The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (review)

When more than one hundred London-based diplomats, politicians, journalists, and international affairs analysts turn out for a discussion of a book, one knows that the book is timely and has something to say about pressing current international affairs and about its topic's potential for impacting regional and international geopolitical alignments. This is what happened on 31 May 2005 at Chatham House, a British think tank associated closely with the United Kingdom's Foreign Ministry. The book discussed was The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq, edited by Brendan O'Leary, John McGarry, and Khaled Salih. O'Leary is a noted international authority on various types of governmental arrangements, such as federations, confederations, and plurifederations. McGarry is a Canadian academic who specializes in the same topics, and Salih is a Kurdish scholar who teaches at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense. Both O'Leary and Salih spent several months in early 2004 in Kurdistan, Iraq, as advisers to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) participating in the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which has been the government instrument of Iraq, although not fully implemented, since it went into effect on 8 March 2004. The TAL was scheduled to be replaced by an Iraq-wide assembly, elected no later than 31 January 2005, obviously a date that was not met.

The task at hand for O'Leary et al. is to "right-size" Iraq, that is, to make the state of Iraq more compatible to the various ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, resulting in better management of the state, reduced hostility, and lessened armed conflict and violence and to secure a more stable political and geopolitical entity. All three co-authors and their major contributors, such as Peter Galbraith and Gareth Stansfield, apply their wide experience with multinational and plurinational states to the evolving question of the future of Iraq and, in particular in this study, Kurdistan in Iraq.

The title notably emphasizes the future of Kurdistan in Iraq and not Kurdistan Iraq or Kurdistan-Iraq, which indicates the preference of the contributors and especially, O'Leary, since he wrote or co-authored four of the main chapters dealing with plurifederation. The title implies that, at least for the time being, the contributors think that a "unified" Iraq would best serve the interests of the peoples of Iraq, especially the Kurds, and implicitly the geopolitical and geostrategic interests of the United States and Europe as well as Middle East states, with the exception of Iran. If, in the future, Iran were to fragment and the success of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq were to be one of the factors contributing to that fragmentation, such a development would probably be acceptable to the contributors of this volume. But, if this were to be the case, then the plurifederalism advocated would be jeopardized.

The principal theoretical projection of the book is in chapters 2 and 4, written or co-authored by O'Leary. As mentioned above, O'Leary was and is an adviser to the KRG and participated in the drafting of the TAL. Why advocate a plurinational federation for Iraq instead of a multinational federation? Because, says O'Leary, "A 'plurinational' federation describes a state in which there are multiple and recognized nations, whose respective nationals may be both concentrated and dispersed, and in which individuals may identify with one, more than one, or none of these nations." The prefix pluri helpfully describes cases of "not one"; that is, it covers both two and more and suggests that national identity or identities may be variable in intensity and that the federation may comprise both conflicting and compatible identities. Multinational federation, by contrast, is often interpreted as indicating spatially discrete and homogeneously adjacent nations, as requiring three or more nations, as suggesting that each national identity is held exclusively and that each national has only one national identity possessed with the same intensity. The TAL foreshadows a...