International Law and the British Mandate: The Debate About Self-determination in the Middle East After 1919’

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This chapter deals with the issue of self-determination under international law by comparing the creation of Iraq out of remnant parts of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War with the concurrent case of Kurdistan. Iraq’s emergence to statehood was largely down to two distinctly separate and seemingly contradictory factors: firstly, the principle of self-determination promulgated by US President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and embedded in the Covenant of the League of Nations, but also the realpolitik of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the delineation of the Middle East after the First World War into British and French spheres of influence. Iraq’s creation came at a critical time in the development of international governance. The legal framework which had come into existence in the nineteenth century, an international society largely predicated on nation states, though with continuing empires, was formalised by the creation of the League of Nations and further emphasised an international society of states. However as will be seen here Iraq, an artificially constructed state of disparate ethnic communities came into being, but the same status was denied too the Kurds, an ethnically homogenous community.