I haven’t been following international affairs in any depth, but will risk some bloviation.

The title combines numerous disparate issues. I don’t know enough about any of them to shed much light.

But others who know as little or less tend to view them from a nationalist perspective pretending to be the perspective of national liberation struggles in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

I view them from an opposite perspective. The reason why communists supported and always will support revolutionary democrats fighting against national oppression was and is that it is the only road towards the union and assimilation of peoples in which the international “shall be the human race”.

The basic principles expressed by Stalin in Marxism and the National Question are now widely accepted by most bourgeois democrats, let alone revolutionary democrats. Even Trotsky paid them the backhanded compliment of pretending that Stalin could not possibly have been the author.

There is still reactionary opposition, but neither oppressor nations nor minority nationalities are as likely to go to war over competing national identities.  “Identity politics” in the developed world is only stirred up by the pseudoleft and far right.

I suspect this is well illustrated by all the recent “national” issues listed in the title.

In Kirkuk, the Kurdish peshmerga has in fact accepted Iraqi government authority over the city as it was obliged to do following the collapse of Daesh in Mosul.

Hot headed denunciations from Barazani’s faction at Rudaw do not reflect reality. The two Kurdish tribal federations that speak different dialectics and administer different territories have not yet formed a basis for a nation state. The referendum was a factional move, not a national one. The Kurdish autonomous region will not be invaded and its authority will not extend to Kirkuk without a full settlement. The minor skirmishing and small scale loss of life that has just taken place reflects both the absurdity of the posturing and the actual restraint of all sides.

For Kurdish nationalism far more important things are happening in Syria with implications for Turkey and Iran as well as Iraq. It is natural that as the end of the regime gets closer (and its victory and permanence are duly announced by “analysts”) that the various opponents are less united and more inclined to fight each other for territory. But in the long run the national and nationality issues throughout the whole region will have to be settled democratically, as outlined by Stalin and as they largely have been in Europe.  The fate of Kurds requires solidarity, not enmity with both Iraqi and Syrian Arabs, as does the fate of democracy throughout the region.

In Catalonia the “nationalist” skirmishing has been even less dramatic with even less loss of life. If both sides had the same grasp of democratic principles as the English and Scots there would be even less drama. But certainly there is no more appetite for war between Catalans and other Spaniards than there is between say Flemings and Walloons in Belgium.

The various European states may separate as Norway did from Sweden or unite as Scotland did with England, or thrash around pathetically as with “Brexit”, but they are already part of a European economic territory and already part of a “Western” culture (with English as a common second language) that makes it largely irrelevant whether they do or don’t. There will be no more national wars in Europe.

What remains criminal is the lack of solidarity from the advanced West to the rest of the world and especially Syria. War was and is required to end war wherever those democratic principles do not prevail.

If the Dutch had taken the same attitude to the English revolution it would have taken a lot longer and been a lot bloodier than the 48 years from 1640 to 1688.