All nation-states are oppressive artificial constructs, but some are far more oppressive and artificial than others.

In the relatively short history of the nation-state-based world system, few artificially engineered national units have been more oppressive than those of Spain, the United Kingdom and Iraq. Despite recasting themselves in recent years as liberal democracies, these supposed nations are still at root brutal ethnocentric hegemonies. Scratch the surface and you get a nasty response, as was plain for everyone to see in the ugly events that unfurled in otherwise super-civilized Spain last weekend.

Spain was never meant to be unified. The Greeks, Carthaginians and later Romans and Vandals wisely colonized only the Southern part of the peninsula and this geopolitically savvy foreign policy was continued by the Muslim régimes that ruled southern Spain well into the middle ages.

The so-called unification of Spain was an event of great cruelty and brutality, involving ethnic cleansing on a grand scale, mini-genocides and the imposition of a system of cultural engineering based on inquisition and torture. You could be arrested in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella for eating aubergines.

This unholy legacy persisted on the peninsula well into the 20th century, with the focus of opposition to the centralized Catholic authoritarian state shifting from traditionally multi-faith Andalusia to nascent socialist and Republican movements in Catalonia and the Basque Region. These regions were subsequently brutalized by the Franco régime. Guernica has become, thanks to Pablo Picasso, a by-word for man’s inhumanity to man, but few remember that it was chosen as a target because it lay within the ‘troublesome’ Basque Region.

Franco’s régime persisted, unlike those of Hitler and Mussolini, down until the mid-1970s. Philip K. Dick’s fantasy alternative history, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War, was very much the reality in Spain. You could be arrested for reading Lorca; the beautiful and culturally enriching Basque and Catalan languages were discouraged or banned.

Since then, Spain has attempted to reconstitute itself, somewhat clumsily, as a quasi-Federal state organized around an artificially restored national monarchy. Tensions, however, remain. While the Basque Country has become the rust belt of the peninsula, Barcelona and its environs has flourished and regained much of its former glory, while the rest of Spain languishes under the aftermath of a government-induced debt crisis. Catalonia has its own local cultural heroes, quite distinct from those of Spain—Gaudí, Miró, Tapiès. The skills of the Barcelona football team—the unofficial Catalonian national team—are greatly admired around the world and, unlike most other successful international football teams, Barcelona FC is owned, not by a Russian oligarch or Thai businessman, but by its fans.
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Scotland and England have a long history of being bickering neighbors. Scotland, being smaller, less populous, and colder, has generally come out worse in the long series of conflicts. Nevertheless, there have been periods during which Scottish culture and science and government have been far in advance of that of England or what would later become the UK. Scotland was a resilient pioneer of Protestant reform and religious tolerance, while England’s Bloody Mary was sending clerics to the stake. In the 18th century, the intellectual Enlightenment took root in Scotland far sooner and more deep-rootedly than it did in its sister-nation. Adam Smith, David Hume and James Watt were all Scots. Scottish technocrats, however, have been routinely excluded from power and relegated to the engine-room (like ‘Scottie’ in Star Trek), both during the British Empire and in subsequent London-centered regimes. Look what happened to Gordon Brown when he was elevated from the ‘engine room’ of the Treasury to the ‘bridge’ of the Premiership. Scots have recently come into the ascendant again—upholding basic Scandinavian-style human rights, tolerance and social justice against English elitism and neoliberalism and affirming their commitment to the ideal of European Union, while England languishes in nostalgia for a more illiberal, militaristic, mercantilist age.
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The history of Kurdistan is perhaps less well known, perhaps because these people have never enjoyed the comforts of their own nation-state. The Kurds are the largest ethnically and linguistically homogeneous group in the world not to have a nation-state of their own. This is a huge gash of injustice that vitiates and destabilizes the whole Middle East and threatens the wider world.

Always culturally and linguistically distinct from other parts of the region, Kurdistan has historically been overwhelmed by more powerful surrounding nations and empires. Vied over by the Persian Safavids and Ottoman Turks in the early modern period, after the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the peoples of this region were first promised independence by the Treaty of Sèvres. The Allies soon, however, reneged on this deal, bullied by Atatürk’s growing nationalist movement in Turkey and preferring to incorporate the rest of the Kurdish population into their own recently created artificial imperial ‘protectorates’ of Syria (overseen by France) and Iraq (overseen by the UK).

Despite the brutal politics of the region, this arrangement has persisted more or less intact to this day. Kurds in Turkey have been routinely excluded from power and denied the use of their native language. In Iraq, they were brutalized by Saddam Hussein, before being corralled into a US-protected, but not independent, zone, in the aftermath of the First Gulf War. Up to and including the recent referendum, appeals for Kurdish independence have been met with deaf ears or outright hostility by surrounding nations and global powers alike. Kurdistan’s only ‘friend’ in the region is Israel, a nation with which it shares a somewhat similar history and projected destiny.

In the recent conflicts in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish Peshmerga has been instrumental in putting down the vicious religious bigotry of the so-called Islamic State uprising. Different from almost every other nation in the region, Kurdistan promotes genuine democracy, egalitarian social policy, religious and ethnic tolerance, gender equality, and the true values of Islam. It is a baffling miscarriage of international justice that the soi-disant liberal ‘international community’ has consistently refused to support the Kurdish cause.
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In a famous essay, Tom Nairn described nationalism as being Janus-faced. There is a good kind of nationalism, looking forwards towards the future, promoting freedom for oppressed peoples and cultures, without fear of sharing this future with other cultures and peoples different from their own. On the other hand, there is the bad face of nationalism, which looks backwards towards imperialism and intolerance and forges nation-states as empires writ small and attempts to impose hegemony over cultural diversity.

This subjacent ideological divide, more emotionally powerful than the struggles between capitalism and communism, liberalism and authoritarianism, has always been the defining ideological conflict of the modern age and it is one that recent events in Catalonia, Scotland, Kurdistan and elsewhere suggest is coming to a head. Let us hope and pray that it does so in a manner that is more liberating and inspirational than marred by tragedy and violence.