The term “components” has leaked from Iraq to Syrian political and community languages in the years following the American occupation of Iraq, and writings, research, and articles began to teem with this invented term.
But before the Americans, the French had introduced the term ‘minorities’ to eastern people’s languages, which became an alternative to the frayed Ottoman language, which used terms such as parishes and dhimmis.
Thus, in every cycle of Western intervention, terms arise and vocabulary enters while others disappear.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was fertile ground for the United States to plant its new concepts,and theintercommunal, inter-ethnic society underwent an American cosmetic operation that became the components of the Iraqi people.
Instead of being citizens of the Republic of Iraq, Ba’athists in turn hid civil groups under the cloak of its regime and divided society into “with us or against us”, so Iraq was not a state of citizens until the American occupier addressed them as dictated by political norms.
Saddam’s Iraq was, in essence, the state of the leader, the party, and the security group, something similar to Assad’s Syria.
There is an earlier expression used to describe social formations, civil groups, ethnicities, and sects in the late Ottoman long period, where the phrase “elements of the nation” was the closest expression to the term “components” being used in the tongues of contemporary writers and politicians.
While Iran distinguished itself from the rest of the Middle Eastern countries that linked citizenship to race, Iran concluded by launching the term “Iranian peoples” to refer to all the peoples inhabiting the Iranian Plateau.
Shah Reza Pahlavi, newly appointed in 1935, did away with the name “Persia,” which had a narrow ethnic connotation, in favor of the collective name of Iran, but the Khomeinist or theocratic state caused the death of formal equality once again by differentiating citizens on the basis of religion and sects.
Syria, like the neighboring countries, was not a state of citizenship throughout the modern history of its establishment, because it was not allowed to transform, according to the short historical path since the French forces expelled from Syria, to the ethereal European form of the modern state, i.e. the nation-state.
While citizenship was preserved as a part of the state’s/regime’s public rhetorical discourse, it was a hollow and formal citizenship, manifested in official correspondence and television and radio programs that received callers with the phrase “Welcome, dear citizen!”
Meanwhile, two issues arise in this context. The first is to adopt a solution to the problems of recognition by emphasizing the discourse of the components, as Syria is the sum of the coexisting groups that are not integrated into a political and legal entity.
The second issue is the “magic wand” of citizenship, which is to say that simply granting citizenship without addressing the issues of recognition and equality between ethnicities and sects means recycling the problem rather than solving it.
Islamists view citizenship as an introduction to the rights of the Sunni majority over its sects and religions, while “Arabists” believe that citizenship means that Syria should be ruled by the whims of the national majority. Consequently, it is not possible for other minorities to concede some of the national features of the Arab state.
Yet a third trend believes that citizenship means granting individual rights over the rights of groups, which means abolishing sub-identities and eliminating them under the slogan “We are all Syrians,” especially regarding Kurds and Syriacs/Assyrians.
What is worth noting is that the term “components” is frequently used in the Autonomous Administration in North and East of Syria (AANES), describing the main ethnicities – Arabs, Kurds, Syriacs and Assyrians.
Instead of saying Kurds or Arabs, the term has become commonplace in most local news reports and political statements to the ‘Kurdish component’ or the ‘Arab component.’
It is possible to refer to Kurds, Arabs, and others without suffixes and additions, such as talking about a sect and attaching the adjective “generous” to it.
The word “components” is supposed to be temporary and transitional, or to be an intermediate term between the two stages of the nation-state and the religious community state, or the state of the party and the leader, and the state of citizenship.
But the reality of the situation indicates that the state of components has become a purpose in itself, as long as the form of the imagined state of citizenship suffers from a major defect and division over the perception of its ideal and the appropriate reality of Syrian ethnic and sectarian pluralism.
There is a Kurdish aversion to restricting the rights of Kurds to citizenship, and this is noticeable in the Kurdish political discourse, due to the fact that those calling for citizenship are divided in their perception of it.
Their dimensions seem either broad regarding Syria, where Syria is labelled Arab or Islamic, or narrow to the extent that it does not comprehend the rights of national groups, and in both cases, these two perceptions cannot constitute the state of citizenship.
There is ample space to imagine a citizenship state based on the recognition of sub-identities that do not conflict with individual rights.
There is also room to get rid of the idea of the component state, which appears to be an improved and delusional form of the sectarian state and the state of discordant nationalities.