Brendan O’Leary The Federalization of Iraq and the Break-up of Sudan 1 IT IS AN HONOUR TO DELIVER THE LEONARD SCHAPIRO LECTURE, especially in Belfast. I am old enough to have known Professor Scha- piro from the days of my first appointment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More surprising than my age is that possession of one of Schapiro’s books once got me into potential trouble. In 1978, then a student in England, I returned to Northern Ireland at Christmas by catching the ferry from Stranraer. At the Scottish port, one of my heavy suitcases drew the attention of a detective. I was asked to open it. The two books most visible were Michael Farrell’s Northern Ireland: The Orange State and Leonard Scha- piro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The detective showed absolutely no interest in The Orange State, presumably unaware that Farrell, now a member of President Michael Higgins’s Council of State in Dublin, was then Ireland’s most famous Trotskyist, and had been one of the most prominent leaders of the People’s Democracy. Instead, the detective focused on Schapiro’s book, and gravely enquired whether I was a communist. I laughed, replied negatively, and could not resist observing that Schapiro was no communist. The detective let me board the ferry, and I thought the episode closed, until the boat docked at Larne. As I walked down the gangway I was tapped on the shoulder. The detective had followed me over. Without arresting me, he asked me to accompany him to the local office of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, just beside the docks. There he asked me to open the suitcase again, lifted up Schapiro’s book, 1 This is a revised text of the Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Memo- rial Lecture 2012, delivered at the PSA Conference, Belfast, 3 April 2012. The author would like to thank Katharine Adeney, David Bateman, Ali Dinar, David Edgerton, Bernie Grofman, George Jones, Will Kymlicka, Ian S. Lustick, John McGarry, Jack Nagel, Khaled Salih, Heather Sharkey, Rudy Sil, Gareth Stansfield, Jessica Staunton, Stephan Stohler and the editors of Government and Opposition. bs_bs_banner Government and Opposition, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 481–516, 2012 doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2012.01372.x © The Author 2012. Government and Opposition © 2012 Government and Opposition Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2012.01372.x Published online by Cambridge University Press