Reudar Visser has a new article up on his website. It’s titled Federalism from Below in Iraq: Some Historical and Comparative Reflections. It’s a comparison between, mainly, the federalizing process as laid out for Iraq in the “Constitution” rammed through under US pressure in 2005, and the process whereby post-Franco Spain became a federation in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
JWN readers know how much I have always admired Visser and his very careful and well-grounded analytical work on Iraq. There’s lots of interesting information in this new article, and a number of potential lessons. However, I must note that I believe that the situation inside Iraq has changed (deteriorated) so much in the past six months that I find it hard to see that the 2005 “Constitution” is going to be a document of much continuing relevance, let alone of any “binding” quality.
Sorry to be so gloomy.
7 thoughts on “Visser on federalism: Iraq and Spain”
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“SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) – U.S. troops have sealed off an Iraqi town after militants forced its mayor and entire police force to resign, and residents said the Americans were preventing aid convoys from entering and people from leaving.
“The town of Siniya has been besieged since Thursday by U.S. forces, who are preventing anyone from entering or going out,” said Hussein Mahjoub, the town’s mayor until he and his fellow councilors resigned last week in fear of their lives.”
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-12-04T160737Z_01_L04416398_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-2
It’s needlessly talking more and more about federalism and compares Iraq with Spain or Namibia or any other setup unless US troops leave and Iraqis will start take care by themselves not by occupiers..
“Actually, even if the situation in Iraq will be become rather problematic, there will always be a second choice by the name of Osama bin Laden. The ex-State Secretary of the US Madlen Albright has stated in December of last year.”
Helena, I certainly appreciate that there are wider issues here that also need to be addressed, and that my approach may seem unduly procedural (and thus uncritical). At the same time, I do feel that this issue is related to problems you address in your other recent and excellent posts about MSM reporting on inter-sectarian cooperation in Iraq (or, as you point out, the absence of such reporting). Much in a similar vein, Western media reports on the Iraqi federalism legislation tend to suggest that this framework more or less automatically will translate into a tripartite federal system. I think it is important to stress that this is not the case, and that the niceties of the legal system reveal that the creation of large sectarian federal entities is in fact quite unlikely. This may sound terribly theoretical and detached from reality but I think it is important, not least because those who advocate sectarian entities – chiefly the Kurds and SCIRI – also pride themselves on being legalistic and orthodox with regard to the constitution.
PS: I think the attempt to marginalise the Sadrists looks like a repeat of the Jaafari versus Maliki struggle earlier this spring. And the new inter-sectarian coalition does have many parallels to the formation that boycotted the law for implementing federalism back in October.
Reidar, thanks for writing this article, and Helena, thanks for pointing to it. The comparison between Iraqi and Spanish federalism is a fascinating one. I might quibble, however, with the assertion that Spain is the only comparable example of “federalism from below,” given that there have been at least two other attempts to establish similar mechanisms.
The first is the Italian model upon which the Spanish one was based. It is of course possible to dispute Italy’s status as a federal country, but I’d argue that (1) the regions have constitutional status vis-a-vis the national government, and (2) the regional governments have gradually drawn down authority in a manner similar to their Spanish counterparts. Certainly, the trend in Italy since the 1990s has been to devolve fiscal and legislative power and to make regional administration more directly accountable to the people.
In any event, the Italian constitution creates a system of provinces and super-provincial regions similar to Spain and, as with Catalonia and the Basque country, provides “special autonomy” for five historically distinct regions. Article 132 allows regions to merge or subdivide with the consent of a sufficient number of municipalities and a popular referendum, subject to a veto at the national level. That article also sets conditions under which municipalities can secede from one province and join another.
The Italian and Spanish examples differ in that, to my knowledge, the mechanisms of Article 132 have never actually been used. Nevertheless, regional boundaries have become a significant factor in Italian politics; certain political parties (of which the Lega Nord is only the most prominent) have campaigned for merger or subdivision of regions, and their platforms have at times been divisive. This might corroborate your thesis that the existence of mechanisms for grass-roots federalism creates a new arena of political dispute. On the other hand, the ability of individual Italian municipalities to switch regions might provide a way to fine-tune the territorial disputes you foresee in Iraq.
There are of course significant problems with using Italy as a template for Iraq. As you point out, strong historic regional identities exist throughout Spain but only in a few parts of Iraq, and Italy is closer to the Spanish than the Iraqi model in this regard. That’s where my second additional example comes in: Somalia. According to the Somali transitional federal charter (which, these days, is worth about as much as the Iraqi constitution), the country’s 16 administrative regions were supposed to coalesce into states, which would then form governments with certain devolved powers. However, with the exception of Somaliland and Puntland (both of which had coalesced earlier via organic processes), the only region-states that were created were short-lived alliances of warlords. Without historic regional identities, there was no basis other than such alliances upon which regional states could form, and due to the warlords’ stranglehold over politics, there were no effective grass-roots mechanisms by which the people of each region could decide what structure they wanted. I suspect that Iraq is headed for a similar kind of failure which could, as Helena suggests, render constitutional federalism irrelevant.
