John Broich’s explainer on the Kurdish question is a good example of the contradictions of contemporary American Kurdophilia. He seems to lament the failure of the Kurds to construct what he admits would be an ethno-nationalist homeland out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, even though America today is built upon a rejection of ethno-nationalism of all kinds. As I have observed before, it’s easy to advocate self-determination for peoples abroad, but a lot harder to do it at home, because self-determination weakens and fragments. That makes it good foreign policy and bad domestic policy, at least in the short run, but that also means that advocates of Kurdish statehood don’t have principle on their side.
Broich seems to think that it follows naturally from the fact that the Kurds are “a group of around 40 million who identify with a regional homeland and common historical background, but are now divided between four countries,” that they ought to have their own country.
But I rather doubt that he would support calls by white nationalists to carve an independent white homeland out of the northwestern United States, calls by black nationalists to carve an independent black homeland out of the United States, or calls by Native Americans to carve an independent Native American homeland out of the United States. Or indeed calls by blue staters to secede. Carving up the United States would surely eliminate the region’s current global military and economic dominance.
The fact is that if we believe in democratic pluralism at home, then we can’t try to protect oppressed groups abroad by supporting their calls for statehood, either diplomatically or militarily. The best we can do is support their calls for democracy and equal treatment within whatever countries they happen already to belong. At least, that’s the best we can do if we want to act toward them in a way that is consistent with the way we treat ethno-nationalist aspirations here at home. (Of course, we might not want to run our foreign policy based on consistency and principle, but that’s not how America’s advocates of Kurdish statehood have been making their case.)
Broich observes that the failure of the allies actually to create an independent Kurdistan after World War I resulted largely from European self interest. The British and French were themselves worried that hacking Arabia into too many pieces would make it difficult for both to maintain their spheres of influence in the region, so they scrapped plans for Kurdish self-determination. But the fact that the Kurds lost their chance at statehood because of European self interest doesn’t mean giving them a state would have been good for the region, or consistent with the principles according to which we organize our own country today.
Broich’s unreflective observation that Woodrow Wilson “himself was explicit in calling for a new, broadly encompassing Kurdistan,” sums up the contradictions in contemporary American advocacy of Kurdish statehood. For Wilson, of course, surely believed in white ethno-nationalism for America, and famously segregated the federal government.
At least he was consistent.