Self-determination and State-building: Mosul Before the League of Nations, 1918–1932

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the place of ‘self-determination’ and its conjunct, ‘minorities’ rights,’ as legal languages in the history of Iraq from the British occupation until its League of Nations-supervised independence in 1932. While historians understand the development of the Arab-led mandatory regime and its relationship to international, League-mediated politics, the potential for the politics of ‘self-determination’ to have created radically different geopolitical outcomes, particularly in the northern, heterogeneous province of Mosul, has only recently been acknowledged. Rather than treat self-determination as an analytical category, this article begins from the perspective of the concept’s novelty in the Middle East in 1918. State-building in Iraq through independence, I argue, depended on manipulating the doctrinal slippages between ‘self-determination’ and ‘minorities’ rights’ as much as it did on institutional processes. Through the emergence of the mandatory regime and in two critical League Council decisions – the Mosul territorial arbitration of 1925 and Iraqi independence proceedings in 1932 – the nascent Arab state, the British Empire, and the inhabitants of Mosul contested the meaning of self-determination. Their arguments had far-reaching implications, some unintended, for the shape of inter-war international politics and constitute an important – and earlier – episode in the interplay between decolonisation and the centring of the nation-state in international law in the twentieth century.