Partners in the Homeland – Communal diversity, cultural hegemony and national identity in Iraq 1958-63

Abstract

Research into Iraqi national identity is a disputed topic. Studies that take a culturalist approach tend to emphasise Iraqi people’s attachment to their homeland, while studies that take a structuralist approach often presume ethno-sectarianism as an enduring feature preventing Iraqis from adhering to a shared national identity. In this endeavour, this thesis also researches the origins of Iraqi nationalism in modern Iraq since the middle of the eighteenth century with a focus on the transformation of the Iraqi national identity during the 1930s to the early 1960s, aiming to contextualise the causal factors for such transformation. Ethno-sectarianism is contextualised by analysing the existing literature and ascertaining the cross-communal socio-political interactions within the public sphere of the Iraqi civil society. Building on this scholarship, a selection of primary sources is analysed in this thesis to shed-light on the transformation of the Iraqi national discourse and identity norms in the first republican period. This thesis shows that despite the intense ideological rivalry between the Pan-Arabists and Iraqists, communal diversity was a shared constitutive element of Iraqi nationalism during the first republican period, which was sustained into subsequent Pan-Arabist Iraqi regimes. For instance, Kurdish national rights and the notion of Arab-Kurdish partnership in the Iraqi homeland were recognised by both the state and the main political parties during this period, which challenges earlier essentialist claims. This thesis shows – using Gramsci’s cultural hegemony conceptualisation – that inclusive nationalism, shared by political parties with divergent ideologies during the first republican period 1958-63 was not situational, rather, it was due to political and intellectual leadership and interaction. This demonstrates the capacity of the plural Iraqi society to reach consensus about key issues related to its political community when provided with a reasonably free public sphere. This conclusion has the potential to be applied in future research related to Iraq’s contemporary issues.