal autonomy.

The United Kingdom has survived different forms of devolution.

Political unity does not require administrative sameness.

The hidden binary—

centralization or partition

—is therefore a false menu.

That does not prove that federalism is the answer for Syria.

It proves only that the choice-space is larger than the inherited argument usually admits.

The Syrian State as Conjecture

Perhaps we should go even further.

Every political order is a conjecture.

It proposes answers to questions such as:

Who governs?

At what level?

Under which rules?

How are rights protected?

How are disputes resolved?

Who controls coercion?

How can rulers be replaced?

What happens when the arrangement fails?

The Syrian state that existed before 2011 was one conjecture.

It failed in catastrophic ways.

Rojava was another conjecture.

It produced important achievements and serious problems under highly abnormal wartime conditions.

The emerging Syrian settlement is a third conjecture.

Why should anyone assume that it has already reached its final form?

The rational approach is not to sacralize any of these arrangements.

It is to preserve what they taught us and create something better.

The Hardest Question for Mazlum Abdi

Abdi says that the January agreement was the best available solution under extremely dangerous conditions. Without it, he argues, war would have continued, more people would have died, and more civilians would have been displaced.

That may well have been true.

But the Choices Protocol asks a second question after every apparently necessary choice:

Was this genuinely the best possible choice, or merely the best option on the menu available at that moment?

Those are different claims.

The immediate agreement may have been the least destructive choice in January.

That does not mean the institutional future must remain bounded by the terms available in January.

A choice can be rational now and still need to be transcended later.

The greatest danger is converting an emergency settlement into an ontology.

“We had to do this” can quietly become:

“This is therefore how Syria must permanently work.”

That conclusion does not follow.

From Optimization to Creation

Much of politics consists of optimization.

How much autonomy can be preserved?

How many ministries?

How much local control?

Which security positions?

How many constitutional clauses?

Which guarantees?

These are necessary negotiations.

But they remain negotiations inside an existing frame.

The more creative question is:

What institutional knowledge could create an option that does not yet exist?

That is the Deutschian turn.

Knowledge changes possibility.

Before federalism existed, federalism was not an available institutional option.

Before constitutional courts existed, no society could choose one.

Before modern representative democracy, the menu looked different.

Before power-sharing arrangements were invented, certain conflicts appeared insoluble.

Political possibilities are not simply discovered.

They are created.

Therefore the Kurdish problem in Syria should not be reduced to bargaining over a fixed quantity of power.

It may also be a knowledge-creation problem.

What institutional innovation could make Kurdish security and Syrian unity compatible?

What constitutional mechanism could preserve local difference without converting difference into permanent territorial rivalry?

What form of representation could prevent demographic majorities from turning into permanent political dominance?

What form of decentralization could preserve local knowledge while preventing armed partition?

We do not yet know.

That is precisely why the choice-space should remain open.

The Preservation Principle Applied Symmetrically

There is an important warning here for Kurdish politics itself.

Do not destroy the means of correction in the name of preserving Kurdish gains.

But also:

Do not preserve Kurdish institutions merely because they are Kurdish.

A local institution that cannot be criticized, replaced or reformed is not made rational by its nationality.

Similarly, Damascus cannot claim that centralization is rational merely because it is Syrian.

The same standard must apply in both directions.

The test is functional:

Does the arrangement preserve criticism?

Does it permit peaceful replacement?

Does it protect minorities?

Does it distribute knowledge intelligently?

Does it allow experimentation?

Can citizens reverse bad policy?

Can the institutional structure survive bad leaders?

Can future generations revise it?

That is a far more demanding standard than nationalism.

The Founding Partner Test

So let us take Mazlum Abdi’s phrase seriously.

Not ceremonially.

Critically.

Kurds will have become founding partners of Syria when they participate in creating a political architecture that does not depend for its survival on the benevolence of Damascus.

They will have become founding partners when Kurdish rights are not temporary exceptions but properties of the constitutional order.

They will have become founding partners when Kurdish citizens can disagree with the central state without their identity becoming a security problem.

They will have become founding partners when local political agency remains real even after the exceptional leaders of this transitional period are gone.

And they will have become founding partners when the system they help create protects Arabs, Druze, Alawites, Christians, Assyrians and others by the same principles they demand for themselves.

Anything weaker may still represent progress.

But it should be named accurately.

The Choice That Does Not Yet Exist

The great temptation after long conflict is to believe that peace requires choosing between yesterday’s alternatives.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes peace becomes possible only when the alternatives themselves are replaced.

Kurds in Syria may indeed have lost aspects of the extraordinary autonomy created under exceptional wartime conditions.

They may simultaneously have acquired a possibility that did not previously exist:

the possibility of helping create the state whose authority they are now being asked to accept.

That possibility should neither be romanticized nor dismissed.

It should be tested.

And the most important test is not whether the Kurdish flag appears beside the Syrian one.

Nor whether Mazlum Abdi holds an office in Damascus.

Nor whether Kurdish is permitted in particular schools.

Nor whether the international community praises the agreement.

The test is whether the new political order makes Kurdish agency structural rather than conditional.

That is the difference between joining a state and helping constitute one.

What If Syria Is the Variable?

For a century, the Kurdish question has repeatedly been formulated as a problem of adaptation.

How should Kurds adapt to Turkey?

To Iraq?

To Iran?

To Syria?

Perhaps that formulation itself deserves criticism.

The Kurds are not the only variable.

States are human institutions.

They can learn.

They can change.

They can fail.

They can be redesigned.

And Syria, after everything it has endured, may have no greater claim to institutional finality than the Kurdish arrangements that emerged from its collapse.

So perhaps the question now facing Mazlum Abdi and Kurds in Syria is not:

How much of Rojava can be saved inside Syria?

Nor even:

How much power will Damascus allow the Kurds to keep?

Perhaps it is:

What kind of Syria must be created so that Kurds no longer need exceptional historical circumstances simply to possess political agency?

That choice does not yet fully exist.

It must be created.

And if Kurds in Syria really are becoming founding partners of a new Syria, that may be their most important responsibility:

not to preserve every institution they built,

not to accept every institution they inherited,

but to help build an order in which neither Kurdish autonomy nor Syrian unity becomes immune from criticism.

A state worthy of survival should not ask its peoples merely to belong.

It should give them the power to help correct the conditions of belonging.

That would be more than integration.

It would be political authorship.

And perhaps, after one hundred years, that is the choice that has finally begun to appear.