A Middle Eastern beacon of direct democracy says there is a path forward for Taiwanese civil society.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/11/29
By: Nick Aspinwall
Credit: Kurdishstruggle / CC BY 2.0
Taiwan’s democracy works. It’s an oft-repeated truism binding Taiwanese society since the country shed decades of martial law and held its first democratic elections in 1996. However, Taiwan’s young democracy does not come without frustrations.
After last Saturday’s elections, the young, progressive wing of voters which mobilized against a pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) during the 2014 Sunflower Movement found itself bitterly disappointed as KMT legislators swept to power and referendums against marriage equality and gender equity education were successful at the polls. The failure of progressivism to take popular hold in Taiwan – reflective of similar trends in Europe and the Americas – has led some young voters to gradually lose faith in democracy as the island lies under the cross-Strait shadow of China and is now recognized as an independent nation-state by only 17 countries.
Deep in the arid desert of what appears on the map as northern Syria, however, a representative from the unrecognized, self-governing, secular democratic confederation of Rojava, described by New York Times Magazine in 2015 as a “utopia in hell,” insists there is a clear, if seemingly unorthodox, path forward for Taiwanese civil society.
Rojava’s territorial boundaries can be fluid, but this Oct. 2016 map shows the general area it administers in what appears on the map as northern Syria.
Rojava, officially named the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), lies just west of the similarly autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. While the two share cultural roots, Rojava, which declared autonomy in January 2014, eschews the better-established, resource-rich Iraqi Kurdistan’s emphasis on traditional liberal democracy and Kurdish nationalism in favor of a governmental philosophy laid out by the leftist revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan. This ethos, known as Democratic Conferedalism, emphasizes direct local democracy and the proactive inclusion of women, religious and ethnic minorities, and outsiders from all backgrounds.
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