New borders, old mistakes: The Iraqi template

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A state built without consent can inherit borders, resources and institutions that serve everyone but its people

Before 1932, there was no Iraq. There were three Ottoman provinces, Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, administered separately for four centuries. Mosul looked north to Anatolia, Baghdad centred the river trade, and Basra faced the Gulf. Although the states shared water, they did not share a polity. And when the British Empire dismantled the Ottoman order, it merged them anyway without even asking the population if they wanted the merger.

This ‘absence of consent’ might seem an oversight, but it was the condition upon which the state was built. The merger served a sequence of interests. None belonged to the people inside the lines.

The first interest was oil. British capital held the concessions of the Turkish Petroleum Company in Mosul before the war ended. The Royal Navy’s shift to oil made those concessions strategically important. At the peace conferences, the hardest fight was over Mosul because Türkiye claimed it and Britain refused to give it up. The League of Nations drew the frontier in 1926. Every diplomat and geologist involved knew what Mosul was worth. But the people of Mosul, whose land held the fields and wells everyone was fighting over, were not even make part of the talks. In other words, their interests had no place in the negotiations.

The second interest was the state itself. With the oil secured, the other provinces were attached to make the unit viable. Baghdad gave the rivers, while Basra gave the port. Three very distinct societies were pressed into one administrative cage. However, the people revolted in 1920 across all three provinces simultaneously. It took the Royal Air Force a year to crush them, and while doing so, London learned the lesson. The issue was not consent but cost. Now, a cheaper instrument was needed.

Britain believed that that instrument was a king. Faisal of the Hijaz, who was ejected from Syria by the French, had no following in Mesopotamia. That was his only qualification. Just like any rootless monarch, he also depended entirely on the power that installed him.

In this case, a plebiscite was organised under occupation, which showed 96 percent approval rating. Historians call it a manufactured election, obviously because the form of consent was staged and substance denied.

The fourth interest made the arrangement explicit. In March 1925, the new government signed the Turkish Petroleum Company concession, covering nearly the entire territory. The consortium was British-dominated, the ancestor of British Petroleum (BP). The companies took the oil for decades, while Iraq received royalties.

Faisal is said to have written privately that his country was being robbed. He signed because his throne had a sponsor, and the sponsor required the signature. The subsoil wealth was legally alienated before the state turned five.

Only then, in 1932, did independence arrive. It came last, after the borders were fixed, the monarch installed, the resources contracted away. Britain sponsored Iraq into the League of Nations as the final signature on a deal the population had never seen and negotiated in rooms where not one of them sat.

The concession ran for decades. The king kept his throne until the bullets found him in 1958. That way, the people inherited a country made for everyone except them, with borders drawn by someone else’s strategy, a king chosen for someone else’s convenience, wealth signed away to someone else’s companies, and politics resting on no consent of its own.

The lines are still on the map. The concession framework lasted until nationalisation in 1972. What followed was instability, coups, dictatorship, sectarian war, and invasion. All that was the structural consequence of a foundation that was never laid. After all, a state founded as an extraction mechanism does not become a social contract by just changing the flag.

Wherever borders are negotiated in rooms empty of the people who live inside them, wherever resources are contracted before sovereignty is exercised, wherever rulers are installed to guarantee concessions rather than represent constituents, the Iraqi precedent operates. The question never asked in 1919, 1921, 1925 or 1932 remains the only one that matters: in whose interest was this done? The answer is in the signatories. The people who lived there did not sign.

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