Iraqi state centralism historically and for Jawad al-Maliki

The excellent and careful Norwegian historian of modern Iraq Reidar Visser has just produced an extremely helpful analysis of the evolution of the concept of the centralized Iraqi state as it developed in the post-Ottoman era… and he continues this analysis right through the the post-2003 era, concluding with some references to the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki on the topic.
In current (post-March 2003) Iraqi politics this issue has assumed particular importance because of the strong preference of the country’s US occupiers (and also the two makor Kurdish parties) for a radical decentralization and geographic devolution of governing authority in Iraq– a project to which many US analysts misleadingly give the name “federalization”.
In support of this decentralization/devolution project, many commentators have alleged that the entire construct of “Iraq” was a purely manufactured creation of the British– and that therefore there is something “natural”, appropriate, and almost inevitable about the deconstruction of that state.
I note that this argument about the “artificiality” of colonial-era boundaries is one that could– potentially– be applied to states in many parts of the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. (Oh, also the United States and if you think about it, just about every state in the world…) But nowhere else that I know has this argument been used so insistently, as it has with reference to Iraq, to try to justify the radical deconstruction of a central state.
Anyway, into this discussion, Visser is now injecting a much-needed degree of solidly informed historical realism.
He writes:

anyone who researches primary materials from the early 1900s soon understands that it is impossible to deny the existence of Iraq as a geographical and social–historical category at the time. For “Iraq” is simply omnipresent in those sources. Foreign consuls, be they Persians or British, would write about “Iraq”. Ottoman administrators, from the sultan’s advisors down to office clerks in the central registries for state correspondence, referred to “Iraq” as a familiar category which required no further explanation. Not least, people living on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris spoke of an area they knew as Iraq. In Basra in 1910, the municipality agreed on a proposal to erect a statue of the Ottoman statesman Midhat Pasha (1822–1883), to keep alive the memory of “his many services to Iraq” in the 1860s and 1870s.
There is little doubt that some kind of Iraq existed, and that this concept was intelligible to ordinary people. Both Sunnis and Shiite Muslims used it to refer to the combined area of the Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, at least north to Samarra. To what extent the popularity of the concept abated further north is a moot point. Some local writers had used expressions like “the Kurdish tribes among the people of Iraq” as early as in the nineteenth century (this would seem to imply that the concept was indeed in use north of Samarra as well); the Ottomans, on the other hand, except for a brief interlude in the early Young Turk period, maintained a distinction between an “Iraq” consisting of Basra and Baghdad and the area to the north which was mostly denoted through its administrative name, the province of Mosul. At any rate it is clear that the standard depiction of Iraq as something that was created by the British from scratch – without any pre-modern roots and essentially forced on the local population – is untenable. The British role was mainly to join Mosul to the two provinces of Basra and Baghdad, whose inhabitants for their part were already familiar with a larger concept of Iraq.
In its most vulgar form, the “constructivist” interpretation of modern Iraq has become allied to an even more problematic ethno-religious caricature map of the country. Mosul, it is claimed, was “Kurdish”; Baghdad, “Sunni Arab”; Basra, “Shiite Arab” or even “Shiite, with a strong orientation towards Persia”. Such models are another unfortunate side effect of twenty-first–century journalism being projected onto atlases of the past. They overlook the fact that the provincial border between Basra and Baghdad was located far south towards the Gulf (it ran eastwards from Nasiriyya to Amara), so that the majority of Shiite Muslims in the area were in fact residents of the province of Baghdad. Similarly, Mosul was highly complex in terms of ethnicity, with large groups of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens, Yazidis and Christians alongside the Kurds. But if this complexity is overlooked, the “artificiality” thesis perpetuates itself: cross-regional cooperation, if taken note of at all, is dismissed as the result of outsiders employing brute force against a population which for their part are portrayed as being locked in internecine antagonisms, unable to conceive of any sort of shared super-regional identity.

I would argue, moreover, that this tendency by many western writers to think of the different “ethnic” and or religious/denominational groupings within Iraq as being locked into internecine antagonism derives from the west-European experience of states having been generally been either created and conceived of along strictly mono-ethnic lines. People who conceive of states in this way find it hard even to imagine states that are formed on multi-ethnic lines. They tend to essentialize ethnicity as an immutable attribute of human experience/practice and to imagine that the world’s different ethnicities must always be competing against each other in one way o0r another…
Visser writes about the decision of the British colonial administrators, who after WW1 had been “awarded” (or, had grabbed) the area of Iraq and ruled it under a League of Nations “mandate”, to create a single, unitary state comprising the previously existing Ottoman regions of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. He notes– and this is of some wry significance today– that one of the goals of the British administrators in doing this was to dilute the influence that the country’s quietly powerful Shiite clerics could exert over its governance…
He notes the determination with which the British pursued their project of creating a unitary state for the whole area (including Mosul), and also the fact that the British used military force including aerial bombardment in their pursuit of it.
He adds this:

The assertion that the centralised unitary state model in Iraq is a heritage from the British mandate period is thus a valid one. But this model was remarkably soon embraced by the new elite of twentieth-century Iraq. There were military coups in 1936 and 1941 and a pro-communist takeover between 1958 and 1963, and yet none of these ruptures occasioned any rethink of the more fundamental question of state structure in Iraq. Quite the contrary, the model of government where all roads lead to Baghdad was maintained throughout these turbulent decades – and quite unquestioningly so.
One important factor in this was the enthusiasm shown by certain groups from outside the “historical Iraq” for participating in the new regime…

He then shows that these centripetal tendencies in Iraqi politics proved remarkably persistent over time– especially among the country’s Shiites:

