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The Sanguinary Legacy Of Partitionism

It doesn't bode well for an independent Kurdistan.
partitions of poland europe

Between Damon Linker’s and Peter Weber’s columns, it appears to be partition week over at The Week (where I have also been known to hang my hat). Linker’s pro-Biden column leans heavily on then-Senator Biden’s having mused about partitioning Iraq to make the case for the Vice President’s foreign policy acumen, while Weber suggests one-upping Putin’s intervention in the Syrian civil war by supporting an independent Kurdistan.

Daniel Larison lays into both proposals in his usual fashion. But my question is: where’s the historical evidence advocates might bring forward to make their case for partition as a solution to inter-communal conflict?

The partition of India that created Pakistan is among the most famously sanguinary examples, but it’s not like history is full of successfully-imposed divisions of states. Northern Ireland’s status remains contested long after the Republic has moved on to more important questions. The Korean War never ended. The Vietnam War didn’t end until the partition of that country was undone on the battlefield. The crackup of Yugoslavia has finally achieved a kind of stasis after multiple foreign interventions. The breakup of the former Soviet Union left irredentist groups in Trans-Dniestria, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, has famously destabilized Ukraine (which may yet itself be partitioned if things really go badly) and may yet tear apart NATO member state Estonia. And, of course, much of the Middle East is the fruit of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.

If I were looking for examples of successful partitions, I’d start with the “velvet divorce” between Bohemia and Moravia on the one side and Slovakia on the other. But of course, that’s an extreme outlier case in which both sides agreed from the outset on the desirability of separation. Other states have achieved independence on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, and have gone on to have cordial relations with their former metropole, but again, the precondition for success was agreement, won through some combination of superior force or persuasion. The track record of partitions imposed as a solution to irreconcilable ethnic or ideological difference is abysmal.

And when have we been in a position to impose such solutions anyhow? If we had said, some time in 2006, say, that we support the partition of Iraq, where would we have gotten the authority to implement it? Who within Iraq, apart from the Kurds, would have signed on to such a plan? If the government didn’t support our plans, we’d be in the awkward position of fighting against the government we had installed and were obliged to defend. Or, alternatively, we might have been in the position of implicitly endorsing ethnic cleansing intended to change the facts on the ground in advance of implementation of such a plan.

When someone talks about America “backing” an independent Kurdistan, what is generally meant isn’t securing an agreement by the Syrian or Iraqi government to recognize that new state’s independence, so that inter-communal relations could resume on a normal and equal inter-state basis. What’s meant is the assertion of a right to independence, and providing the material support to back up that assertion with force. It means, by definition, escalating the inter-communal conflict, in the hopes that victory for the side we are backing can be achieved expeditiously enough that the other side sees no alternative but to surrender.

And Syria and Iraq are not the only players in the mix, just the weakest. If Kurdistan is ever going to be a secure state, it will only be with the acquiescence of powerful states like Turkey and Iran that rule most of the territory where the Kurds live. The price it would take to win that acquiescence at the negotiating table is hard to fathom. Logically, one should assume that the price it would take to win it on the battlefield would be all the higher.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Kurdish ambitions. Kurdistan is kind of like 19th-century Poland, a country that ought to exist, and only doesn’t because of a historic injustice. But it’s worth recalling that what it took to restore Poland to the family of nations was the carnage of World War I; that World War II began with the agreement between Hitler and Stalin to reverse Polish independence; that the worst of the Nazi crimes were committed on Polish territory; and that after the war Polish national territory was forcibly relocated westward (Poland was the only victim of Nazi aggression to be treated in this fashion), after which Poland finally found the blessings of peace under Soviet domination.

This is not, I think, a model we should encourage the Kurds to emulate.

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