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Writing in Open Democracy last month, Shluwa Sama laments that “Kurdish nationalism in Iraqi-Kurdistan has been transformed from an ideology that strengthened resistance to the Iraqi Baathist dictatorship to a tool now being employed to help build shopping malls.” She is not the only one to criticize the rampant materialism gripping the region, or to note how air conditioned shopping malls are replacing the more authentic bazaar as a locus of social life. Multinational companies courted by the Iraqi Kurds threaten to transform “authentic” Kurdish society to a homogenized capitalist shadow of itself. Oil companies and other foreign corporations also claim more and more people’s land and put the environment in jeopardy.
Many of these fears and worries are justified, and the people of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq need to stand up and protect themselves from modernization’s destructive side effects. Development needs to be managed carefully, and the entire society’s interests need to be safeguarded from the more rapacious and predatory business interests looking to make quick profits in Iraq. Growing income inequality raises more and more alarm bells, especially with weak social safety nets to catch the less fortunate left behind by modernization’s changes. Nor can anyone with both eyes open help but worry when they see the urban sprawl and traffic of Erbil, or the plastic garbage and hasty construction lining roads and rivers of an otherwise beautiful landscape.
The criticisms of the Iraqi Kurds’ “neo-liberal transformation” may also be misguided, however. Many of today’s critics of the Kurdistan Regional Government were once friends. They now resent the Iraqi Kurds’ pro-capitalist, pro-Western turn. For much of the international Left, “pro-capitalist” and “national liberationist” are mutually exclusive terms, you see. They can forgive bombings of civilians, the occasional massacre and Stalinist authoritarianism of too many “revolutionary” movements, but not the embrace of capitalism.
Given how critics of neoliberalism focus on the way military power is used to protect and extend imperialism's economic power, however, I am surprised they seem to completely miss what looks like a fairly obvious and astute strategy on the part of the Iraqi Kurds: Attract foreign investments so that capitalist elites will influence their home governments in the Kurds’ favor. If “capitalist imperialists” control the most powerful military forces on earth, does it not make sense to get the capitalists on your side?
Given that everything else failed for the Kurds -- from normative appeals to the world's "conscience" and old-fashioned guerrilla revolts to communist parties and appeals to the eastern bloc’s “solidarity,” – Erbil’s strategy appears compelling. We should remember that for most of the 20th century, the Kurds were subject to the most intensive and often times brutal policies of the non-Kurdish central states ruling over them. Experiences ranged from forced assimilation (witness the large numbers of Kurds who don't speak Kurdish today) and the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages in Turkey and Iraq to the displacement of millions, the banning of the Kurdish language and even denial of the Kurds' existence in Turkey. None of the old strategies seemed able to put a stop to these abuses and tragedies.
Erbil’s signing of contracts with multi-national oil companies and its current strategy of exporting oil for less money than it could get from Baghdad makes perfect sense in this context. Every gleaming shopping mall, if owned at least in part by foreign interests, may be worth more than a battalion of local fighters.
Once the Kurds have more security against the more basic sorts of threats, they can then focus better on containing the excesses of neo-liberalism or completely rejecting it. One may argue that these objectives – security and resistance to certain kinds of globalization or capitalist homogenization -- are not mutually exclusive, of course. In the Iraqi Kurdish case they might be contradictory at this particular point in time, however.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of the forthcoming Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
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