The principle and its violation in Iraq
Bob Zadek framed the question by contrasting countries formed “by the natural flow of events,” where people with a common culture or language settle a border, with countries formed “unnaturally” by European diplomats — the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Americans — “sitting around a conference room table with a map of the world and drawing lines and creating countries.” He listed the USSR, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Africa as examples that fell apart, and asked whether Iraq was likewise “an unnaturally formed country just drawn on a map.” United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Ivan Eland agreed. After World War I, he said, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and despite Woodrow Wilson’s framing of the war as one to spread democracy and self-determination, “the opposite happened.” The British wanted oil in Iraq, so they “glued three provinces of the Ottoman Empire together” — provinces that “had little relationship to each other before.” Lebanon and Syria, he added, were artificial in the same manner, drawn by the British and the French. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Eland’s remedy, set out in a 2009 book called Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, was that before the United States left Iraq it should negotiate with the Sunnis, Kurds and Shias and help them moderate a partitioning. An Iraq could remain, but each group would control its own autonomous area under a weak central government. The problem, as he described it, is that a strong central government controlled by one group oppresses the others: Iraq had Sunni rulers for decades after the British established the monarchy, the last being Saddam Hussein, and after his overthrow the Shia ruler Maliki was “oppressing the Sunnis and the Kurds.” A loose confederation of autonomous states, by contrast, leaves the groups providing their own security and judicial systems, so they do not fight over the center. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
American hypocrisy and the oil question
Zadek called self-determination part of “our American DNA” — the conviction that people can pick the form of government they choose to live under — and then argued that American policy in Iraq is “anti-self-determination” because it forces the factions to live under a government against their will and arms the Maliki government to suppress those who want self-determination. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
A caller, Jacob in San Jose, asked whether the region’s instability is chiefly a function of its energy resources and the consumers who want them, and raised Turkey’s interest in controlling a pipeline. Eland answered that much American policy is based on oil whether the government acknowledges it or not, citing his 2011 book No War for Oil: US Dependency in the Middle East, in which he argued that the market is the best means to get oil. He said there are very few scenarios in which energy analysts fear supply will be cut off, because too many people make money from selling it — even radical governments and ISIS have sold oil. The real reason for keeping troops in the region, in his account, is not to guard oil but to keep a thumb on everybody else’s oil, including that of the Europeans and the Chinese. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Jacob then raised the South Stream pipeline and John McCain’s trip to Bulgaria, arguing that the United States pressured Europe to stop a direct pipeline from Russia and succeeded. Eland replied that the United States wants to keep control over its European allies and minimize Russian influence, and that after the Cold War Russia should have been let into the European community of countries rather than excluded. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Nationalism, liberalism and the hubris of reshaping cultures
In a later episode Zadek put the same charge in different terms: the United States was not content to let other societies evolve into more open, small-d democratic, market societies on their own, but acted like a parent with a young child pushing them toward what it knew was best — in effect denying them the self-determination America had had in its own history. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Yoram Hazony said that was exactly right. He predicted that few people in Serbia, Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan would describe American and European interventions as kind and gentle and liberating, and he rejected the foreign policy that says Washington or Brussels knows how every country should live and will make them live that way. He allowed that in extreme cases such as Rwanda or Cambodia, where the Americans had solid information about atrocities on the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions slaughtered, and where the military capacity existed to go in quickly, stop it and get out without becoming the government for the next 50 or 100 years, intervention seems like a basic moral obligation. But he said those cases do not describe American foreign policy over the last generation, which assumes that any kind of bad government needs to be stopped. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Hazony called that view utopian — well-intentioned but unrealistic — and doubted the United States could enter a foreign country it does not understand well and reshape its culture into a democracy in America’s image. Democracy in that image, he said, developed in the English-speaking world over 800 or 900 years. He noted that the French state collapsed in the 1950s and a military intervention reestablished a new constitution, and described the European Union as a bureaucracy that autocratically imposes laws on countries that have not asked for them. If the French and Germans have not been good at maintaining self-governing independent nations, he asked, why expect countries in other civilizations to do things the American way? He called it hubris to think Iraq — governed by dictatorships for thousands of years, since before England or America existed — was waiting for the United States to invade, set up liberal arts colleges and help write a new constitution. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Self-determination and development in Latin America
Zadek opened a 2017 episode by recalling the American colonists, who “had a large degree of self-determination,” democracy, low taxes and opportunity, and yet found it not nearly enough and fought a revolution. Latin America, by contrast, had so little and yet showed “a huge amount of passivity,” which led him to ask whether something in the region’s political traditions made it unable to adopt free-market and democratic principles. Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017)
Fergus Hodgson said the question of why Latin America has not developed is one many have written books about, and that he had attended a roundtable in Guatemala examining it. On the Economic Freedom of the World Index, only Chile has ever cracked the top 10, while Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador sit near the bottom. He attributed the pattern to the region’s particular history and peoples — indigenous populations, Spanish conquerors or colonists, and a slave population — and to the common legal and governmental approach the Spanish imposed from the founding, which he described as mercantilist and feudalist. The indigenous people, he said, are extremely collectivist or tribalist, and tribal customs get in the way of a more liberal or open society. Protectionist, anti-competition rhetoric that is merely par for the course in Latin America, he added, has appeared in the United States too. Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017)
Hodgson said he saw no easy solution, and recalled standing in El Salvador and estimating an average monthly salary of about $300, against earnings in the United States easily five times that. Lack of economic development goes hand in hand with crime, he said, and Central America and Venezuela have a huge tendency toward participation in the prohibited and therefore violent drug trade. He said seven or eight of the countries with the highest murder rates in the world are Latin American, and that Venezuela has knocked Honduras and El Salvador off the top spots to become the most murderous nation on the planet. Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017)
Across episodes
The Iraq episode and the Hazony episode argue the same question — whether American foreign policy denies other peoples the self-determination the United States claims to champion — and the treatment shifts from remedy to skepticism: Eland, in 2014, proposes partition and a weak central government as the way to restore self-rule, while Hazony, in 2018, denies that the United States has the capacity to reshape foreign cultures at all, treating even the French and Germans as imperfectly self-governing. The Hodgson episode touches the topic only obliquely, treating self-determination as a background condition the colonists enjoyed rather than as a policy question, and the excerpts show no development linking it to the other two.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any partition proposal, nor any official American response to Eland’s or Hazony’s arguments. They do not give the legal basis, statute or case authority for any claim about self-determination, and the Hodgson excerpt breaks off before the discussion of immigration and the welfare state. Nothing in the sources states how the various factions or governments named responded to the positions attributed to them.