The case for patriotism -- and for the partition of Iraq

Euro-federalists should travel in such places before they dismiss the virtues of patriotism. Patriotism, as I argued at yesterday’s CPS Liberty Conference, is what makes us behave unselfishly. It’s what makes us recognise an obligation to the people around us. It’s why we accept election results when we voted for the loser, why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we obey laws with which we disagree. Take that away and you get… well, you don’t necessarily get the sectarian violence of Syria or Iraq, but you do get a breakdown of responsible government.

How much disorder, horror, fear and mutiny might have been avoided had Iraq been divided along ethnographic lines in 2003 – or, better yet, in 1920. (If you don’t like the word “ethnographic”, substitute “democratic”: it amounts to the same thing.)

Any mention of partition sends some pundits scurrying to their keyboards. What about Yugoslavia, they say, or Ireland, or India, eh eh? Well, I wonder whether, in each of those cases, an agreed separation beforehand might have left us with something very like today’s borders without the intervening war. We’ll never know, obviously, but it’s worth noting that several partitions happened amicably enough, from Czechoslovakia to the West Indies Federation.