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Book
Review |
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Visser, Reidar. Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism
in Southern Iraq (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005). 238
pp, $39.95.
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Why isn't an Basra a sovereign state? Dominated
by Shi'a Arabs, Basra was one of three Ottoman provinces before, under British
occupation, it was sutured to Baghdad and Mosul, creating modern Iraq. Yet
other portions of the broken Ottoman Empire – some far less distinctive
– became independent after World War I. Why did Basra become part of Iraq?
This is no merely local or narrow question. Much world history teaching
and scholarship simply assumes the territorial state. Yet there is nothing
"normal" about sovereignty. Of the one or two thousand peoples and regions
which might have a state of their own, just under two hundred actually do.
The causes of unevenly distributed sovereignty are central to any discussion
of the modern world. |
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Exactly because struggles over sovereignty
are so important, it is easy to read the present into the past. Visser began
his work for Basra in the 1990s, just as Yugoslavia was breaking
up. While Basra can be understood as another book for the 'Balkanization'
shelf, Visser argues that "the Middle East, for all of its own problems,
contrasted sharply with the Balkans in its approach to multi-ethnic realities." |
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The lines dividing Iraqis, Visser says, have shifted
considerably in the last century. Those divisions are not necessarily rooted
in the artificial state constructed at the end of the First World War. In
fact, Visser points out, it is debatable just how much Iraq is an
invention of post-Versailles Great Power politics. Visser, who offers evidence
from both camps, ultimately contends that this is not the point. Iraqi nationalism
won out for reasons internal to Iraq itself. There was indeed a strong separatist
movement in Basra at the beginning of the 1920s, culminating in a 1921 petition
to British authorities demanding Basran independence. Visser examines the
movement's leadership, a leadership drawn from across the region's economic
and political elites. The movement's failure, Visser tells us, resulted
from the inability of these elites to mobilize wide popular support; it
"failed because a potential that existed was not exploited." This, however,
raises a further question: "why," Visser asks, would the "oppressed population
of oil-rich southern Iraq refrain from separatist activities for most of
the twentieth century?" Once the separatist movement imploded, its memory
was all but erased. Successive Baghdad governments and Iraqi scholars rewrote
Basra's history in order to consolidate Iraqi state power and identity –
as well as ensure that Iraq continue to benefit from Basra's oil and port.
As a result, Basra's separatist episode is all but forgotten in today's
Iraq. |
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Visser does not pass up the opportunity to
offer his own advice for to Iraqis for developing a stable political structure
in the current atmosphere of international and internal conflict:
both
camps should seriously consider the possibilities for a mixed-breed
variety of federalism – a system which could open up opportunities
to Islamists in certain geographical regions which at the same tie guarding
against human rights violations of the kind an immature federal system
may be particularly vulnerable to.
This activist historian voice is limited, however, and centers on the evidence
he has offered, revolving around Basra's incorporation into the Iraqi national
identity. |
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More than three hundred years after the Treaty
of Westphalia supposedly birthed the contemporary concept of the sovereign
state, disputes over sovereignty fester within and between states throughout
the world. Basra offers a necessary reminder that the understanding
such disputes requires close historical reading of local as well as world
histories. |
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Maryanne Rhett
Washington State University |