I’d guess that a more successful model for a country like Iraq, where historic regionalism exists only in certain areas, is provided by countries like Ukraine, Finland and Tanzania. This involves a type of asymmetric federalism, with one or more regions having constitutional status and autonomous powers within a unitary state. How to get there from here, though, is something I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Jonathan, many thanks for your very inspiring feedback and sorry for the delay – I simply didn’t discover your post until now. I am vaguely aware about the Italian parallel – I ended up not pursuing it further, partly because the federal status of the country, as you say, is in even more dispute than is the case in Spain, partly because the 1978 Spanish constitution also has very strong roots in the older 1931 constitution and is intellectually deeply rooted in Spanish socialism, and partly out of a belief that the practical significance of the Italian “from below” component has been limited, again as you point out. What I have been wondering about – hopefully you may have some input on this – is to what extent the Italian system of 1948 created a true tabula rasa. Is it not the case that there was some kind of pre-existing (or elite-drawn) administrative map that was imposed in a one-off administrative decision, and that the “bottom–up” element is limited to (future) administrative changes? At any rate, whatever the placement of the Italian political system along the federalism–unitary state continuum, the demarcation system is interesting as such, certainly as a fine-tuning device, as you suggest. However, in the Iraqi constitution, there is no mechanism for fine-tuning below the governorate level.
Thanks also for the reference to the Somali case, whose “from below” dimension I was unfamiliar with. I checked the charter: is it correct that the demarcation procedures are not specified in any greater detail than the rather fleeting mention of the possibilities for regions merging into states in article 11.2.b? If that is the case, i.e. if no mechanism for launching a federal initiative has been defined, then I would say that this is a bit more rudimentary than Spain and Iraq. I totally agree with your comments on the strength of historical regions across these countries and the relative backwardness of Iraq on this score, but I do believe that in Iraq attempts will at least be made to constitute regions in accordance with constitutional procedure, and that the country in that case may come to differ from Somalia. That is also why I think these legal complexities deserve some attention.
Is it not the case that there was some kind of pre-existing (or elite-drawn) administrative map that was imposed in a one-off administrative decision, and that the “bottom–up” element is limited to (future) administrative changes?
I believe this is so. The 1948 constitution established a list of 20 regions based on a predrawn map, with the mechanisms of articles 132 and 133 reserved for future cases. I’m by no means a scholar of Italian politics, but I believe this is part of the reason for the subsequent stability of regional boundaries. Once regional institutions were established, the costs of subdivision or amalgamation became much higher, and the focus shifted to increasing the autonomy of the existing regions (such as the institution of elected councils in 1968, fiscal powers in the 1990s and expansion of competences in 2001).
However, in the Iraqi constitution, there is no mechanism for fine-tuning below the governorate level.
Do you think something like this might work in Iraq, possibly in disputed cities like Kirkuk, or would it open too many possibilities of border conflicts and non-contiguous enclaves?
I checked the charter: is it correct that the demarcation procedures are not specified in any greater detail than the rather fleeting mention of the possibilities for regions merging into states in article 11.2.b?
Like most things in Somali politics, the process of forming region-states was left half-baked. There was a vague idea that the states would coalesce through consensus among clan elders, as had previously happened in Somaliland and Puntland. The transitional parliament was also supposed to enact a law on formation of states, and articles 11(5) and 68 of the charter call for a “federal constitution commission” and “state boundary demarcation commission” to oversee the implementation of federalism. In fact, however, I don’t believe that these commissions were ever appointed, and the TFG has never established sufficient control on the ground to begin the state formation process.
There have been a couple of attempts to form a region-state in the Juba Valley, but these mainly consisted of a group of allied warlords declaring that such a state existed, and the issue has become moot since the Islamic judiciary took over that area. If the TFG wins out over the judiciary and establishes control of southern and central Somalia, then the process of bottom-up federalism might be developed further, but this prospect is at best uncertain.
Jonathan, once more thanks for your insights. I don’t have a very thought-through position on this, but my gut reaction is that to apply “fine-tuning mechanisms”, from below, to flashpoint areas like Kirkuk might well have as its sorry result the perfection of the ethno-sectarian madness. The idea of municipal transferability is beautifully democratic, but perhaps not suited for areas with ongoing conflicts? In that regard, perhaps it is better to insist on the (mostly multi-ethnic) governorates as a common arena, to stimulate compromise and cooperation instead of inviting further sectarian divisions?
The idea of municipal transferability is beautifully democratic, but perhaps not suited for areas with ongoing conflicts?
I suppose it could go either or both of two ways. On the one hand, the existence of a peaceful, democratic and binding dispute resolution mechanism might induce some participants to give up the gun for the ballot box. On the other hand, the very availability of separatist mechanisms might push separatism to the top of the agenda and embitter the electoral losers to the point of making the conflict worse.
It’s been a while since I read any of the relevant literature, but my gut reaction would be that the second alternative is more likely. It seems to me that a successful conflict resolution measure must (1) be accepted as legitimate, and (2) produce an outcome that is minimally acceptable to all sides. An election usually satisfies the first criterion if the campaign is fair and the results are credible, but the winner-take-all aspect of a referendum cuts against the second one. The type of nuanced compromise that makes all parties equally unhappy is more likely to result from high-level negotiation than an up-or-down electoral choice.