Perhaps the most convincing indicator of how centralist ideals pervaded twentieth-century Iraqi political thought is the discourse of the Shiite opposition after the onset of republican pan-Arab and gradually more anti-Shiite rule from the 1960s onwards. Even in this period of brutal state oppression, Shiite oppositionists consistently clung to the vision of a centralised state when they challenged the government of the day…
This tendency of support for the centralist and unitary state model persisted even beyond 1991 and the traumatic anti-Baath uprising of that year – and despite the fact that it was the regime’s exploitation and abuse of the concept of centralism that had enabled it to engage in military folly in Kuwait. Shiite Muslims, who suffered disproportionally as the uprising was brutally quelled, did not abandon the vision of a unitary state when they in exile renewed their planning for a post-Baath future. Indeed, much of the internal troubles of the Iraqi opposition in the 1990s were caused by Shiite unwillingness to accept autonomy demands by Kurds who now more uniformly than before propagated federalism as the ideal future structure of government.

The Kurds, Visser makes clear, were always much more skeptical of the virtues of tight political centralism than the Shiite or Sunni Arabs. Then, in March 2003, the US toppling of Saddam gave the Kurds the opportunity they had long been seeking to win either a radical decntralization of the Iraqi state or (as many Kurdish citizens now seem to prefer) outright secession of the Kurdish areas from it.
Visser assesses the support of the Iraqi Shiites for decentralization (“federation”), after March 2003, in the following way:

Shiites who worked with the Americans did acknowledge the concept in a theoretical sense, but without expressing much enthusiasm. More radical Shiite Muslims in fact joined Turkmens in early 2004 in street protests against federalism in the city of Kirkuk, thus echoing the anti-federal position of the Sunni Arabs who before 2003 had been the loudest critics of any kind of tampering with the unitary state structure. And even those few Shiites who were openly pro-federal were careful to stress that it could be implemented in Iraq only on certain conditions: it would have to be a non-sectarian model of federalism, with geography – not sect or race – the basis for future federal entities. The sole federal project launched south of Baghdad in this period was consistent with those criteria and combined the three southernmost provinces of Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar only. It was a bid for a regionalist “southern” entity rather than a “Shiite” one.
Signs of possible changes in this picture did not emerge until the summer of 2005. International media then started to focus on calls made by one of the Shiite factions, SCIRI, for a single unified Shiite sectarian federal entity covering all the territory south of Baghdad down to the Gulf. Many analysts soon concluded that “all the Shiites of Iraq demand a single federal entity and exclusive control of the oil resources in the area”, even though the amount of actual agitation in favour of this particular scheme was quite limited. An alternative interpretation would be to see these initiatives as parenthetical projects in a wider historical context. If Shiite attitudes to federalism are studied over time, it seems clear that the more recent demands for a unified sectarian Shiite federal entity are atypical and even exogenous – and owe much of their prominence to Western journalists who seem drawn towards a simplistic but user-friendly Balkans model of Iraqi politics. Among the Shiite Muslims themselves, enthusiasm for these federal proposals has been much more in doubt. Influential Muqtada al-Sadr has repeatedly rejected any consideration of “federalism in the context of occupation”, and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s emphasis on non-sectarianism and nationalist values is at variance with SCIRI’s ideas about a single Shiite canton.(10) Still, SCIRI has managed to obtain a constitution that puts no limits on the scale of new federal entities, and they have been careful to present their rather hazy federal scheme as a “guarantee against anti-Shiite terrorism” – potentially a vote-winner in a climate of steadily increasing security problems.

He notes– and this is important– that at some point before February 2006, the Sadrists had presented “a concrete proposal to delay the implementation of federalism outside the Kurdish areas until the next parliamentary session, scheduled to start in 2009.” He argues, moreover, that this proposal could even have helped the Americans to find an orderly way out of Iraq.
Finally, regarding the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki— and the current prospects for the robustness of the project of keeping Iraq as a unified, multi=ethnic state– he writes the following:

Maliki, who hails from a small town near Hindiyya (between Hilla and Karbala in central Iraq), was among the first leading Daawa personalities to publicly indicate an open-minded attitude to federalism back in 2002, but as late as in the summer of 2005 he warned local authorities in Karbala that autonomy should not come at the expense of “the centralism of the state”, as this could ultimately lead to the creation of statelets. However, a certain shift of his personal position may have occurred during the course of the summer, when he was deeply involved in the constitutional negotiations and increasingly seemed to fraternise with Kurdish federalists while at the same time dismissing the Sunnis as recalcitrants in the question of state structure. It is therefore somewhat ironic that he replaces Jaafari who has been far more sympathetic to the Sunni view that the Arab areas of Iraq can do without federalism. Still, Maliki has so far not expressed any support for the sectarian federal scheme headed by SCIRI, and he has been elected as representative of a party which supports a vision of a unified multi-ethnic Iraq with a meaningful role for Baghdad as capital. That is a vision which despite daily terrorist attacks is proving remarkably resilient – thanks not least to historical roots that extend much further back in time than many Western observers are prepared to admit.

Visser has done some remarkable work in this short paper. He is another historian who, like Juan Cole, has shown himself very talented at drawing on his broad understanding of the history of Iraq to produce multi-layered and very well-informed analyses of current political issues in Iraq, and to do so in a timely, very policy-relevant way.
Actually, what he does is a little different from what Juan does. Visser spends more time on deep and considered historical reflection and less time on the “vacuuming up” of large numbers of items of daily news than Juan. I think it’s really great that we can have easy internet access to both of these guys’ work, and I am immensely grateful for their efforts.