Federalism and Political Culture in Iraq

Shaping and institutionalizing federalism as the most famous local-regional democratic governance requires extension of civic and democratic political culture, overcoming identity crisis, etc. Federalism was one of the mechanisms of international coalition under the leadership of America for stablishing peace and democracy in Iraq, but it was fulfilled only in Kurdistan and not in central and southern regions. The aim of this article is the analysis of the impact of identity crisis and entrenched undemocratic political culture on nonfulfillment of federalism in Iraq by using a political- sociological approach. The main question is that why federalism didn’t fulfill in Iraq? In this article, the hypothesis is that: historical and entrenched identity crisis in Iraq in the past century and the supremacy of subjective and religious-ethnic political culture over civic - democratic ones, have led to a failure in implementing federalism in this country. This article concludes that, the identity crisis due to imposed nation-state building in the recent decade, ethnic-religious violence and divergent political culture in post-Saddam Iraq led to the un-fulfillment of federalism.