Identity politics in Iraq
Reading Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms one cannot help but feel that people’s belief in the nation-state may be slightly overstated. The tenuous and fragile existence of states that is so lucidly illustrated by Davies makes our belief in their eternal mountain-like permanence rather absurd. Yet the mere suggestion that Iraq may fragment is met with […]Fanar Haddad writes for Near East Quarterly:
Reading Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms one cannot help but feel that people’s belief in the nation-state may be slightly overstated. The tenuous and fragile existence of states that is so lucidly illustrated by Davies makes our belief in their eternal mountain-like permanence rather absurd. Yet the mere suggestion that Iraq may fragment is met with either howls of protest or hand-wringing approval – the former driven by an inflated sense of nationalism and/or solidarity; the latter driven by an insistence on viewing less developed countries in ethno-sectarian/religious terms.
The cold fact is that state fragmentation, failure, collapse and even reincarnation are far from atypical in history. One is reminded here of Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams in which a dream describes a hell inhabited not by people but by dead states: “… their bodies stretched out sprawling side by side: empires, emirates, republics, constitutional monarchies, confederations…”1
Iraq, like any other state, can one day find itself amongst the dead states of Kadare’s hell.
